We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. Kara's next book is also on this topic, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our lives (St Martin's Press, Jan 2023). The conditions in the mines are brutal, the book features heartbreaking story after heartbreaking story of gruesome injuries occurring often times to children. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin.

Although the two ends of the chain could not be more disconnected in terms of human and economic valuation, they are nevertheless linked through a complicated set of formal and informal relationships.The RMI promotes the responsible sourcing of minerals in accordance with the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights. This was the final truth of cobalt mining in the Congo: the life of a child buried alive while digging for cobalt counted for nothing.

I was horrified to read about the children and women who hand mine this metal for a mere dollar a day. Glencore plc is committed to preventing the occurrence of modern slavery and human trafficking in our operations and supply chains … We do not tolerate child labour, any form of forced, compulsory or bonded labour, human trafficking or any other form of slavery and actively seek to identify and eliminate them from our supply chains. The author brings us with him into Congo, hunting for cobalt, a chemical element needed in rechargeable batteries. What the book really does a good job of doing is documenting the conditions of the "artisanal miners" themselves. More than three-fourths of the population live below the poverty line, one-third suffer from food insecurity, life expectancy is only 60.I admire them simply because they did what they needed to do to get the truth to the masses, no matter what [ and some of that is covered in the acknowledgements and notes at the end. Installing a crude dictator in exchange for access to resources and an ally that would not do dealings with the soviet union. Despite helping to generate untold riches for major technology and car companies, most artisanal cobalt miners earn paltry incomes between one or two dollars per day.

Industrial innovations sparked demand for one metal after another, and somehow they all happened to be in Katanga. Joseph Conrad immortalized the evil of Leopold’s Congo Free State in Heart of Darkness (1899) with four words—“The horror! In this stark and crucial book, Kara argues that we must all care about what is happening in the Congo―because we are all implicated. One of his solutions may seem unattainable - “treat the artisanal miners as equal employees to the people who work at corporate headquarters. Though all the big companies (Samsung, Apple, Tesla, etc) proudly claim there is no child labor in the cobalt they use, nothing is done to ensure it.

Kara's writing style is very engaging, and it reads pretty quickly (it is under 300 pages) but if you're familiar with the topic it's a really 101 read. The severity of harm being caused by cobalt mining is sadly not a new experience for the people of the Congo.