Baron Wormser: Disconnected

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives 

by Siddharth Kara

St. Martin’s Press

288 pages

Release date: January 31, 2023

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One of the curiosities of the techno-consumer world is how little we know about where anything comes from or what goes into it. Various shows of concern are made are about the integrity of supply chains and ethical sourcing but much of what we take for granted, particularly in the electronic world is simply taken on eager faith. Apple wouldn’t do anything bad. Nor would Tesla. Alas, as Cobalt Red, a book about mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by Siddarth Kara (a professor of human trafficking and modern slavery at Nottingham University who went to the Congo a number of times to observe first-hand and to talk with people) shows in terrible detail, they do bad routinely. Or, closer to the mark, they countenance evil—working children to death, creating environmental devastation, allowing labor practices to flourish not far removed from slavery, putting women in conditions that encourage sexual assault, paying people a pittance for dangerous work—while offering assurances via boards of oversight that no evil is being practiced. Not that “evil” is in any corporate vocabulary. After all, not many people are going to Africa to see for themselves what goes into a smartphone. Everyone is too engaged in using the device, which seems to many, a miracle that more or less fell from the sky, a miracle they can take for granted.

   Since we spend our lives handling products, this attitude is understandable. We are savvy or not-so savvy consumers intent on bargains, value, and status. Our wants routinely become our needs. Our needs become part of what it takes to get along in the perpetually modern world. This is particularly true with technology, where it takes a concerted effort to get by without a computer or cell phone. Those machines are close to us but what about jet engines, airplanes, automobiles, trucks, to say nothing of the ordnance that is pounding Ukraine to bits? Where do the ingredients, the raw materials, come from? What are they? Those batteries that power the planet’s electric cars, do they fall from the sky? Probably not but our environmental haste for “good” cars has no time for questions, much less second thoughts about what we are doing with so many cars. Wants become needs. Get out of our acquisitive, necessitous, convenience-seeking way. 

   Kara’s book focuses on so-called artisanal miners, people who dig for cobalt with picks, shovels, and rebar. This cobalt, to quote Kara, “is combined with other metals to make cathodes—the positively charged part of a battery.” Six companies in 2021 produced “86 percent of the world’s lithium-ion rechargeable batteries. Most of the cobalt in these batteries originated in the Congo.” A lot of money is being made, virtually none of which goes to the people mining the cobalt. The conditions they work under range from desperate—carrying bags of ore over difficult terrain—to nightmarish—working in tunnels that frequently collapse and bury all the workers inside them. Their bodies are rarely found so their families cannot properly mourn them. Kara heard terrible wails of grief in his sojourns in the Congo.

   Such wails have been emanating from the Congo for centuries beginning with the slave trade in the early 1500s, Subsequently, the Congo has been pillaged and its people harrowed by industrial demands for raw materials, including rubber, palm oil, and copper. The degree of brutality visited upon the Congolese people is staggering. In order to get the population to extract rubber sap the Force Publique of “His Serene Majesty Leopold II” of Belgium “whipped the natives into submission using the chicotte, a flesh-shredding whip fashioned from twisted hippopotamus hide. They kidnapped the wives and children of village men and ordered them to meet a quota of three to four kilos of rubber sap per fortnight. If they returned from the forest without meeting their quotas, the hands, noses, or ears of their loved ones were chopped off.” Meanwhile, the romance with the automobile burgeoned.

   We can say of course that was then, this is now. We don’t have King Leopold anymore. We do have corporations all over the planet who operate in the name of profit and who will do whatever they need to do to make that profit, including whatever public relations smoke clouds are deemed suitable. Denial comes easy when you are focused on a single goal. So does rationalization: “If we don’t do this, someone else will.” The demand for cobalt to power those devices is insatiable. Is that the fault of the corporations? After all, they didn’t invent the devices. If grief is visited on certain people—and we are talking about many people here, hundreds of thousands of Congolese—that is unfortunate. Life is full of unfortunate events. Profit has no problem summoning up an air of wisdom. The press, as it cheers on the latest version of whatever device, is glad to go along.   

    Smartphones are called “gadgets” by Kara and it’s a fair label. The world managed for a long time without these gadgets. Somehow the human race survived without taking endless pictures of themselves and what they had for dinner. Then, in a very short period of time, they became necessities. If they disappeared tomorrow, the human race, which, after all, is very adaptable, would adapt to that loss. Affairs might have to become simpler and less urgent but that seems not only bearable but beneficial. At this point in time, haste is consuming the consumers; “busy” being the operative word, spoken as a one-word excuse for any random action or inaction. The Congolese children, who leave school or never go to school so that they can dig cobalt, and their parents, whose health has been wrecked by the mad scramble to dig cobalt, they are busy too. Busy trying to survive in a world where to quote one Congolese, “We work in our graves.” 

   Indignation is a cheap out. I have a computer and a cell phone. (The pay phones I once used have disappeared.) I don’t use the phone much but there it is. I am complicit. I lived for over two decades without electricity. I understand something about doing without. I also understand something about how technology has filled a large hole in the contemporary human psyche, how a degree of inward attentiveness that expressed itself in prayer, meditation, conscience, reverence, and moral striving has been replaced by the beguiling distraction and convenience of technology. The smartphone, since it allows everyone to feel connected to everyone else, is a prime example. To call technology an idol of sorts is not an exaggeration. What it offers, including artificial intelligence and cloning, is automatically considered to be good. Our human inventive capacity would appear to be blessed, our genius inviolable. We can all join the choir of praise via such gadgets and the batteries they require (to say nothing of the autos that are much more than gadgets). We have created a world in which our independence, about which a big fuss is perennially made in the political realm, turns out to be not so independent. An impartial observer might think humankind was addicted. Until the scientists come along with a fix, we are very much dependent on that cobalt. 

   Yet the fix is not going to be a fix. With each fix, we move further away from the earth and the sources that moor us to the physical world. We grow more and more disconnected, more abstracted, because we have no means to consider how we are living. Instead, we exist to serve our machines. As users we can summon up history to excuse ourselves. It has always been thus in what we are pleased to call “civilization,” a notional phenomenon with a pleasant sheen largely founded on minerals and fashioning metals. We are content to harvest the billions of years that went into the making of the earth without a second thought. The wonder of the economic component of this process is that it makes a virtue of such expediency, as in “Look! Here’s a whole new way to make more money!” Politics, which is sometimes defined as the art (too kind a word) of expediency, gladly goes along and turns cobalt into one more geopolitical football since many of the corporations that control the mining in the Congo are Chinese and thus pose a strategic threat to the United States. Americans may rest assured; our man in the Congo is on it. 

    Kara lays this out straightforwardly. About the global economy that has “run amok in Africa,” he has this to say: “The depravity and indifference unleashed on the children working at Tilwezembe [a mining site] is a direct consequence of a global economic order that preys on poverty, vulnerability, and devalued humanity of the people at the bottom of the global supply chains. Declarations by multinational corporations that the rights and dignity of every worker on their supply chain are protected and preserved seem more disingenuous than ever.”  A Congolese woman put it succinctly to Kara: “Our children are dying like dogs.” 

   Looking “depravity and indifference” in the eye is something not many of us want to do, particularly when that eye will not only deny those qualities but assert its virtue. Why not? Shareholders are pleased; consumers are pleased; believers in technological progress are pleased. To say that globalism is a disaster will not sit well with many who profit from it and many who, one way or another, believe in those corporations and governments as they go about their marauding ways. The corruption that has marred the Democratic Republic of the Congo is one more chance to wink at the human condition by those who are not held back by any shred of idealism about what life on earth might be. Too bad then that the disconnection, the turning of everything into a product, looks like the ruin of the human race. While the forests burn and the ice caps melt and the oceans continue to acidify, we can look at our smartphones and forget we are on the earth. We are busy. We have our inventions. Leave us alone. And “alone” is where we are, not as alone as the corpse of the child Kara encounters in a mining area, “lying motionless within a storm of dust and despair.” but, nonetheless, despite all the putative connections, alone. 

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Copyright 2023 Baron Wormser

Baron Wormser’s many books include The History Hotel (Cavan Kerry Press, 2023).