Gold, diamonds, tin, coltan, cobalt; these are the blood of the modern electronics industry. Each is bought with human blood in the Congo. The modern world as we know it is built on these minerals. If you make a phone call, look at a website, or watch television; if you start your car, or turn on your Ring doorbell, or play your Switch, you’ve touched a piece of electronics that incorporates something mined by hand under the grueling conditions of semi-slavery in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The Congo Basin
The Congo Basin lies in the center of Africa, carved out by the Congo River and the tributaries that feed it. It’s a region the size of the European Union, and one of the richest areas on the planet — by mineral wealth. The people who live there are among the poorest on earth. The politicians and academics of the West tell stories about why this is: the people aren’t responsible enough, the elites don’t invest in their own economy, the culture never developed, the government is corrupt, the Congo basin is a natural funnel for inter-regional conflict. These are lies.
So why are the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo so poor, if their country contains sixty percent of the world’s coltan reserves, $24 trillion of gold reserves, the fourth-highest producing diamond mines in the world, and significant reserves of lithium? That requires an explanation of the history of the Congo basin.
In the late 19th century, the world had been divided up by the colonial powers: England, France, Belgium, Portugal. At the end of the 1870s, ninety percent of Africa was under the control of Africans. The continent of Africa had been plundered for over 300 years by that time — the Transatlantic slave trade had brutalized the continent. From 1445 to 1870, the three slaving powers — Britain, France, and Portugal — transformed Africa into a source for human raw material for the colonies of the so-called New World. This undermined the productive economies within Africa, deforming them to produce not goods for trade, but slaves. “The lines of economic activity attached to foreign trade,” wrote Walter Rodney in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, “were either destructive, as slavery was, or at best purely extractive.” Those who denied the European slavers were attacked either by local partners of the European powers, or by the Europeans themselves, like Queen Nzinga of the Mbundu, who fought the Portuguese for thirty years.
By 1885, as the European powers concluded the “scramble for Africa,” writes Chris Harman in A People’s History of the World, that “[t]he number of genuinely independent states outside of Europe and the Americas could be counted on one hand — the remains of the Ottoman Empire, Thailand, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan.”
What became of the Congo?
The Congo Basin was cut apart by three European powers: France, Portugal, and Leopold II of Belgium. King Leopold was a largely ornamental monarch in Belgium, but he had taken the lessons of the other European states seriously, and knew that in order to compete with the colonizing powers, Belgium would need colonies of its own. With his personal fortune, he financed the exploitation and colonization of the greater part of the Congo Basin and created the so-called Congo Free State as his own personal property. By promising the other European powers that he would maintain this central region free of taxes on trade and by claiming he was only interested in “philanthropy,” he was able to convince them to agree to his seizure of the region.
Leopold’s so-called philanthropy — the usual European claptrap about civilizational uplift and economic development — turned out to be the imposition of slave labor, genocidal work conditions, the mutilation of the African Congolese people, and the imposition of a colonial administration comprised entirely of European foreigners, all in the interests of extracting ivory, rubber, and the mineral wealth that the Western world was increasingly coming to rely upon for its technical advances.
Between the forced labor, torture, and ouright murder committed by the colonial administration, as many as fully one half the African population of the Congo Free State may have been killed by Leopold between 1885 and 1908. Failure to meet Leopold’s rubber quotas was an offense punishable by death. The Force Publique, the king’s enforcement army, were required to present the hands of the dead to prove they’d carried out their gruesome task. Failure to meet the quotas could, then, be paid in part in hands; some villages were encouraged to attack others to make up their impossible quotas in the only payment they could gather: human limbs.
This was the punishment of the Congolese for living in one of the richest regions in the world.
Africa’s World War
Between 1996 and 2003, Africa, and more particularly the Congo, which began the war as Zaire but which would emerge as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, were embroiled in a whirlpool of violence, torment, genocide, and blood. The forces unleashed by the Rwandan genocide in 1994 swept through the Congo and continue to be felt in central Africa to this day. These forces — the imposition of European concepts of race and caste, the construction of arbitrary borders in a land that had never known them, the creation by colonial administrations of nationalities in a world of families, tribes, and ethnic groups — were the legacy of the 19th century occupation of Africa. The war was fought by and continues to be fought by Africans in Africa, but it is a war of European creation.
The entire history of the Rwandan genocide is beyond the scope of this article, but it will suffice to establish that the ethnic divisions between Hutus and Tutsis was a thoroughly artificial one established by Belgian race scientists and administrators. Who was a Tutsi? Anyone, during the colonial census, who owned more than ten cows or who had a longer thin nose, high cheekbones, and were over six feet in height. This manufactured ethnic conflict exploded into what was then Zaire.
The Congo had struggled for half a century by then, attempting to wrest its sovereignty from Europe and the U.S. By the 1950s, the people of the Belgian Congo (now a part of the state of Belgium) were demanding their independence and sovereignty. In 1960, the Belgian Congo won its independence, but the state structures were not yet stable.
The Republic of Congo, the state that resulted from the Belgian withdrawal, was immediately riven by civil war. This was the so-called Congo Crisis. The two poles of power in the republic were Patrice Lumumba, the Marxist-Leninist African nationalist on the left and the president, Joseph Kasa-Vubu, on the right. Belgian-backed secessionists rose up in the periphery, and Patrice Lumumba called on Soviet aid. The Congo Crisis thus became a proxy war between the USSR and the U.S. Empire. Lumumba was assassinated by Belgian contractors — likely with assistance by MI6 and the CIA. The murder was part of a coup carried out by the republic’s Chief of Staff of the army, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, a U.S. puppet.
With the death of Lumumba and the consolidation of power around Mobutu, the Republic of Congo was renamed Zaire. It received huge aid packages — military, diplomatic, and economic — from the United States Empire and its NATO lackeys France and Belgium, to establish a Congolese bulwark against Communism in Francophone Africa. He was close to the apartheid South African leaders and the zionists in Palestine.
Mobutu ruled the Congo as a dictator from 1965 until 1998. However, his eccentricities eventually caused him to fall out of favor with the Clinton regime. The west viewed Paul Kagame, the incoming president of Rwanda, as a more stable and desirable comprador. When the Rwandan crisis spilled over into the Congo Basin, Mobutu was finally deposed by the nationalist revolutionary forces of Laurent-Désiré Kabila. Although Kabila was an authentic revolutionary, he was overly dependent on support from Rwanda and Uganda, who wanted to use him to fulfill their own interests. After becoming president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and realigning the country with principles of redistribution, his former backers in Rwanda and Uganda turned on him and began sponsoring new rebel movements in the eastern regions of the Congo.
In 2001, Kabila himself was shot and killed by agents of the Rwandan government, with the approval of, you guessed it, good old Uncle Sam.
Since that date, the DRC has been embroiled in regional conflict with Rwanda and Uganda. Mineral wealth in the country’s east has been stolen by the post-genocide Rwanda government. Although the West sanctimoniously declared the end of the genocide, millions of people have perished in the subsequent regional wars, revenge killings and ethnic cleansing. Violence has wracked this region not despite it being one of the richest areas in raw material, but precisely because of it. The rapacious world-capitalists of the West set the stage, then backed away and raised their hands. “If they want to kill each other over the proceeds,” they slyly say, “that’s on them. Nothing we can do about it.” At the same time, enormous sums of money are turned over to those warlords who can command these minerals for sale on the international market.
Not much has changed since the Belgians accepted disembodied hands instead of rubber to match their quotas.
Coltan
Between 1999 and 2001, Rwanda’s officially recorded coltan production increased tenfold, from 147 tons to 1,300 tons. “Part of the increase in production is due to the opening of new mines,” said a report issued by the South African Institute for Security Studies in 2005. “However,” it went on, “the increase is primarily due to the fraudulent re-export of coltan of Congolese origin.” In 2014, that number was 2,718 tons of ore.
Coltan is short for columbite-tantalite. In appearance it is a dull silver that looks almost like coal. After refining, however, coltan is transformed into a heat-resistant powder known as metallic tantalum. This tantalum powder has unique uses in electrical components: the tantalum electrolytic capacitor. Tantalum capacitors have very high capacitance per volume, meaning they are highly efficient and can be produced at low weights. They were first developed in 1930 and used for the military.
Light-weight electronics are possible because of the tantalum capacitor. Every cell phone and laptop on the market today makes use of tantalum. Almost all computers, in fact, make use of tantalum capacitors, and so do most consumer electronics. Tantalum is in everything.
The conditions under which coltan is mined are more horrific still than the history of colonization might suggest. Mining coltan is hazardous. The diggers and washers used to break the coltan out of the earth and prepare it are primarily Congolese children. In fact, in 2019 an ENACT Africa report found that over 40,000 children aged fourteen and younger are employed by coltan mines in the Congo. These mines are charmingly referred to as “artisanal” because all of the hard labor is done by human beings, rather than machines.
From an International Peace Information Service report in 2020: “In Eastern Congo, a couple, typically parents sustaining a household of six members, working full-time in artisanal mining, can earn around U.S. $202 per month” but would need $243 to cover their expenditures. Coltan sells for roughly $50 per pound. A good coltan miner can produce 2.2 pounds of coltan per day. The typical family reported in the IPIS report would be paid around $6.70 a day — if the two parents each produce 2.2 pounds of coltan during the day and we assume the cost is $50 per pound, they produce $220 in a day but are paid less than one tenth of that value.
There’s an infinitesimally small amount of coltan in a single phone — 40 milligrams, or 0.00009 pounds of the stuff. That’s a half a cent of coltan. For that mere half cent, however, the miner is paid only a tiny fraction. If the miner was paid the value of the coltan, it would cost thirty times what it does; it would make these 40 milligrams of coltan worth not half a cent, but 15 cents. Again, this seems like nothing — until you consider that global smartphone sales in 2022 were roughly 1.4 billion phones. That’s $210,000,000 being sucked out of the Congo, away from the miners who are making it every year just on cellphones alone.
Computers that are used as servers generally have nearly .006 pounds of tantalum in their capacitors. That’s 3 cents of tantalum; again, if the miners in the Congo made in wages what they produced in coltan, that would amount to $9 per machine. Over the 12.15 million server units shipped in 2020, that amounts to $109,350,000 stolen from the Congolese miners and their families.
Other reports indicate that coltan miners can be paid less than $2 per day.
This is true of every electronics product sold in the world today. The money that would go to the coltan mining regions of the world is instead going into the pockets of the wealthy owners and officers of the big mining firms and electronics companies. Why is the Congo poor? Because the West is stealing her wealth, both in the form of stolen wages, and in the youth who are worked to death in the coltan pits of the Eastern Congo.
The Conditions of the Coltan Miners
The eastern regions of the Congo are more or less controlled by mercenaries from Rwanda. The mineral wealth of the DRC is forcibly extracted, often literally at gunpoint, and sent over the border to be exported as Rwandan coltan. A 2022 article by researcher Oluwole Ojewale reports that, as one might expect, that there is a link “between coltan exploitation and large-scale environmental degradation, human rights abuses, violence and death.” This includes “violation of environmental laws, child labour on mining sites, and complicity of mining companies in the abuses of populations at risk.”
At the town of Mwenga in Shabunda, in September of 2020, fifty miners died at the mines. Holes dug by these artisanal miners are rarely covered after mining activities have ceased, leaving scars and wounds in the land that ooze tailings, fill with water, leech into the groundwater. Landslides trap miners underground. When the miners attempt to band together to improve their conditions, as they did in forming the cooperative Cooperamma, the corporations have simply engaged in what amounts to open war that harkens back to the Coal Wars of the late 19th and early 20th century U.S. history.
Child miners face daily exposure to radon, which causes lung cancer. The haphazard mineral certification schemes designed to at least give the appearance that child-miners are not used in coltan mining are often subverted. In the Eastern Congo, where the ore is exported in secret, they are often useless and unenforceable. The children who work in the mines, forced either by economic circumstances or outright threats, are as young as six.
Siddharth Kara, a researcher at Harvard’s school of public health, says “You have to imagine walking around some of these mining areas and dialing back our clock centuries… People are working in subhuman, grinding, degrading conditions. They use pickaxes, shovels, stretches of rebar to hack and scrounge at the earth in trenches and pits and tunnels to gather cobalt and feed it up the formal supply chain.” And the stuff is dangerous. “Cobalt is toxic to touch and breathe — and there are hundreds of thousands of poor Congolese people touching and breathing it day in and day out. Young mothers with babies strapped to their backs, all breathing in this toxic cobalt dust.”
He warns that there is “complete cross-contamination between industrial excavator-derived cobalt and cobalt dug by women and children with their bare hands… Industrial mines, almost all of them, have artisanal miners working, digging in and around them, feeding cobalt into the formal supply chain.”
His conclusion? “The bottom of the supply chain, where almost all the world’s cobalt is coming from, is a horror show.”
“Imagine an entire population of people who cannot survive without scrounging in hazardous conditions for a dollar or two a day. There is no alternative there. The mines have taken over everything. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced because their villages were just bulldozed over to make place for large mining concessions. So you have people with no alternative, no other source of income, no livelihood. Now, add to that the menace in many cases of armed forces pressuring people to dig, parents having to make a painful decision, ‘Do I send my child to school or do we eat today?’ And if they choose the latter, that means bringing all their kids into these toxic pits to dig just to earn that fifty extra cents or a dollar a day, that could mean the difference between eating or not. So, in the 21st century, this is modern-day slavery. It’s not chattel slavery from the 18th century where you can buy and trade people and own title over a person like property. But the level of degradation, the level of exploitation is on par with old-world slavery.”
Who’s Buying?
There are several associations of big businesses that drive coltan exploitation. One of these, for instance, is called Cobalt for Development, and was founded by BMW Group, BASF, Samsung SDI, and Samsung Electronics. Volkswagen joined this association in 2020. Tesla joined Glencore and other corporations in the Fair Cobalt Alliance. These associations are semi-NGOs, designed to whitewash the conditions of cobalt mining in the Congo, much as the Free Trade Coffee movement did to whitewash and hide the brutal exploitation of coffee harvesters in Brazil during the 1990s.
Cobalt is a key part of the drive for “green” energy; the lust for cheap transistors underlies U.S. political incentives like the so-called Green New Deal. The fact of the matter is that, as long as capitalism reigns over the Congo and imperialism reigns over the face of Africa, green technology is soaked in the hot, red blood of Congolese children.
What Is To Be Done?
The partition of Africa was not a natural state-building process. It was imposed from the outside by the colonial powers. These borders cut across ethnic, cultural, and family lines. They have created states that cannot be self-sufficient, so they are forced to rely on their imperial patrons. This is the basis of Pan-Africanism — the desire to unite the political forces of Africa in order to establish an internal economy, internal markets, and internal development. This is a necessary prerequisite to the continent throwing off the shackles of the imperial powers, for without these things no African state will be able to resist the money, promises, and eventually the arms, of the West.
Here, in the heart of the world-imperialist beast, the country to which all that cheap coltan is flowing, we must encourage solidarity with our African siblings. We must oppose our own government and its corporations at every turn, wherever we can. We must demand, through direct action and public pressure, legislation that makes it difficult for the corporations profiting off of the blood of children. And we must never forget that the very foundations of our world are mired in the blood of the exploited — not only here within the empire, but abroad in the Global South.
