I learned this reading “Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives” by Siddharth Kara, in preparation for a two-week visit to Congo next month, guest of the Canadian international advocacy group, Journalists for Human Rights.
The plan was to go and train journalists there. They speak French — Kinshasa is the largest French-speaking city in the world with a million more residents than the Paris metro area. I took French for a year in 7th grade. Translation would be provided by the former editor of this newspaper, Michael Cooke, who is board chair of the JHR, which also explains how they came to invite me.
We’d go together, visit schools, maybe take in a refugee camp: some 6 million people have been displaced by violence in Congo.
We talked about this trip for more than a year. Recently a date was set at the end of May and the proper journalistic credential acquired. Last Wednesday I had a fruitful conversation with the JHR’s international program manager. We discussed some of the stories I’m interested in covering. Moved by Kara’s book, I wanted to visit cobalt mines.
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Excellent post....always good to trust your gut instinct.
ReplyDeleteOne of the best, most honest articles you've ever done. I'll never look at the phone the same way again.
ReplyDeleteJust yesterday my wife and I were discussing cobalt mining. We will soon be relocating to the southwest near silver City, New Mexico and we have been looking at the real estate listings and found a nice little house in a place called Hurley
ReplyDeleteIt's quite a bit cheaper then the other properties we've been looking at and I asked her why did she think that was and she said well it's right by the mine.
She's lived in this area before and is familiar with it and said the mine is closed but the ground is contaminated and you can't have the garden and you probably shouldn't be raising animals there. I'm like oh but it's cool for people to live there?
I was offered the opportunity to go work in Ghana a few years ago and just turned it down immediately. At the time I didn't even have a passport. I've never traveled anywhere outside of the United States. My entire life so hell. No, I wasn't going to work in Ghana. Never even imagining that there might be some kind of sightseeing I might want to do while I was there. Tourism? Just not my thing. in Africa. Probably not
Parts of Congo clearly super dangerous. And did you see the front page with what's going on in Sudan? Don't they share a border?
You made the right call for all the reasons you went through in your head. But I don't see why nothing can ever be done about it, even though it made complete sense for the grandmother to not believe it. From her perspective, nothing has ever been done before, so why would it happen in the future? Of course. But some problems do get solved, and publicizing the cobalt issue until the government and tech companies have to take seriously how the cobalt is mined--of course that can happen. The process is underway, and columns like this are part of it. Siddarth Kara's book provides the raw material to discuss it--it's enough to publicize Kara's book.
ReplyDeleteSince 1998, an estimated 5.4 million people, mostly civilians, have died in the Congo war. The bloodiest war since WWII. Very few people are aware of this.
ReplyDeleteI give you credit for even considering going to Congo. Regarding child labor driving the manufacture of cell phones and so many of the commodities we enjoy while choosing not to think about, we're all guilty as charged.
ReplyDeleteIf cell phones were not mandatory in today's cockamamie world, I wouldn't have one.
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