In ages past, humans could pretend their luxuries simply appeared, but our current age makes it nearly impossible to ignore the harsh realities that make our way of life possible. Because ASM is almost entirely informal, artisanal miners rarely have formal agreements for wages and working conditions.

Their lives and minds would change if they actually had to go there and SEE the littles mining this dangerous cobalt], and they don't engage in dangerous practices [ again, SO not the truth].

These guides assisted me in gaining access to scores of mining sites, as well as the people who toiled at them. If you are listening to it on audio Peter Ganim reads Siddharth's words in a measured and immensely listenable tone. Your mother is also under constant threat of sexual harassment, assault and rape as she works at the mines.

In the Congo, cobalt ore occurs right at the surface, so child labor can be employed to scrape it up by hand. Cobalt is a part of all of them and literally carry the fingerprints of men, women and their children exploited because of the desperation of poverty to risk their lives digging for cobalt.The way the system is setup is to exploit every citizen in the Congo so they will have no other choice but to mine. Kolwezi is the new heart of darkness, a tormented heir to those Congolese atrocities that came before—colonization, wars, and generations of slavery. The slaves remained far removed from the British breakfast table until a band of abolitionists placed the true picture of slavery directly in front of the English people.

Your mother also works in the mine, carrying your baby brother, who is 1 month old, in a sling while she washes raw ore in a pool that is contaminated with heavy metals. Such then was the main task: to convince the world that thgis Congo horror was not only and unquestionably a fact; but that it was not accidental or temporary, or capable of internal cure … To demonstrate that it was at once a survival and a revival of the slave-mind at work, of the slave-trade in being.Without maps I can't understand the geography or the geology because I can't see where Kipushi, Gécamines, the Copper Belt etc are, and therefore their relationship and significance. And that the author didn’t provide any ‘solutions’ until the epilogue, which ended up being about 2 sentences and then turned into more of the same repetition was just ridiculous. This book is full

The flow of minerals and money is further obscured by a web of shady connections between foreign mining companies and Congolese political leaders, some of whom have become scandalously rich auctioning the country’s mining concessions while tens of millions of Congolese people suffer extreme poverty, food insecurity, and civil strife. It’s a rare, silvery metal that is also used in many of our low-carbon innovations crucial to achieving our climate sustainability goals. This is their only option to provide for their family, indeed the Congo government has likely siphoned off the payments from the mines back into western bank accounts for a selected few and the entire world looks the other way in exchange for access.Roughly 2,300 kilometers southeast of Kinshasa at the opposite end of the country is Lubumbashi, capital of Haut-Katanga Province and administrative head of the mining provinces. Although the two ends of the chain could not be more disconnected in terms of human and economic valuation, they are nevertheless linked through a complicated set of formal and informal relationships.