Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives
In one sentence: University of Nottingham researcher Siddharth Kara, twenty years into investigating modern slavery and child labor, walked into a cobalt mine in Congo's Katanga province and wrote this book about how the element that keeps your phone battery from catching fire is being extracted through nearly the same colonial logic that once ran the rubber trade on the same land.
Overview
Kara has spent more than two decades researching modern slavery and child labor. A few years ago, his attention turned to cobalt — the metal next to nickel on the periodic table, essential to lithium-ion batteries because it lets them hold maximum charge without catching fire. Three-quarters of the world's cobalt supply comes out of the Congo, most of it from Katanga province. In 2018, on his colleagues' urging, Kara made his way into one of the region's mines. He describes the scene: nothing but chewed-up earth, no trees, no birds in the sky, a haze of grit in the air. Cresting a ridge, he came upon a vast pit cut into the earth, packed with nearly 15,000 people who barely had room to move, the air full of the clanking of mallets on stone. "It was basically a scene as if it was 2,000 years ago when the pyramids were being built," he writes, "this sea of brute humanity laboring with just raw force against this mountain of solid cobalt stone." Many of the workers are teenage boys with no safety equipment, earning a few dollars a day, while the companies that turn that cobalt into batteries pull in billions from tech giants. The book traces the timeline of demand: the smartphone boom of 2007–2009 drove the first spike; by 2012, with electric vehicles taking off, demand hit what Kara calls an "exponential explosion." Mining companies buy up territory and bulldoze entire villages, pushing an already destitute population to a stark choice — risk collapse, poisoning, and cancer for a few dollars a day mining cobalt, or don't eat today. It's that desperate, endlessly replaceable labor supply — "there's another 10,000 people behind them" — that keeps cobalt's price falling. Kara calls this pattern by its name: colonial thinking. "How can their earth count less than ours? How can their children count less than ours?"
Why It's Recommended
The book supplies the episode's only present-day, eyewitness perspective: Kara is the only person in the episode who has actually stood in a cobalt mine, and the pickaxe-on-stone sound in the episode is real audio he recorded on site in 2018, not a sound effect. Through his account, the episode strings rubber (late 19th century), uranium (mid-20th century, which decided Patrice Lumumba's fate), and cobalt (21st century) into a single line — same land, same logic, just a different commodity each time the world invents something new to want. What makes the book sharper still is how it pulls the electric vehicle — marketed as the moral choice against climate change — back down to its actual material foundation: we are trying to "protect" our own environment by destroying one in the heart of Africa. The episode doesn't end on condemnation; it borrows Kara's own cautious hope — "every advancement we make as a human civilization is achieved in these leaps that are only born upon the revelation of a great horror" — and that line lands with weight precisely because it comes from someone who has seen the horror firsthand.
Source
Siddharth Kara, a researcher at the University of Nottingham focused on modern slavery and child labor, is the central guest interviewed for the 2023-05-31 episode "The Ghost in Your Phone," hosted by Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei. He introduces himself in the opening lines: "I am a researcher on modern-day slavery and child labor and author of the book 'Cobalt Red: How The Blood Of The Congo Powers Our Lives.'" The mine-site description, the demand timeline, the "colonial thinking" argument, and the episode's closing note of hope are all drawn directly from his account. The book was published in 2023.