Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

In Chapter 4 of Cobalt Red, Kara takes a short metaphorical detour from his journey to various mining towns to describe the political history of the Congo from the first recorded contact with Europeans to the present day (See: Background). The purpose of this detour is to illustrate how the history of imperial exploitation of Congolese resources connects to the present economic and political circumstances surrounding cobalt mining, highlighting The Persistence of Colonialist Practices from the 15th century to the contemporary era. Unlike the other chapters, which are a mix of information gleaned from on-the-ground observations and interviews conducted by Kara and historical information drawn from secondary sources, Chapter 4 is a straightforward historical narrative.

This detour provides an opportunity to assess Kara’s general use of primary and secondary historical sources throughout the book. In his historical narrative, Kara uses colonial-era primary sources written by British government officials, explorers, and journalists such as David Livingstone, Joseph Conrad, and Roger Casement. He quotes at length, for example, from the writings of Henry M. Stanley, the Welsh explorer who helped secure ownership of Congolese lands on behalf of King Leopold II of Belgium. He uses these documents to describe the methods by which Europeans at the turn of the 19th century gained control of Congolese resources, and how later British activists worked to put an end to the most egregious practices of the Belgians in Congo, such as forced labor.

When describing the anticolonial movement in the 1950s and 1960s in Congo and the aftermath of independence in 1960, Kara relies more on secondary sources, such as monographs by Western writers like Politics in the Congo: Decolonization and Independence by Crawford Young (1965). These secondary sources are authoritative with a politically left-leaning bent, such as The Assassination of Lumumba by Ludo De Witte (2005). When describing this era, in a claim derived from these and similar texts, Kara focuses on the tragedy of the execution of anticolonial leader Patrice Lumumba. His emphasis here on Lumumba’s leadership prefigures the extensive quote from Lumumba at the end of Cobalt Red. Kara’s descriptions of the subsequent governments of Mobutu and the Kabilas give further context for The Problem of Government Corruption that he criticizes, as he once again emphasizes how internal government corruption and foreign interference have fueled the exploitation of the Congolese.

In Chapter 5, Kara returns to his mixed-methodology approach to documenting the situation on the ground at cobalt mining sites throughout the Congo. In this chapter, he describes The Exploitation in Artisanal Mines in detail. Kara does not deal extensively in statistics about these conditions, such as describing the precise number of miners or the number of accidents that occur in mines. Instead, Kara uses impressionistic descriptions of the circumstances cobalt miners face daily. He justifies this choice by noting the paucity of data and lack of reporting in the mining sector, and also speaks of deliberate government whitewashing of the more controversial practices, such as child labor: “[M]ost government employees that I met took great pains to deny or diminish the existence of child labor in artisanal mining” (97). He hopes to address this lack of hard data by raising awareness of the circumstances with subjective data and descriptions of the workers.

The passages wherein Kara describes the miners’ working conditions and the experiences of those injured in mining accidents are some of the most detailed, with Kara attempting to create a sense of pathos and immediacy. Kara is particularly focused on the children who work at the mines. For instance, he describes a meeting with a 16-year-old who was injured in a mining accident: “[He] sat insensate on the dirt, scrawny limbs extending from a wasted trunk. I could feel the heat radiating from this burning frame. He spoke in a voice devoid of tone, emerging from his throat like a grainy whisper” (130). Kara’s use of adjectives such as “scrawny,” “wasted,” “burning,” and “grainy” emphasize the physical impacts of working in the mines, suggesting premature aging and decay despite the boy’s youth. Kara relies on sensory detail, invoking sight, sound, and even touch in the description of the boy’s feverish heat. The figurative language also evokes a ruined natural landscape: The boy’s body is like a “wasted [tree] trunk,” while the “grainy” element of his whisper suggests the dust and dirt of mining activities, implying that both the people and the landscape they inhabit are being indelibly marked by the mining industry.