I use the words rule and reign because Mobutu and the Kabilas ran the country like despots, enriching themselves on the nation’s mineral resources while leaving their people to languish. Kara, who traveled the country, entering mines and speaking to workers at every level of the labor chain, exposes slavery, child labor, forced labor, and other ongoing horrors and crimes. At no point in their history have the Congolese people benefited in any meaningful way from the monetization of their country’s resources.

To uncover the truth about brutal mining practices, Kara investigated militia-controlled mining areas, traced the supply chain of child-mined cobalt from toxic pit to consumer-facing tech giants, and gathered shocking testimonies of people who endure immense suffering and even die mining cobalt. I was pretty shocked at how many large scale deaths seemingly occur, with sometimes dozens of people killed and that news not making it to global headlines (again I am not sure I believe that Glencore would really bury this information as he incites). Of all the tragedies that have afflicted the Congo, perhaps the greatest of all is the fact that the suffering taking place in the mining provinces today is entirely preventable. This is storytelling at its most dangerous and yet, the author never falters [ even after witnessing a mine collapse in person <--I would have not dealt with that well at all, but for him, it just reinforced the need for this book to come out and for the truth about all that is going on in Congo to be published]. They will assure you that conditions are not as bad as they seem and that they are bringing commerce, wages, education, and development to the poorest people of Africa (“saving” them).Kolwezi is tucked in the hazy hills of the southeastern corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As a result, it is always raining somewhere in the Congo, and the country has the highest frequency of thunderstorms in the world.

If they didn’t contract the virus and share it with their family causing death, they still stopped their education to provide for US. Each of these devices have, at the very least, one element that inflicts extreme suffering and even death on the Congolese people. Your mother is also under constant threat of sexual harassment, assault and rape as she works at the mines.Imagine for a moment if almost three-fourths of all fossil fuel beneath the earth’s surface was instead extracted from a single patch of earth roughly four hundred by one hundred kilometers in size. It's packed full of almost too much information about cobalt, the history of the Congo, government corruption, child labor, and human trafficking. Occupying the entire heart of the African continent, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is an extraordinary land teeming with nature. The region is also brimming with other valuable metals, including copper, iron, zinc, tin, nickel, manganese, germanium, tantalum, tungsten, uranium, gold, silver, and lithium.

If you listened to Vietnam war veterans talk about their injuries (on both sides), I am not sure you could really discern a difference between the injuries from the miners to people in actual wars. I am speaking from an infrastructure standpoint, where critical infrastructure we rely on are powered by these devices such as police, hospitals, transportation, innovation in climate science etc. Until this moment, I thought that the ground in the Congo took its vermillion hue from the copper in the dirt, but now I cannot help but wonder whether the earth here is red because of all the blood that has spilled upon it.

More than 70 percent of the world's supply of cobalt is mined in the Congo, often by peasants and children in sub-human conditions.