cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/49038928

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Nicolas Niarchos [in his book] exposes how the metal cobalt gets from the mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo to the battery factories of China and into the electric vehicles that purr along our streets — and who profits.

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Yes, it is no secret that the DRC is corrupt, that children labour in its mines, that business can be rapacious. As for electric cars, sceptics have been claiming for years that they are less environmental than gas-guzzlers, given their polluting production and the swift obsolescence of their batteries.

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At the heart of the book he puts a single “artisanal miner” or creuseur — one of those modern-day misérables who dig cobalt with little more than a sharpened steel rod. Odilon Kajumba Kilanga is “a laconic man, rail thin […] His father — “the best father in the world” — wanted him to get an education, but he died of malaria and typhoid, and the mines were his son’s only option.

The worst thing, Kajumba told Niarchos, were the nightmares. Collapses. Metal-poisoned children. Twelve-hour shifts in the dark. And little to show. He invited Niarchos to his single-room home with embarrassment. It contained an old TV, a hanger for clothes, shampoo, toothpaste and a toothbrush. And a single bed, which he shared with two other diggers.

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Niarchos visited Congolese mines — formal ones and “makeshift shafts dug into the red earth of people’s back gardens”. In a Chinese-owned mine, he saw workers without helmets, goggles or even shoes. They used cut-off half jerricans to haul ore. He interviewed former child miners and heard how they were given drugs to suppress fear and hunger. He heard that some miners believed that sex with a virgin makes you lucky. Some of them raped young girls.

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Reporting from the DRC can be fraught with danger. Niarchos drove along the cobalt highway, along which endless lorries haul ore to Zambia and South Africa on their way to China. At a checkpoint, a lorry crashed into his car. The driver stumbled from his cab and asked Niarchos if he wanted to go and smoke a joint.

Less farcical was his arrest by the Congolese secret police. An attempt to meet and interview the Congolese warlord Gédéon — reputed to be a cannibal — turned out to be a sting, and Niarchos was driven away by Kalashnikov-carrying soldiers. He was incarcerated, interrogated and threatened with death […] After a week of detention in a mosquito-infested cell he was deported — but not before all his computer files were deleted and his laptop taken away.

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Equally compelling is Wang Chuanfu, the founder of the Chinese electric car giant BYD. He grew up in grinding poverty before getting into battery production — building his company’s success by copying Japanese technology while driving down costs. It is striking that the name didn’t stand for anything at first, except, it was joked, “brings you dollars”. Now they say it’s for “build your dreams”.

BYD is a case study in how China has managed to outcompete the West, dominating the battery market and cobalt supply chain alike. State-enmeshed corporations such as Wang’s are crucial, along with the Chinese government’s “mutable and pragmatic” polices. So are the small-scale Chinese entrepreneurs who work all over Congo — all over Africa. Niarchos compares them to the wildcatters of the American gold rush.

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The result is that China does not just own many of Congo’s cobalt mines, which produce almost three quarters of global supply, it is involved in every aspect of the battery supply chain. It extracts much of the value. If that sounds colonial, it is. So is the Chinese rhetoric about how wonderfully it is helping Africa to develop. So is the endemic racism towards Africans.

Western companies, by contrast, have found it too difficult or risky to invest in countries such as the Congo. With a few exceptions — notably the controversial Anglo-Swiss mining company Glencore — the Western corporate strategy has been to “let China do the dirty work and then reap the profits further down the chain”.

Niarchos uses Elon Musk to illustrate this disconnection. The Tesla boss responded to complaints about child labour by promising to put webcams in cobalt mines. For Niarchos, this just demonstrates his ignorance of the issues. Children mostly work above ground as porteurs or ramasseurs, carrying the ore in plastic sacks on their backs or picking through slag. There may be hundreds of thousands of them. No one really knows.

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US disengagement, however, may be ending. Niarchos concludes with the US efforts under Joe Biden to build an alternative cobalt supply chain and research new kinds of silicon or sodium-based batteries.

Or there’s the old way. In June 2025, after this book was finished, President Trump oversaw the signature of a peace deal between Rwanda and Congo. It involved a minerals agreement. Trump trumpeted how “we’re going to take out the rare earth, take out some of the assets, and pay… Everybody’s going to make a lot of money.”

Everybody, presumably, except the creuseurs.