The flow of minerals and money is further obscured by a web of shady connections between foreign mining companies and Congolese political leaders, some of whom have become scandalously rich auctioning the country’s mining concessions while tens of millions of Congolese people suffer extreme poverty, food insecurity, and civil strife. Imagine a giant ball of clay pinched at two ends—southwest from Kinshasa to the ocean, and southeast in a terrestrial peninsula that traces the Copper Belt. To be sure, the loss of life during Leopold’s control of the Congo is estimated to be as high as thirteen million people, a sum equal to half the population of the colony at the time.

We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.In ages past, humans could pretend their luxuries simply appeared, but our current age makes it nearly impossible to ignore the harsh realities that make our way of life possible. T HE SOLDIERS ARE WILD and wide-eyed as they point their weapons at the villagers trying to enter the mining area at Kamilombe. In COBALT RED, Siddharth Kara provides an intense account of cobalt mining in the Congo, where three-fourths of the world’s cobalt is hand-mined in dangerous and toxic conditions by thousands of men, women, and children for one or two dollars a day. In The Casement Report (1904), Roger Casement, British consul to the Congo Free State, described the colony as a “veritable hell on earth. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from.

In the Congo, cobalt ore occurs right at the surface, so child labor can be employed to scrape it up by hand. The Amerie’s Book Club selection for the month of December is COBALT RED: HOW THE BLOOD OF THE CONGO POWERS OUR LIVES by Siddharth Kara! These guides assisted me in gaining access to scores of mining sites, as well as the people who toiled at them. Our power was out for about 35 hours over the weekend due to a storm that moved through, downing lines and breaking a pole, leaving a transistor box precariously dangling upside down. Even the inhabitants living close to the mining areas who do not work as artisanal miners have very high concentrations of trace metals in their systems, including cobalt, copper, zinc, lead, cadmium, germanium, nickel, vanadium, chromium, and uranium.They're both gruesome, one involves bullets and the other involves gashes from falls, tunnel collapses and many more scenarios of horrific accidents.

Spend a short time watching the filth-caked children of the Katanga region scrounge at the earth for cobalt, and you would be unable to determine whether they were working for the benefit of Leopold or a tech company.

Such then was the main task: to convince the world that thgis Congo horror was not only and unquestionably a fact; but that it was not accidental or temporary, or capable of internal cure … To demonstrate that it was at once a survival and a revival of the slave-mind at work, of the slave-trade in being. It is horrific in the extreme, and all so that we Westerners and many Asians can have cheap battery-powered devices. Governments offered commercial entities the rights to mine minerals from a parcel of land in exchange for a portion of revenues, a system that continues to this day. If they didn’t contract the virus and share it with their family causing death, they still stopped their education to provide for US.

Cobalt Red' is the searing, first-ever expose of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves. Aluminum, tin, nickel, and other metals were used in thousands of industrial and consumer applications. Their lives and minds would change if they actually had to go there and SEE the littles mining this dangerous cobalt], and they don't engage in dangerous practices [ again, SO not the truth]. Although the two ends of the chain could not be more disconnected in terms of human and economic valuation, they are nevertheless linked through a complicated set of formal and informal relationships. For thirty-two years, Mobutu supported the Western agenda, kept Katanga’s minerals flowing in their direction, and enriched himself just as egregiously as the colonizers who came before him.They will tell you that they uphold international human rights norms and that their particular supply chains are clean. My investigations in the DRC were only made possible with the assistance of several guides and translators who were trusted in local communities. Cobalt Red is the searing, first-ever expose of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves. Honestly, this book can be extremely heavy at times but I powered through because I needed to know more.