Lumumba was black
And he didn’t trust
The whores all powdered
With uranium dust.
Lumumba was black
And he didn’t believe
The lies thieves shook
Through their “freedom” sieve.
Lumumba was black.
His blood was red—
And for being a man
They killed him dead.
They buried Lumumba
In an unmarked grave.
But he needs no marker–
For air is his grave.
Sun is his grave,
Moon is, stars are,
Space is his grave.
My heart's his grave,
And it's marked there.
Tomorrow will mark it everywhere.
Lumumba’s Grave, Langston Hughes from The Panther and the Lash, 1965
I recently read the 2005 book Iqbal by Francesco D’Adamo and shortly after listened to the 2023 audiobook Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers our Lives by Siddharth Kara. I believe very strongly in coincidence. I think things that are related to each other are happening all the time, but only through our perception and interpretation of events do we assign meaning to them and create connections between things because they are fresh in our minds (see recency bias). The connection I’m making between these two books is coincidental only because I could have read a book about Appalachian coal miners, or about Chilean lithium mines, or about the first 250 years of U.S. history, or any colonial history and I could have made many of the same points. What may surprise some people is that these books and the exploitation they describe are currently ongoing, but they not unique in the history of feudalism, colonialism, and capitalism.
Iqbal is historical fiction, based on the true story of Iqbal Masih, a Pakistani boy born in 1983 who was forced into child labor making carpets, and who campaigned against it once he was able to escape. Children in Pakistan were sent to cramped factories in cities for a variety of reasons, most connected to an exploitative economic system. One child was sent because his farmer father had a bad harvest and needed to take out a loan to cover his costs and purchase seeds for the next year. The next year the harvest was bad again and the wealthy man who loaned him the money took his child to his factory to pay off the debt. Another was a teacher in a rural town that couldn’t pay his salary, so he also went into debt with the same result. The children were locked to their looms and forced to work all day. When they arrived, the owner would give them a slate with many tally marks on it, which were supposed to represent their debt burden. Each mark represented a rupee, and a full day’s work would erase one mark from the board, but in reality none of the children knew how to read or count and the boards served only as a mechanism to give them false hope and prevent them from attempting to escape. The wealthy owners never had any intention of freeing the children until they got too old or sick to do the work well.
When Iqbal arrived at the factory, he was obstinate and brave and determined to escape. He recognized that the system was unjust and would not stop until he did something about it. What made his escape possible was that one of the children did know how to read and taught the others in secret. This allowed them to read a flyer from an organization dedicated to ending child labor in the country and helped Iqbal to find them when he got out and bring them to shut down the factory he worked in. After his escape he joined them, the Bonded Labor Liberation Front, and helped them to identify other factories to free more child slaves. According to Wikipedia:
In 1994 he received the Reebok Human Rights Award in Boston, and in his acceptance speech he said: "I am one of those millions of children who are suffering in Pakistan through bonded labour and child labour, but I am lucky that due to the efforts of Bonded Labour Liberation Front, I go out in freedom I am standing in front of you here today. After my freedom, I joined BLLF School and I am studying in that school now. For us slave children, Ehsan Ullah Khan and BLLF have done the same work that Abraham Lincoln did for the slaves of America. Today, you are free and I am free too."
In 1995, at about 13 years old, he was shot and killed by the “carpet mafia”, the wealthy owners of the carpet factories like the one he escaped from who did not want to lose the power of their debt bondage over children. In the final chapter of the book, one of Iqbal’s companions in the carpet factory writes to another after his death:
The one afternoon two weeks ago, there was a knock on the garden door. It was a boy, dirty and with bruises from chains around his ankles. He told us he had been working in a carpet factory, that he had run away and come to us so that we would help arrest his master and free the other children.
And then, do you know what he said?
'I'm not afraid.'
I looked at him carefully, Fatima. It was Iqbal. I swear, he was identical! The same voice, the same eyes.
Three days later another boy appeared. And then at the market a boy rebelled against his master, one of the richest merchants.
They were Iqbal too.
The book was published in 2005, and set during Iqbal’s life (1983-1995). I was struck by the similarities between it and Cobalt Red, highlighting the slow pace of progress in human rights for workers and children around the world and the market pressures to exploit human beings for profit (no excuses, these are bad people, but they are also acting rationally in an economic system which incentivizes exploitation).
Cobalt Red details the conditions of workers in The Democratic Republic of the Congo (the Congo) and, through extensive interviews with people in different regions of the country, raises up the voices of those workers. As the author notes in the introduction, almost every product that we use that contains a rechargeable battery contains cobalt, of which the vast majority is mined in the Congo in conditions of near slavery and often with child labor. There are valid critiques of the book (this for example highlights basically all the negatives of the work), and the author inserts himself too much into the story and portrays himself almost as bumbling along, while playing spy and thinking how cool he is. However, the background of the history of colonialism, genocide, and extraction of resources from people, to rubber, to diamonds, copper, oil, and cobalt, the greed and imperialism of Western nations is responsible for massive harm to the people of the Congo. Estimates vary, but several million and up to 50% of the population of the Congo may have died or been killed due to the conditions imposed by King Leopold II of Belgium during colonial rule.
Cobalt Red links the past colonial history to our neocolonial globalized economy. As cobalt is a required ingredient in almost all rechargeable batteries, the marvels of modern technologies are only possible due to the exploitation of a vast number of people and the maintained instability of the country. The efficiencies of communication and most modern forms of labor that come from battery-powered devices such as laptops, smart phones, electric vehicles, and more would not exist without the deprivation of a large number of people. In other words, our labor (and leisure) in the U.S. is built directly from the exploitation of Congolese workers. As the author states, “The global economy presses like a dead weight on the artisanal miners, crushing them into the very earth upon which they scrounge.”
This is, in a subtle way, both a cause and effect of supremacist culture. On the surface, we are told that prices reflect value, and that certain products are more valuable because there is more demand for them, or because of their scarcity. We are also told that certain workers are more productive and therefore their labor is more valuable (the political economist Blair Fix breaks down the incorrect logic that equates price with value). This sounds reasonable in theory, but, as I discussed in my first blog post:
“power imbalances are a huge factor in determining pricing and that wealthy nations use their monopoly power to force poor nations to accept lower prices ‘at every node, from extraction to manufacture, while setting final prices as high as possible.’”
International companies have a huge concentration of market power as well as the backing of their governments, which in many cases declare technology to be important to national security. This allows them to squeeze former colonies like the Congo for the lowest prices possible, which in practice means extreme exploitation of human beings, including children, in slave-like conditions. In the Congo, workers spend days or even weeks digging tunnels until they get to rich veins of cobalt. In that time, their bosses provide them with food and sometimes a small amount of money for their daily expenses. Once they hit ore, they are paid a pittance per kilogram of ore that they extract and are kept as indentured workers until their boss determines they have paid off their debt from the weeks they worked digging the tunnel. Often, just like the Pakistani children in the factories, the workers do not know how to read or write and somehow they are never able to mine enough ore to pay back their boss. Other workers live in company towns where they are required to pay their rent and buy food from the mining company and, in a microcosm of the global economy, are continuously in debt to their bosses.
All of this is to say that the miracle of modern capitalism and the technology produced by it isn’t the cheap access to goods or the “efficiencies” afforded by technology. The miracle is that these benefits continue to be built on the backs of our fellow humans and in an age of instant communication all over the world the wealthy are still able to cover it up. The first step, of course, is knowing about the problem. That is the main value of Cobalt Red, though as the critique I linked above shows, many news outlets have been reporting on the issues for a while. The second step is actually doing something about it, which is why Cobalt Red (and previous reporting) is not enough.
In the book the author highlights how companies like Apple, Tesla, and Google all claim that they source their cobalt from mines that are certified as not using child labor. This certification and voluntary action from companies happened due to public pressure about child labor in supply chains. However, the book goes on to detail how it is absolutely impossible for any cobalt purchaser to get cobalt that is not supplied with child labor (not that the debt bondage of adults is much better). This is because there are so many independent miners forced into indentured conditions, forced to have their children work with them, or forced to mine secretly on their own and sell to the major companies in the Congo because of the conditions their country has been kept in by colonial powers and corporate interests. To paraphrase, one miner asked the author if he understood what their working conditions were like and Kara responded that they were terrible conditions of exploitation and the miner said “no, we are working in our tombs.”
I point this out not to say that change is impossible, but to say that this type of voluntary change or “self-regulating markets” is absolutely worthless. The only way to create change is to require international investigators to certify companies and impose fines on companies that use child labor and indentured servitude, while requiring a livable wage for all workers. Simultaneously, colonizing countries must take a percentage of the massive profit they have extracted from countries like the Congo and use that to undo some of the harms they have done.
However, this all sounds very abstract, and depends on people much more powerful than myself and the people I expect are reading this. So what can we do? We can face the truth of the world unflinchingly and say “this is unacceptable.” We can take small actions in our personal lives and in our communities to reduce the demand for batteries and thus for cobalt and the powerful corporate interests it attracts to the Congo. One action is to keep our smartphones and other devices as long as possible, take care of them, and take them to repair shops when they are broken to extend the useful life of the cobalt inside of them. Another is to buy used or refurbished devices rather than new (I’ve had success with a website called Swappa). Anything else you can do to reduce your consumption of energy and of manufactured goods has an impact. And finally, on a broader level, we can support statewide and national policies that reduce consumption and waste, such as “right to repair” laws about which Cory Doctorow has written extensively, which require companies to make their products serviceable by third parties (incidentally, NPR’s Planet Money has a good episode about companies coming together to make worse, more breakable products so people have to keep buying them).
Government isn’t the solution to all of our problems, as it is often captured by the wealthy interests we need it to counterbalance. But proper regulations on companies would reign in the cycle of overproduction, overconsumption, and excessive waste we are currently in. Amazon destroys millions of products each year, including electronics, that haven’t sold, most fast fashion ends up in landfills, and depending on the type of good you return or exchange, it is often sent straight to a landfill. I say this not to make a reader feel guilty, but to highlight that the business models of these large corporations, and ultimately the structure of accumulation of the global economy must lead to these results. We can and should do our small part individually, but we also need to support policies which change these harmful incentives and instead promote human wellness.
I want to wrap up this post with a discussion of the ideology of supremacy that underlies any hierarchical system and is very important in upholding the inequalities of labor and trade that exist now. Supremacy, put simply, is the belief that certain groups of people are superior to others. I believe it is important to state these things directly because a lot often goes unsaid in the subtext of any type of communication. In the instance of international trade, as I mentioned above it is not enough to recognize and denounce the poor conditions of workers. Many people recognize those conditions and justify them because of supply and demand, or market forces, or other similar euphemisms for “I can’t picture a better world, therefore nothing can be done.” What I want to point out is that accepting the slave-like conditions of workers around the world as part of development, or capitalism, or markets, or whatever word one chooses is a form of supremacy. It is to believe that my convenience, my lifestyle, my efficiency at work, are more important than the basic human needs of thousands of others. To justify it in any way is to claim that there are certain people who matter and who should benefit from “market forces” and others who don’t and “that’s just the way the world works” and that is supremacy.
P.S.
Cobalt Red ends with the complete text of Patrice Lumumba’s last letter to his wife. Lumumba was the first democratically elected prime minister of the country and tried to fight the colonial economic order that was imposed on the Congo and was instrumental in the transition from a colony of Belgium to it’s own nation. He was executed less than a year after independence. The full letter is worth reading.
A single life can't do much, but they can subscribe to you. Good work, and good luck.
Fabulous piece, Sean! Thank you for writing and posting it.