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

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of injuries, violence, death, and human trafficking. 

Cobalt Red is primarily an investigation into the working conditions of artisanal cobalt miners in Congo. Artisanal miners work on a piece-rate basis and generally do not have work contracts. Instead they work on a freelance basis and are paid per kilo of ore that they unearth. Although these small-scale operations are often organized around family units, their work accounts for a large amount of the cobalt mined in the world. Kara combines on-the-ground observations with interviews with miners and their families to paint a picture of the working conditions that they face. Kara emphasizes child labor, workplace hazards, and low wages as critical issues in the industry, highlighting the exploitation in artisanal mines.

Kara describes how many children in Congo are obligated to work at mining sites instead of attending school because their families need the money to survive and they cannot afford the school fees. Kara notes this issue could be quickly resolved if miners earned more money, but “no one up the chain considers themselves responsible for the artisanal miners, even though they all profit from them” (65). Kara interviews many child miners and describes their health challenges in vivid detail. For example, he meets two boys aged 10 and 11 who have never attended school. They work breaking and washing stones in mines. The exposure to dust and heavy metals has resulted in “metallic coughs” and “itching and burning skin on their legs, as well as chronic pain in their backs and necks” (77). These conditions are roughly the same for many of the other child miners he interviews, some of whom have been trafficked from poor areas to work in the mines.

Kara undertakes many field visits to mining sites where he observes workplace hazards such as lack of proper safety equipment. The haphazard tunnels built in the mines are some of the most dangerous locations. The miners often have insufficient ventilation fans and the tunnels are not properly supported, resulting in frequent collapses that kill dozens of miners. Kara puts these dangers into context for readers by describing his experiences along with his observations, such as when he writes, “The soles of my sneakers tore off by the end of my time at Shabara, but many of the artisanal miners were barefoot” (136). Even at one of the “model mining” sites, Kara notes that “none of the workers wore masks or goggles” (200) to protect them from the toxic dust. The safety standards go unenforced by the government agencies and watchdog organizations tasked with preventing exploitation.

Kara interviews miners, négociants, and depot agents to get a sense of how miners’ wages are determined. His work reveals that miners, also known as creuseurs, have limited ability to negotiate for higher wages because they do not have access to motorized vehicles to take their ore somewhere else to get a higher rate. They are often at the mercy of négociants and depot agents who set the prices. As a result, many of the child workers make only a dollar or so a day, while the miners make only around two dollars. Négotiants, by contrast, can make around $18 a day or more. As documented by Kara, artisanal miners thus face constant exploitation and poor working conditions in the cobalt mines.