One of the poorest countries on Earth is paying a heavy price for the world's green energy revolution.
At the mouth of a vertical tunnel, three men strap on toy-like headlamps, flick off their plastic shoes and drop into a shaft that plunges deep underground.
They call themselves creuseurs — diggers. They carved out this mine in pursuit of a prize.
They stop under a brittle ceiling flecked with green-blue nuggets, a rock composite of copper and cobalt.
It's the cobalt they want. It's the cobalt the world wants.
"This is money!" laughs Nico, the miner in the lead. But they can't extract these nuggets without risking a cave-in.
The men must go deeper.
They drop down another vertical shaft. It was hot at the surface, but it's a furnace down here.
Twenty-five metres underground and 100 metres from where they began, they enter a small chamber and begin to dig.
Nico stabs the wall with his crowbar, chipping off chunks of cobalt. They must work fast. There’s only 20 minutes' worth of oxygen down here.
Their cobalt haul is tiny, worth a few dollars at most. They must ascend.
As they emerge from the tunnel, the sun blazes with extraordinary intensity. They stare at the ground for a moment to let their eyes adjust. "Cobalt, wealth of the Congo," says Nico, looking up. He passes me a lump of rock. In my hands, I hold the blue-green gold people are digging — and dying — for.
A deadly business
The Katanga region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo was known to colonial adventurers as the Copper Belt. There’s now a new game in town.
Beneath Congo’s rich red earth lies the world’s largest known deposit of cobalt, a key metal in the lithium-ion batteries that power everything from smartphones to electric vehicles. Last year, Congo supplied about 70 per cent of the world’s cobalt, dwarfing its closest competitors, Australia and Russia.
As the world races to adopt green energy technologies in the fight against climate change, cobalt is in demand like never before. Batteries now account for over 50 per cent of global cobalt consumption and with electric vehicle sales predicted to surge from 6.5 million in 2021 to 66 million by 2040, the world's appetite for the metal is only growing.
But the violent rush to extract cobalt is unleashing a new cycle of misery and foreign domination in one of the world’s poorest nations. Massive industrial mining operations — mostly Chinese-owned — have moved into Congo, intent on dominating the next energy epoch. The big mines are accused of corruption, poisoning the locals and exploiting Congo's resources with little benefit for the country.
On the fringes of the big mines, nearly a quarter-million small-scale miners, including women and children, labour for a smaller piece of Congo's mineral riches. They work in tunnels and open-pit mines dug by hand, exposed to radiation, cave-ins, arrest, even death. Mostly economic migrants from Congo's impoverished interior, these freelance creuseurs are known as "artisanal miners". It's a term that belies the extreme hazards of their profession. Theirs is a deadly business.
Children are everywhere. They dangle gleefully from trees, sweat as they pump water at the town well and braid hair on the front steps of their concrete homes. Among them, sitting on a plastic chair in her front yard, is Mama Nicole. Her child is gone.
He passes me a lump of rock. In my hands, I hold the blue-green gold people are digging — and dying — for.
She speaks in a whisper: "At about 3pm, when I was at church, someone came and said, 'your child went to the mines and there was [an] accident'." Mama Nicole holds a photograph of her son, Deomba. "He was 13 years and one month old when he died."
Like hundreds of children in his town, Deomba made extra money for his family digging for cobalt. He told his mother he was heading off to buy charcoal for her cooking stove and instead stole across the highway and climbed the embankments of the giant Chinese-owned Congo Dongfang Mining concession. The locals call it CDM.
CDM's embankments are brutalist architecture wrought in earth: massive bulwarks of dirt scooped from the company's enormous open-pit mine.
Too mineral-poor to bother extracting cobalt from, this excess dirt is dumped along the mine's boundary in towering walls on the fringes of Mama Nicole's town.
But the dirt is not so barren.
Every day, artisanal miners swarm over the embankments, trespassing on the CDM mine in search of cobalt they can sell on the informal market.
Mine security patrols are known to chase, arrest, beat and sometimes shoot at trespassers. But they are risks the miners feel they must take. If they don't find cobalt, they don't eat.
As Deomba and a friend scrambled up the embankment, a section more than 30 metres high sloughed off and buried them alive. The tragedy of their deaths is uncommon only in that their bodies were recovered, unearthed by other artisanal miners.
"He was like a girl," says Mama Nicole, with a faint smile, "because he was the one who did all the housework. He helped me a lot. I can't understand how he's just gone now." Mama Nicole's hands begin to shake, and she covers her face with Deomba's photograph.
CDM is a subsidiary of the Chinese multinational Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, one of the world's biggest cobalt producers. For years, Huayou supplied cobalt to battery makers who in turn supplied Volkswagen and Daimler for their electric vehicles.
In the past, Huayou openly bought cobalt from artisanal miners. Then, in 2016, Amnesty International concluded the company most likely benefited from child labour. Huayou pledged to clean up its act. It committed to ridding its supply chain of child-mined cobalt and promised to help make artisanal mining a safer source of work for the many people who rely on it.
Mining companies have a legal obligation not to endanger the communities around them, but this is cold comfort to Mama Nicole. Her neighbour Safi tells me the section of mine where Deomba died was not fenced. "The company has never been here to visit," she says. "No apology. Nothing. They take our copper and cobalt but when a child dies on their mine, they are nowhere to be found."
Foreign Correspondent has written to Huayou to ask about the safety of the CDM mine near Mama Nicole's village but has not received a reply.
An open-sky mine
To appease major battery buyers like Apple and Tesla, the Congolese government pledged to crack down on children working in mines. But half a kilometre from where Deomba is buried is an open-pit artisanal cobalt mine the size of two football fields, teeming with children.
"The DRC is a rich country, full of minerals," says Albert Mutawa, the mine's site manager, as he juggles calls on three cell phones. "But the government doesn't provide money for schools, so parents send their children to the mines instead."
Mutawa calls his operation une mine ciel ouvert — an open-sky mine. There are hundreds of them scattered across the region, some employing up to 15,000 artisanal miners. Hand-dug open-pit mines can be extremely dangerous. Just a week earlier, a section of a nearby mine collapsed and killed at least six workers.
Children labouring at the open-sky mine, just 500 metres from where Mama Nicole's son is buried.
Foreign Correspondent: Michael Davie
Most of the boys working in Mutawa's mine are between 12 and 16 years old. They're not exactly mining — those digging jobs are reserved for adults labouring at the bottom of the pit. The boys have an even more arduous task: hauling 40kg sacks of cobalt-rich dirt up the mine walls and loading them onto trucks.
"They take our copper and cobalt but when a child dies on their mine, they are nowhere to be found."
One boy, Median, says he's 17 years old but he looks younger. Tall and gaunt, his soft eyes do nothing to betray his strength. He often carries two sacks of cobalt at a time with nothing on his feet but a pair of torn flip-flops.
"I started working here when school stopped," he says. Many children here once attended government public schools but when local authorities increased fees sixfold — which few parents could afford — many children were sent to the mines instead.
Mutawa tells us it takes 1,200 sacks of cobalt to fill a truck and each crew fills two trucks a day. That means each boy will carry around 240 sacks a day. For their efforts, they'll earn less than a dollar a day. Once the cobalt has been emptied into the trucks, a crew of even younger boys — five and six-year-olds — run the empty sacks back down into the pit.
There are no girls labouring here. Many artisanal miners believe the presence of women makes cobalt disappear. "We call them nyoka … snakes," one boy tells me. Superstition is rife among the miners. Reports are that kidnappings and even blood sacrifices are rampant.
As we're filming, the regional police superintendent arrives. We're told he's responsible for ensuring the mines are run safely and free of child labour. He tells us that if we give him $US50 we can continue filming the kids, "no problem". For another $US20, he'll provide us with a police escort for the day.
Despite the government ban on children working in the mines, there's little enforcement on the ground. This makes it nearly impossible for buyers to ensure a supply-chain free of child labour.
Tainted supply
While cobalt from Mutawa's mine won't be sold directly to companies like Apple and Tesla, it eventually finds its way into some of the products we use. To see how artisanal cobalt enters the global supply chain, we follow a motorcycle carrying cobalt from an artisanal mine to a warehouse outside Kolwezi, the provincial capital at the centre of the cobalt boom.
The warehouse walls are painted with the letters CU and CO — the chemical symbols for copper and cobalt — and they're open for business.
We've been told Chinese middlemen run a cobalt market inside. If they're buying cobalt, they're breaking the law: only Congolese nationals are allowed to trade artisanal cobalt.
Inside the warehouse, our hidden camera reveals dozens of Congolese men sorting and shifting massive sacks of raw cobalt ore under the supervision of Chinese overseers.
In another corner, artisanal miners negotiate with Chinese buyers who sit behind a wall of wire mesh. Locals suspect the buyers rig the Metorex machines that measure the concentration of cobalt in the ore. It's not uncommon for fights to break out over price.
What makes cobalt so special?
Cobalt is the miracle metal that enables lithium-ion rechargeable batteries to last longer and deliver more concentrated power. It's what helps keep batteries stable while they are charged and discharged. Cobalt is why iPhones fit in your pocket and Teslas accelerate like rockets. In the global drive towards decarbonisation, cobalt is the critical metal.
The back of the warehouse is stacked to the roof with sacks of raw cobalt: "More than 150 tonnes," according to the Congolese warehouse manager. It's a staggering amount for just one depot. Artisanal cobalt like this accounts for up to 30 per cent of Congo's total output. This warehouse isn't unique. Dozens of them line the road outside.
From here, thousands of tonnes of cobalt — some of it mined by children — will be exported to refineries for purification. Further up the supply chain, it may be mixed with cobalt from mines that are child-labour free, which makes it impossible to trace. Then it will be on-sold to dozens of manufacturers who make components for phones, computers and electric vehicles.
And there's the rub: Amnesty International says smartphone companies and electric vehicle makers can't be sure they haven't used cobalt from mines where children work.
"Hold hands, walk fast," whispers Mama Natalie to her young sons, John and King. The boys grasp each other and follow their mother across a busy Kolwezi road thundering with mining trucks. They climb through a drainage ditch and onto a towering embankment.
In the indigo light before sunrise, the slopes of the Chinese-owned COMMUS mine loom like mountains. Mama Natalie and her sons scramble up the slopes towards bulldozers pushing fresh waste over the embankment's edge. They must move fast — the mine's security guards will begin their patrols in an hour.
Like thousands of others, Mama Natalie and her family migrated to Kolwezi from a poverty-stricken province in Congo's interior and made a home a few hundred metres from the flanks of the COMMUS mine. Their dream was to find enough cobalt in the discarded dirt to make a decent living.
But it hasn't worked out that way. While some lucky ones have found jobs in the mine, Kolwezi's cobalt boom has delivered little for Mama Natalie and her family. Much of the city still has no running water, infant mortality remains chronically high and there's effectively no government schooling.
"My boys come crying to me," says Mama Natalie, "They say, 'Mum, why can't we go to school like other kids? Please send us to school so we can study'." Mama Natalie pauses on the embankment to catch her breath. "We don't work here by choice anymore," she says. "There is no other work we can do."
High up on the embankment, Mama Natalie begins to dig. Her shovel strokes are quick and strong. John and King dig with their bare hands. When John finds a nugget, he raps it against his mother's shovel-blade, listening for the tell-tale sound of cobalt. He tosses the chunk into the sack and continues digging.
Almost as soon as they begin, a lookout whistles from the top of the embankment. The security patrols have begun. Mama Natalie and her boys beat a fast retreat. They'll return for an hour when the patrols break for lunch — and if they find enough cobalt, they'll eat tonight.
Later that day, as we're filming on a public road adjacent to the COMMUS mine, we're detained by members of the mine's private security teams dressed in black SWAT gear. Among them are officers from the Congolese Police Force. We're instructed to follow their LandCruiser through the gates of the COMMUS mine.
"The Congolese children of this generation will be saying that every foreigner … has looted their lives."
En route — and still on the public road — the LandCruiser suddenly stops. One of the security guards and a policeman jump out and snatch a plastic-wrapped mattress from a civilian. They stuff the mattress into the LandCruiser and continue driving. We’re stunned: we’ve just witnessed police committing a crime.
Inside, the mine is a world unto itself. An electronic billboard extols the virtues of hard work and safety in Ki-Swahili and Mandarin. Chinese engineers and supervisors dart in and out of the site's office buildings. After being held inside the mine for two hours, we're told Kolwezi's police chief has been summoned. He arrives with a cadre of men and we're ordered to follow him to police headquarters.
Inside the police station, I reiterate to the chief that we were filming on a public road. He merely shrugs. "The Chinese own that, too." It's eye-opening to see just how deeply in the pockets of the Chinese the authorities really are here.
'There's no benefit'
COMMUS's presence in Congo is in line with Chinese President Xi Jinping's "Made in China 2025" policy, a sweeping plan to transform China into a manufacturing superpower in 10 areas. That includes developing the capability to make batteries for electric vehicles. China's aim is to control the global supply chain, from extracting metals to manufacturing the batteries themselves.
As of last year, 15 of the 19 biggest industrial mines in Congo were owned or financed by Chinese companies. In exchange for the right to extract Congo's mineral riches, China has pledged to spend billions on infrastructure, including schools and roads across the country. Critics say little has eventuated. The Congolese government — with financial assistance from the US — is now conducting a broad review of Chinese mining contracts, part of a wide-ranging effort to combat corruption.
Is there an alternative to cobalt?
Some battery makers are finding ways to reduce — and even eliminate — cobalt in their batteries. Tesla says it's phasing out cobalt in its cheaper electric vehicles in favour of lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries. While they're cheaper to make, cars with LFP batteries typically have a shorter range.
The Chinese industrial mines are notoriously secretive, but a whistleblower who works for one of the big mines agrees to meet with me on the condition his identity is kept secret. He tells me beatings are commonplace, but worse is the Chinese attitude towards the safety of their Congolese employees.
"People are dying for lack of safety," he says. "Accidents are many. If a worker dies [the Chinese] don't report it to the government. They bury the person, hiding the corpse … and bribe the family to keep quiet."
He shows me a video of Congolese soldiers whipping two artisanal miners as they lie on the ground. A group of Chinese men watch and laugh. The miners were allegedly caught trespassing and digging for cobalt when they were apprehended.
He is dismayed by the violence and disregard for human life he has seen in the Chinese mine where he works, but he's truly angry at his own government for turning over the country's extraordinary mineral wealth for others to profit from.
"We have the right to work, this is our land," he says. "But jobless people from China are coming here to work while our local people are suffering. Minerals are going out and there is no investment coming back. In fact, we are being under-developed by what they are taking. It's killing us. There's no benefit."
A new day
It's 6pm and Mama Natalie and her children sit on the bare concrete floor of their home eating a shared bowl of boiled maize and dried fish, their only meal of the day. In better news for the family, John and King have been offered places at a school run by the nuns of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, who have rescued more than 4,000 children from the mines and placed them in a school they built themselves.
But the decision to send children to school can be a difficult one. "We encounter resistance," says Sister Wainoi, "because the parents feel taking away the children from training them in the mine is reducing the income of the family. We have seen many cases where parents say, 'If you go to school, we won't feed you'."
To overcome this problem, the sisters have started a feeding program. They now provide all their students with one meal a day. For many, it's the only meal they get. "We see a lot of children putting food in their pockets and when we ask why, they tell us it's to feed a little brother or little sister at home," she says.
The feeding program helps make the decision easier for Mama Natalie. The following week, she helps her sons into donated uniforms. She asks John and King to bow their heads and pray before setting off to class. "These children are our future," Mama Natalie says, as they scurry down the road. "We are young today and are strong but when we get old, they will be in charge."
It's a future that Sister Justicia Nakesa Pili of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd worries about when she sees thousands of children going to the mines. "What will become of tomorrow?" she asks. "We will reach a time when the Congolese children of this generation will be saying that every foreigner, everyone around them, has looted their lives."
Watch Foreign Correspondent's 'Blood Cobalt' on YouTube and iview.
Credits
- Reporting and photography: Michael Davie
- Video: Erin Harvey
- Graphic design: Emma Machan
- Digital production: Matt Henry
