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

“Unspeakable riches have brought the people of the Congo little other than unspeakable pain.” So writes Siddharth Kara in Cobalt Red, How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives . It’s one of the many poetic phrases that make this book easy on the ear but hard on the heart and mind. There’s pleasure in turning the pages of such finely crafted prose, pain in knowing that, if you have half a heart, you’ll never be able to see your smartphone, laptop, tablet, solar power system, or electric car quite the same way again, that you’ll see blood all over the supply chain that put them in your hand, on your roof, or in your driveway. Despite such privilege, you might even ask yourself how you can stand to live in such an evil, brutally predatory world for one more day. I did, but I read on and highly recommend this book despite that shaky moment.

It’s better to know that, as Kara writes, “The ongoing exploitation of the poorest people of the Congo by the rich and powerful invades the purported moral foundation of contemporary civilization and drags humanity back to a time when the people of Africa were valued only by their replacement cost.” 

Kara not only crafts a fine sentence, but also surrounds his subject—artisanal cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—with broad historical and economic context. He recounts the discovery of the Congo and the waves of exploitation and predation to claim its vast resource wealth, driven by successive technological revolutions, none of which have left anything for the Congolese people aside from comprador and kleptocratic elites.