It was just another of those celebrity travel programmes, an hour of wasted time, following the journey through tropical forests and vast desserts, encountering strange exotic animals and people, the scripted conversations and pre-arranged meetings, with the army of translators, camera, sound, and tech guys carefully out of shot and the now familiar drone view from above…you know the sort of thing. But it was the Congo that caught my attention “Into the Congo with Ben Fogle” the fearless adventurer of Castaway fame and Prince William look-alike.
It had the predictable, lessons on man-made climate change and the horrors of colonisation. It would be hard to travel through the Congo without making reference to the industrial scale slavery instituted under King Leopold, in one of the darkest stains on European history. The significance of the slave plantations, was not lost, as they produced the rubber essential for the pneumatic tyres which powered the industrial revolution in Europe.
Ben Fogle’s journey was limited to the Congo and not to the Democratic Republic on security grounds and I am sure he would not have been able to bring his entourage through to the south of that vast nation and visit the cobalt and copper mines in Kolwezi close to the Zambian border. For here is the irony so meticulously and harrowingly exposed by Siddharth Kara in “Cobalt Red, how the blood of the Congo powers our lives”. The brutal slavery of thousands of people men women and children in the cauldron of these mines competes with King Leopold in his greed and savagery. The minerals, the cobalt lithium and copper they dig by hand out of these mines goes to supply the other world with the essentials for the green revolution.
“ It would not be a stretch to suggest that much of the EV revolution rests on the weary shoulders of some of the poorest inhabitants of Kolwezi, yet few of them have the benefit of even the most basic amenities of modern life, such as reliable electricity, clean water, and sanitation, medical clinics and schools for children.”
“The global economy presses like a dead weight on the artisanal miners, crushing them into the very earth upon which they scrounge”
Much of his account is hard to read with descriptions of the unspeakable suffering of an enslaved people, which is happening now and which we are in some way connected. And yet…and yet, we hear so little of these things and would rather not hear when we do.
Siddharth Kara is a professor in global slavery and human trafficking and a truly fearless activist, making dangerous journeys into areas controlled by gangs and militia to uncover the truly shocking reality of what is happening in this heart of darkness. His account is a dreadful tale of human lives trapped in a hideous cycle of misery, men, women, mothers with babies, boys and girls clawing at the ground with metal rods, crawling through collapsing mine shafts, washing stones in toxic liquids, transporting heavy sacks with barely enough to survive. Accidents are not waiting to happen, they happen all the time. Boys carrying heavy loads malnourished and exhausted fall down the slopes of the pits and suffer fractured spine and leg injuries. the bodies of children trapped in collapsed mines are never retrieved and their mother’s weep as the walk over their graves every day. “We work in our graves” was what some say. It is truly horrific and stomach churning. And it involves individual human lives. This was Elodie, orphaned by cobalt mining:
“After the loss of her parents Elodie, said she turned to prostitution to survive. Soldiers and artisan miners purchased her regularly. ‘The men in Congo hate women’ she said ‘They beat us and laugh’. Elodie became pregnant. After her son was born she started digging at lake Malo. She said that prostitution and digging for cobalt were the same. ‘muango yangu njoo soko’. My body is my market place. Elodie slept in an abandoned, half-finished brick hut near the southern edge of Kapata with a group of orphaned children. The children were known as Sheques a word derived from ‘Schengen area’ which indicates that they are vagabonds without families. There are thousands of shengues across the Copper Belt and they survive by any means necessary, be it scrounging for cobalt, doing petty jobs, or being purchased for sex. Elodie said she typically earned about CF 1,000 (about 1$) a day at lake Malo which was not enough to meet even the most rudimentary needs. She was forced to let soldiers do ‘unnatural things’ to her in order to survive. Elodie was one of the most brutalised children I met in the DRC. She had been thrown to a pack of wolves by a system of such merciless calculation that it somehow managed to transform her degradation into shiny gadgets and cars sold around the world.”
Its easy too to blame other people when our hands are clean. It is easy to be lost in our own self-righteousness pursuing the noble aim of saving the planet, while turning a blind eye and a deafy to the cries and the suffering of those outs of sight, further down the line, who carry the burden of it. Those who pay the price in their bodies and blood of our grand projects. It makes me more and more convinced that the pursuit of “Net zero” is nothing but a vanity project, paid in blood, but not ours.