The pillage that fueled America's tech booms

Throughline

This episode of Throughline explores the hidden history behind cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, revealing how the extraction of

Key takeaways

• Cobalt mining in the DRC is one of the most dangerous and exploitative industries globally, with workers enduring severe health risks and poverty.
• Over three-quarters of the world's cobalt comes from the Congo, making it a critical yet ethically fraught resource for modern technology.

Main topics

• Cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo
• Ethical supply chains in tech manufacturing

Notable quotes

You and I, people listening to this conversation, we cannot function for 24 hours without COBOL. Because it's in our smartphone, our tablet, our laptop, and our electric vehicles.

Conclusion

The episode concludes with a call to action, emphasizing that awareness of systemic

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Hey, you know that nagging voice in your head, the one telling you to put the phone down and stop doom scrolling? Well, it's time. Look up. Take a daily curiosity break with Shortwave, NPR's science podcast. Let your mind wander to the edges of Speaker 8 (0:12) outer space or wonder about what's lurking in the depths of the seafloor, all in under 15 minutes. Shortwave, your daily mental reset. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 2 (0:25) Hey, this is our final installment of ThruLine's summer series, Hidden Histories. Stories that will make you rethink how the world works. We hope you've been enjoying it. Over the past month, we've heard some pretty shadowy stories about things we celebrate in our daily lives. Like the cartel that controlled the design of the light bulb. Check it out if you haven't listened yet. Today, the hidden and violent history of tech innovation. The quest to control one of the world's most precious natural resources. A resource we use every day when we pick up our smartphone. Speaker 1 (1:16) You and I, people listening to this conversation, we cannot function for 24 hours without COBOL. Because it's in our smartphone, our tablet, our laptop, and our electric vehicles. Speaker 1 (2:06) When you wake up, like I do, I'll start swiping just like you and checking how much charge I have and so on. At that very moment, when you click over to social media, there'll be a mother with a baby strapped to her back. And she will be hacking at the earth under a scalding sun without any reprieve, trying to fill up a sack desperately, bent over. Speaker 1 (2:38) scrounging away, releasing toxic puffs of cobalt dust into her lungs and her baby's lungs. Because cobalt is toxic. And then she can eat, her baby can eat, her children can eat, her husband can eat, whoever it is. The family can eat that day. And their day is measured in kilos of cobalt. Speaker 1 (3:03) And that invariably flows up through the formal supply chain into our phones and stuff as we plug them in each day. Speaker 1 (3:18) Above the dirt where all this cobalt is located is a population of some of the poorest people on the planet. Speaker 6 (3:26) This is Siddharth Speaker 1 (3:27) Kara. 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. Speaker 6 (3:36) For over 20 years, Siddharth has dedicated his life to understanding the conditions for workers at the bottom of the supply chain. the people who extract the resources that go into products that fuel the world economy. Several years ago, he became interested in a metal called cobalt, a key ingredient in rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. It's what keeps that little battery icon green as we scroll through social media or turn on GPS or swipe right or left on a dating app. That interest landed him in the Democratic Republic of Congo because... Speaker 1 (4:11) Three-fourths. of the global supply of cobalt is mined in the Congo. Speaker 6 (4:16) And most of that cobalt comes from a specific region of Congo called Katanga. At the urging of his colleagues, Sidharth went there in 2018. Speaker 1 (4:26) I've been, at that point, 18 years documenting slaves and child labor, so I've seen already quite a bit of horror. But what I saw on that first trip in the Congo just left me shell-shocked. I was... Completely unprepared for the severity and enormity of violence and suffering and degradation. And it redirected the entire course of my research journey from that point forward. Speaker 2 (4:53) Cobalt mines are often protected by heavily armed security and are not welcoming to outside prying eyes. But Siddharth was actually able to get into one. And this is what he saw. Speaker 1 (5:09) Everything's chewed up. You know, there are no trees anywhere. There's no birds in the sky. There's this haze. There's grit that you can kind of feel in your throat and your eyes as you walk around. And we come to this ridge, and it is almost like a lightning bolt thunderclap. Speaker 1 (5:34) What I saw in front of me was this cavernous chasm in the earth of just pure cobalt mountain and stone. And inside that cavern was close to 15,000 human beings crammed so close to each other they barely had room to move. Speaker 1 (6:02) There was this thunderous clanking of metal on stone, mallets and rebar, hacking, hacking, hacking, all of this cacophony of voices and this toxic cloud of grit rising up from the pit. Speaker 2 (6:20) This is actual audio from this very mining site that Siddharth captured while he was there. Speaker 1 (6:25) It was basically a scene as if it was 2,000 years ago when the pyramids were being built. Like just this sea of brute humanity laboring with just raw force against this mountain of solid cobalt stone. Speaker 2 (6:45) These thousands of workers, many of them teenage boys, work without safety equipment in toxic, dangerous conditions, hauling away thousands of tons of cobalt. And each worker maybe makes a few dollars a day for this labor, while companies that make products with cobalt bring in billions, selling to all kinds of tech companies. Speaker 1 (7:07) It was unlike any experience I ever had or have had since. Speaker 2 (7:17) Cobalt mining hasn't only fueled our gadgets and machines. It's also a vital material in the creation of electric cars, a technology that many people hope will help in the fight against global climate change. Speaker 1 (7:31) The truth of the matter is we are endeavoring to preserve our environment by destroying the environment in the heart of Africa. That doesn't make sense. In fact, it's an enormous hypocrisy. How can their earth count less than ours? How can their children count less than ours? That's colonial thinking. I mean, now we're dialing the moral clock back to the 17 and 1800s. where it was generally accepted that the people of Africa were worthless and their environment and their resources are ours to pillage. Speaker 6 (8:14) The moral clock. Cobalt brings up a troubling contradiction that is embedded in the fabric of our culture, our way of life. The disturbing reality is that we, in the developed world, are collectively tolerating the suffering and brutality exacted on thousands of people in the Congo so that we can make technological progress. Speaker 6 (8:38) And as Siddharth said, this is something that goes back over 100 years. It's a cycle that keeps re-emerging like a ghost haunting the world. In this episode of ThruLine from NPR, we're going to explore the history of Congo's tragic role in the formation and development of the world economy and meet the people who fought to end the cycle. Speaker 7 (9:06) This is Julie Speaker 8 (9:07) Carter from Buffalo, New York. You're listening to Through Line from NPR. This season on Planet Money Summer School, we have drilled for oil in Norway, we've smuggled products into North Korea, and now we make it to our seventh continent, Antarctica. Speaker 1 (9:27) That's Speaker 8 (9:28) right. Speak for me. Mr. Penguin, speak for Speaker 1 (9:31) me. Speaker 8 (9:31) That's another sound of Antarctica. That's a reporter trying to interview a penguin. We'll explain on Planet Money Summer School. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 8 (9:41) Fall is right around the corner. That means the midterms. Hey, it's Myles Parks from the NPR Politics Podcast. Now is the perfect time to calibrate your news diet for the fall. Follow our show for short daily episodes that will help you stay ahead of the most important midterm storylines that you need to follow. Find the NPR Politics Podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi there, I'm Brittany Luce. And not to brag, but I host a really fabulous podcast. It's called It's Been a Minute. I love making it and I think you'll love listening to it. Over the last year, hundreds of thousands of listeners have been tuning in. And I gotta say, if you haven't yet, you're missing out. Listen to the It's Been a Minute podcast from Speaker 7 (10:25) NPR today. Speaker 7 (10:28) The day's top headlines, local stories from your community, your next podcast binge listen. You can have it all in one place, your pocket. Download the NPR app today. Part one, Speaker 8 (10:45) the king in the scramble. Speaker 6 (11:05) The late 1890s at the Belgian port of Antwerp. A young man in his mid-twenties, employed by a British shipping company, shows up for work. Every Speaker 4 (11:15) day, his job was to... Stand on the dock, check that the cargo manifest accurately represented the cargo coming off his ships. Ships bringing cargo from the Congo. Tally up what was loaded onto the ships when they went back to Africa and so forth. And he quickly began to notice something. Things weren't adding up when he looked at what was actually on the ships. He noticed that when his company's ships arrived from Africa, they were filled to the hatch covers with enormously valuable cargoes of ivory and wild rubber. These materials Speaker 6 (11:52) were supposed to be a part of trade. So naturally, he expected that items like manufactured European goods would be put on the ships heading back south towards Africa. But Speaker 4 (12:05) instead, he saw those ships... Carried mostly soldiers, firearms, and ammunition. No trading goods were being sent to Africa. No merchandise was being exchanged for all these riches that were coming from Africa. Speaker 2 (12:33) With every passing day, he became more and more obsessed. Rubber and ivory in, weapons and soldiers out. He carefully documented what he was seeing, and eventually he pieced together what was happening. Speaker 4 (12:49) There, standing on the dock at Antwerp, he realized that he was looking at evidence of a slave labor system 4,000 miles away. Speaker 2 (13:05) The young man's name was E.D. Morel. And what he figured out is that there wasn't trade happening. The guns and soldiers he saw were going to enforce the extraction of rubber and ivory in the Congo. Speaker 4 (13:18) He went to the head of the shipping company and said, something terrible is going on here. Clearly there's forced labor involved. Nobody's being paid for this stuff that's coming from Africa. We shouldn't be involved with it. The head of the shipping company told him to get lost. Speaker 2 (13:33) It didn't work. Morell noticed he was suddenly getting the cold shoulder at work. And then the company... Speaker 4 (13:40) Tried to pay him some money to shut up. When that didn't work, tried to promote him to another job in another country. That didn't work. Speaker 2 (13:47) His obsession only grew. And after failing to get his company to stop shipping arms and soldiers to the Congo, Speaker 4 (13:54) Morell quit his job. And in the space of several years, he turned himself into the great British investigative journalist of his time. Speaker 2 (14:07) E.D. Murrell would go on to gather evidence from the Congo to tell a sweeping, disturbing story that would implicate Belgium, Europe, and the world economy in an atrocity. That story would cause the first