Olivia: The battery in the phone you're holding, or the laptop you're working on, likely contains a mineral called cobalt. Over 70% of the world's supply comes from one country, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Jackson: Okay, I think I’ve heard that before. It’s a key ingredient for batteries. Olivia: Right. But here’s the part we don't hear. Up to 30% of that cobalt is dug by hand, by artisanal miners, including thousands of children, in conditions that can only be described as modern-day slavery. Jackson: Whoa. Hold on. Thirty percent? That’s a staggering number. That means there's a very real chance the device I'm using to record this, the phone in my pocket, is connected to that. Olivia: It’s almost a certainty. And this is the world that author and modern-slavery expert Siddharth Kara plunges us into in his Pulitzer Prize-finalist book, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. Jackson: And Kara isn't just a journalist looking for a story. This guy is a British Academy Global Professor who has spent over two decades doing fieldwork in more than 50 countries. For this book, he went into militia-controlled mines. He's seen it firsthand. Olivia: He absolutely has. And what he documents is a system that is designed to be brutal, exploitative, and almost entirely invisible to us, the end consumers. He argues that our daily lives are, quite literally, powered by a human and environmental catastrophe. Jackson: A catastrophe we’re holding in our hands. That’s a heavy place to start. Where do we even begin to unpack that?

Olivia: We have to start on the ground, in a city in the southern part of the DRC called Kolwezi. Kara describes it as the beating heart of the world's device-driven economy. It sits on top of the largest and most accessible cobalt deposits on Earth. But for the people living there, this wealth is a curse. Jackson: A curse how? I would imagine a city sitting on that much valuable material would be booming. Olivia: It’s booming with people, but also with misery. To make this real, Kara tells the story of a fifteen-year-old girl he met named Elodie. Her story is, in many ways, the story of cobalt. Her father was an artisanal miner who died in a tunnel collapse at a large industrial mine site. Jackson: Oh, man. So he was digging illegally on a company's concession? Olivia: Exactly. A common practice. After he died, her mother started washing cobalt stones in a nearby lake to make money. The lake, Lake Malo, is notoriously toxic from mining runoff. She contracted an infection from the water and died a year later. Jackson: So at fifteen, she’s an orphan. Because of cobalt. Olivia: Completely orphaned by cobalt. With no family and no support, she was forced into prostitution to survive, selling herself to other miners and soldiers. She eventually had a baby. And to feed her son, she had to go back to the very same toxic lake that killed her mother, to wash cobalt stones. Jackson: This is just… it’s a nightmare. What kind of living can you make doing that? Olivia: She told Kara she earned about one thousand Congolese francs a day. That’s about 55 cents. For a full day’s work, submerged in toxic water. She told him, in a quote that I don't think I'll ever forget, "My body is my marketplace." She saw no difference between selling her body for sex and selling her body to the toxic lake. Both were just ways to survive. Jackson: Wow. That’s… I don’t even have words for that. A fifteen-year-old mother, making 55 cents a day. How does the cobalt she pulls from that toxic sludge end up in a thousand-dollar phone? The disconnect is astronomical. Olivia: That’s the core of the book. Kara meticulously maps out the supply chain of suffering. It starts with the artisanal miners, the creuseurs, like Elodie. They dig the cobalt ore with their bare hands or with rudimentary tools. They then sell their sacks of ore to local traders, called négociants. Jackson: And I’m guessing these traders aren’t paying a fair market price. Olivia: Not even close. They exploit the miners' desperation. These traders then take the ore to massive, open-air depots. The most famous one is called Musompo. Kara describes it as a chaotic, sprawling market where thousands of tons of cobalt from countless unknown, unregulated, and often illegal mines are all mixed together. Jackson: So it’s basically a massive laundering mechanism for minerals. Once it hits that depot, you have no idea if it was mined by a child, a slave, or someone who died in a tunnel collapse an hour ago. Olivia: Precisely. The origin is completely erased. And from these depots, the big industrial mining companies—many of them Chinese-owned—buy the ore. They process it, and from there it enters the global supply chain, sold to battery manufacturers, and then to the tech and car companies we all know. The entire system is designed to create plausible deniability. Jackson: It’s a system designed to be untraceable. It feels intentionally broken.

Olivia: Exactly. And Kara's most profound argument is that this isn't a new kind of broken. It's a very, very old one, specific to the Congo. He makes this chilling comparison. He says, "Spend a short time watching the filth-caked children of the Katanga region scrounge at the earth for cobalt, and you would be unable to determine whether they were working for the benefit of Leopold or a tech company." Jackson: He’s talking about King Leopold II of Belgium. The man responsible for one of the most brutal colonial regimes in history. Olivia: The very same. In the late 19th century, Leopold claimed the Congo as his own private property and brutally exploited the population for rubber and ivory. His private army, the Force Publique, would cut off the hands of workers who didn't meet their rubber quotas. Millions died. Kara argues that the logic of that system is alive and well today in the cobalt fields. Jackson: What’s the logic? Olivia: The reduction of human life to its replacement cost. Under Leopold, a person was worth only the rubber they could extract. Today, in the cobalt mines, a person's life is valued at less than the dollar or two a day they can earn. The system doesn't care if they live or die, because there are always more desperate people to take their place. He calls it "the slave farm perfected." Jackson: But what about all the corporate social responsibility talk? The 'ethical sourcing' initiatives we hear about? The tech giants put out these glossy reports. Olivia: Kara calls it an "enormous and atrocious lie in action." He investigates these so-called "model mines," which are supposed to be clean, regulated, and free of child labor. He gets inside one run by a company called Congo DongFang Mining, or CDM, in a neighborhood called Kasulo. Jackson: And what does he find? Olivia: He finds a thin veneer of formality papering over the same horror. He sees teenage boys working, a complete lack of protective gear, and a system of debt bondage where miners are forced to dig dangerous tunnels for weeks without pay, just to pay back the "boss" for food and shelter. He describes Kasulo as a "manic hive of tunnels" where diggers are literally working in their own graves. The model mine is a fiction, a PR stunt. Jackson: That’s incredibly cynical. It’s a performance of ethics, not the practice of it. This is powerful, and it's infuriating. But I have to ask about a criticism I've seen leveled at the book, and it's a tricky one. By focusing so intensely on the horror, on the filth-caked children and the suffering, does it risk reinforcing that old colonial trope of Africa as a place of one-dimensional misery? Does it, in a way, strip the Congolese people of their agency and complexity? Olivia: That is such an important question, and it’s a valid critique to consider when a Western-affiliated academic writes about Africa. The book is, without a doubt, a difficult and harrowing read. And yes, it focuses almost exclusively on the suffering tied to mining. But I think Kara preempts this critique in his epilogue. He says his goal was to document the truth that is being systematically hidden from the world. Jackson: To force us to look, whether we want to or not. Olivia: Right. He talks about meeting with the Congolese ambassador, who encouraged him to help local researchers. Kara's realization was that lasting change only comes when the exploited can speak for themselves. But for that to happen, the world first has to be willing to listen. And to listen, the world has to know there's a problem. He sees his role not as speaking for them, but as kicking the door down so their voices can finally be heard over the noise of corporate PR. Jackson: So the book isn't the end of the conversation, it's the brutal, necessary beginning. It's the evidence presented to the jury, which is us. Olivia: I think that's a perfect way to put it. He’s laying bare the crime scene.

Jackson: So we're caught in this incredible paradox. Our clean, green, hyper-connected future—electric cars, seamless communication—is being built on a foundation that looks disturbingly like 19th-century colonial exploitation. The tools of progress are forged in a system of regression. Olivia: That’s the central, heartbreaking thesis of Cobalt Red. It forces us to confront that the life of a child buried in a tunnel in Kasulo is part of the production cost of our convenience. Kara's conclusion is devastatingly simple. After witnessing a tunnel collapse that buried dozens of men and boys alive, with no real rescue effort, he writes that the final truth of cobalt is that the life of a Congolese person counts for nothing. The loot is all that matters. Jackson: Wow. "The loot is all that matters." It leaves you feeling helpless. Olivia: It does. But the book isn't a call for despair. It's a call for outrage. Kara leaves us with an implicit question: Does it have to be this way? Is this the only way we can have our modern world? Jackson: And it’s not about just throwing away our phones or feeling guilty. That doesn't help Elodie or the other miners. The book makes it clear that the companies at the top of the chain—the trillion-dollar tech and auto giants—have the power and the resources to enforce real change in their supply chains. They just have to choose to. The pressure has to come from us, the consumers, the investors, the citizens. Olivia: Exactly. The system is invisible by design, and this book makes it painfully visible. It demands that we stop looking away. It's a reminder of what Patrice Lumumba, the Congo's first democratically elected prime minister, said in his final letter before he was assassinated: "What is important is the Congo, our poor people whose independence has been turned into a cage." Kara shows us that, for many, that cage is still very real. Jackson: A powerful and necessary read, even if it's a difficult one. It changes how you look at the phone in your hand. Olivia: It absolutely does. Jackson: This is Aibrary, signing off.