Cobalt Red: a regressive, deeply flawed account of Congo’s mining industry

Katz-Lavigne and Espérant Mwishamali Lukobo

COBALT Red: how the blood of the Congo powers our lives, by Siddharth Kara, has been making waves. Released in April and tailored for a non-specialist audience, it has quickly become a New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller, as well as a bestseller in Amazon’s African Politics category.

The book centres on the mineral cobalt,

currently sought after the world over for the production of high-end batteries. More than 70 percent of the world’s supply originates from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Kara’s project, he says, is to expose the trade’s dirty secrets for all of us to see.

Unfortunately, in doing so Kara has engaged in many unsavoury practices of his own. This book can teach us at least as much about how to not write a critical book on “modern-day slavery” in Africa as it can about the artisanal mining industry. Its indulgent use of dehumanising rhetoric, lack of research ethics, and ignorance and/ or erasure of local knowledge undermines Kara’s purported mission at every turn.

Cobalt Red is not a ground-breaking exposé, as it has been billed. It is the latest in a long series of White saviour adventure books that the DRC could sorely do without.

The colonial mindset of Cobalt Red makes for a disturbing read. While Kara accurately identifies many of the issues and actors at play, he greatly oversimplifies the analysis into binaries of victims and villains. The Congolese miners are portrayed as helpless and suffering, while most of the other characters possess a generally malevolent agency.

Kara’s consistent depiction of Congolese people as victims is at odds with his emphasis on the importance of Congolese lives. He replicates the dehumanisation he calls out, referring, for instance, to the “subhuman existence” of miners, or how they “scavenged” for leftover minerals “like birds picking at bones”. Or his description of a woman named Jolie:

“Grief pressed hard against her slender frame. Her wide eyes were sunk deep within her face. The bones in her wrists seemed to stand up above the flesh. Her teeth were clenched like a skeleton’s. The skin on her neck had striated discolorations that appeared like ribbons. She breathed with a raspy cadence, but the voice that emerged was somehow reminiscent of the soft song of a nightingale.”

His overwrought attempts to evoke an emotional response resemble writing on Africa from decades ago. Like Joseph

Conrad did with Heart of Darkness, he reinforces colonial dynamics even as he purports to call attention to them. This form of narrative, as Arundhati Roy explains, commits the very sin it condemns:

“Apolitical (and therefore, actually, extremely political) distress reports from poor countries and war zones eventually make the (dark) people of those (dark) countries seem like pathological victims. Another malnourished Indian, another starving Ethiopian, another Afghan refugee camp, another maimed Sudanese… in need of the white man’s help. They unwittingly reinforce racist stereotypes and reaffirm the achievements, the comforts and the compassion (the tough love) of Western civilisation. They’re the secular missionaries of the modern world.”

This is a spot-on description of the white, colonial gaze of Kara’s book. It makes little difference that Kara himself is not white – people of colour are also capable of inhabiting this mindset. His book recognises the continuities between DRC’s modern mining industry and colonialism, but it fails to see how pathologising Africans was a tool of the colonists as well.

The outsider’s gaze is nowhere more obvious than when Kara makes simplistic comparisons between “our generally safe and satisfied nations” in the West and Congolese people in the DRC. He depicts the country as a place that does not exist in the modern age.

He notes, for example, that “people from another world awoke and checked their smartphones. None of the artisanal miners I met in Kipushi had ever even seen one.” It’s a passage that smacks of hyperbole. Smartphones are not difficult to find in the DRC, and the idea that many miners have never encountered one doesn’t ring true. Somebody with more local knowledge and experience than Kara would know that some artisanal miners can and do invest in smart phones. Those that don’t have almost certainly seen them around. But few would make the imprudent decision of bringing one to the mining site.

This is just one example of Kara’s failure to understand the lives of artisanal miners, including women, and to recognise that miners have lives beyond the site. People in this region do not just suffer until they die. They also live and experience joy, and research demonstrating the adaptability of informal artisanal miners directly contradicts the tired image of African workers as passive, static victims.

Kara misses (or ignores) all of this because he is intent on portraying the DRC as an unchanging, suffering world out of time. He then injects that narrative with steroids by trying to write a call to arms. The result, as the New York Times described it, is a book that “takes the form of a righteous quest to expose injustice through a series of vignettes of exploitation and misery”.

This describes Kara’s narrative and political strategy well: double down on the pain; let no light in. The suffering in Cobalt Red is relentless. At one point he describes miners as “an ant colony of humans”. Elsewhere he says that:

“An explosion of human beings was crammed inside the enormous digging pit, which was at least 150 meters deep and 400 meters across. More than fifteen thousand men and teenage boys were hammering, shovelling, and shouting inside the crater, with scarcely room to move or breathe.”

Time and time again, Cobalt Red denies Congolese the agency to shape their own futures. It makes Kara’s work heavy with fatalism and inevitability:

“From the moment Diego Cão introduced Europeans to the Kongo in 1482, the heart of Africa was made colony to the world. Patrice Lumumba offered a fleeting chance at a different fate, but the neocolonial machinery of the West chopped him down and replaced him with someone who would keep their riches flowing.”

Despite moments like this of Western guilt, in general Kara’s worldview seems to be that West is best. He recounts a conversation in which a Congolese researcher suggests the situation won’t improve unless companies follow minimum standards, “Just like in America.” Kara chooses to leave that comparison there rather than engage with it. Yet corporate impunity is not a Congo-