Congo’s gold rush

There’s a story behind the minerals inside your computer and cell phone, and it begins with a tooth.

Last June a single, gold-crowned tooth returned to the Democratic Republic of Congo, as ordered by a Belgian court. It was placed in a coffin and buried in a freshly built mausoleum as crowds gathered to pay their respects.

This tooth is part of the history of the Congo and its seemingly endless suffering of exploitation. It’s central to understanding your computer and cell phone, as well as the future of electric cars and the 5G network.

That tooth is all that remains of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the Congo – a hero to his people, and a leader in power for less than seven months before he was brutally assassinated by the joint forces of the United States and Belgium more than 60 years ago. His crime? Asserting that Congo should take control over its own resources for the benefit of Congolese people.

Lumumba was shot by a firing squad on January 17, 1961. Gerard Soete, a Belgian police commissioner, oversaw his body being chopped apart and dissolved in acid. Soete kept one tooth as evidence. When Soete described it as his “hunting trophy” in a documentary nearly four decades later, it was the first Lumumba’s family had heard of what happened to Patrice’s remains. Sixty-two years after Lumumba died, his tooth came home.

Lumumba’s policy never had a chance. Congo’s resources continue to fill the pockets of foreign powers as other nations profit from – and incite – ongoing instability and poverty in the central African nation. Today’s inventions demand two key resources from mineral-rich Congo: cobalt and coltan.

Cobalt in the South

In Kolwezi, southern Congo, rain can turn the copper-saturated earth green. Copper has been mined in Congo since the fourth century. But it’s not just copper. The region is estimated to have 3.4 million metric tons of cobalt, a copper by-product used in lithium-ion batteries that enables them to last longer and store more power – like the batteries capable of supporting electric vehicles. Around two-thirds of the known global supply of cobalt is in southern Congo, and it’s likely the easiest to access, given the lack of accountability or regulations.

China owns most of Congo’s mining rights, including the mineral rights for cobalt-rich Kolwezi. The mines operate under deplorable conditions, without basic safety protocols for workers such as helmets or goggles – or even shoes, as one New Yorker article described. “Plastic jerricans, cut roughly in half and tied to ropes, were being used to haul ore,” it said.

Three-quarters of Congo’s population live on less than two dollars a day. But life isn’t cheaper to accommodate those low wages; constant instability, inflation and poor infrastructure means that even the most basic things of life – food, shelter, clothing and medical care – are often too costly. Poverty drives even children to work in the mines. There are no statistics on how many children mine in Kolwezi, but the estimate is in the thousands. The children are paid no more than three U.S. dollars a day for their work, often less. They use their bare hands to search for rocks bearing cobalt and to wash the ore.

Tragically, many children – and adults – are drugged on narcotics so they don’t feel hunger and can work longer.

Tech giants sued

In December 2019, the International Rights Advocates (IRA) filed a federal class action lawsuit against Apple, Google, Dell, Microsoft and Tesla for “knowingly benefiting from and aiding and abetting the cruel and brutal use of young children in Democratic Republic of Congo to mine cobalt.” They filed on behalf of 14 children who were maimed or killed in mining accidents. The IRA wanted the companies to be sued for forced child labour and to pay for medical care for children harmed in mines.

In 2021 the case was dismissed, after all five big tech companies denied liability; the court ruled that the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act doesn’t apply “extraterritorially.”

Others continue to raise awareness and fight for better working conditions in Congo. Siddharth Kara recently published Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, an investigative account into cobalt mining. “There is no such thing as clean cobalt,” Kara says. “Proclamations of clean cobalt are nothing more than marketing and puffery.” This matches what the IRA said in its court case: that companies intentionally mix cobalt mined by children with more legal cobalt to give the tech giants “plausible deniability.”

Other concerns abound. Mothers work in the mines with babies strapped to their backs, despite the fact that cobalt appears alongside radioactive uranium, the cause of irreversible health problems including birth defects. There is also the ever-present threat of violence. The region is bristling with army, police and militia groups funded by external players.

“Our green future cannot be at the expense of the destruction of Central Africa,” says Kara.

Sony’s Playstation & Africa’s World War

Coltan is another resource essential for today’s technologies – including 5G. It’s used to produce the tantalum capacitors needed for almost every electronic device. It’s a mineral closer to home for me, literally. Coltan is mined in the eastern region of DRC, where I spent four of my teenage years. Eastern Congo is infamous for the many rebel groups that terrorize local populations, burning villages, brutally raping women and murdering children, all with seemingly no motive or master plan except to provoke terror. But where do they get their guns, their gear? we would ask, dreading the answer.

In 2000, Sony’s release of Playstation II shot the price of coltan up from $30 per pound to $380. A manic rush began. Just the next year, the UN reported that the DRC was being “systemically” looted by foreign armies and that 100 Western corporations were financing rebel groups and militias. (It’s a little ironic to cite the UN, given that Congolese on the ground have told me their suspicions that the UN is profiting off the militia groups too.)

The coltan rush fueled the Second Congo War, also called “Africa’s World War,” which lasted until 2003. Ugandan and Rwandan troops had entered Congo to quash the spill-over of Rwanda’s genocide, but they stayed to create more chaos and to get rich. Eight African nations and 25 rebel groups warred in the eastern region, creating in five years the highest death toll globally since WWII.

How is it that a tragedy can occur in one region of one nation that rivals the war that embroiled all of Europe and North America, and no one hears about it? Is it because there is no happy ending? Is it because every country is implicated as a villain, even Congo itself?

Sixty percent of the world’s known reserves of coltan are in eastern Congo. Two years ago the Institute for Security Studies reported that over 40,000 children and teens are in the mines: “a pool of cheap labour.” Those children are exposed to Radon, a radioactive substance that rides with coltan and causes lung cancer. Mines are known, on the ground and in statistics, as sites of prostitution, STDs and rape. My neighbour in Isiro, a slim, pale teenager, went to the mines. She came back after a botched abortion, not speaking of what happened, changed.

Today Rwanda smuggles coltan across the border. They export tonnes of the mineral to Europe, blending illegally and legally procured coltan so that companies can market their minerals as “clean,” the same move as Chinese companies in the south with cobalt.

The last time I scoured the internet for a phone built of clean minerals, I could only find one tiny company in Holland that qualified – and they did so by recycling old phones, with their own troublesome pasts. Even as consumers we’re implicated by our devices.

Does Congo suffer so much that the numbers blur people’s vision and create a static they can’t hear individual stories through? In this age of the internet, is the whole world oblivious to how they are exploiting one nation, driving a population – literally – into the dust?

Here’s what could happen

Every time I think of what destruction greed wreaks in Congo, I cannot help but be deeply shocked, all over again. I want you to feel it, too, because I don’t know how else our words, or beliefs, can make any sense.

During the coltan craze of “Africa’s World War,” my family lived in neighbouring Uganda, waiting for things to settle. All I knew of Congo then were the French-speaking men in our living room harmonizing gentle worship songs in three unknown languages at once, and then frying delicious fresh catfish in palm oil for us. We moved into Congo when I was 14 years old, and for the next four years I lived in the thick rainforest of the Congo Basin. I learned what a lot of people quickly discover: Congolese are fiercely proud to be Congolese. I’m proud, just to be associated.

Think of it like this: despite being wrecked, over and over, for centuries, without a break, Congo has managed to make a name for itself on the global stage for Congolese music, Congolese dance, Congolese food and Congolese fashion. (Picasso wasn’t a genius – he just finally caught up to what Congolese sculptors have been doing forever.) Google will tell you how Congo is the resource-richest country in the world per square mile, but Congolese people are proud because of what they’ve accomplished as people. I think we all get a little tipsy wondering: what levels of creativity would be possible in a stable Congo? It would shake the world.