Written by Roya Kenny
16/11/2025
Content Warning: This article discusses genocide, slavery, sexual violence, and racism.
“What is important is the Congo, our poor people whose independence has been turned into a cage, with people looking at us from outside the bars, sometimes with charitable compassion, sometimes with glee and delight.” – Patrice Lumumba, in his final letter to his wife before being assassinated.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is the eleventh largest country in the world, largely landlocked except for a small area where the Congo River meets the Atlantic Ocean. Within the country there are over 200 ethnic groups as well as large geographical variation, from savanna to tropical rainforests. The territory now known as the DRC has an incredibly tenuous political history, marked by foreign machinations from the horrific colonial rule of King Leopold II of Belgium to the US backed deposition and assassination of Patrice Lumumba. After the assassination of Lumumba, seen by many as the Congo’s short-lived hope for democracy, the country has been under the rule of the authoritarian leaders Mobutu, Laurent and Joseph Kabila, and most recently Felix Tshisekedi. Various armed groups also operate within the country, embroiling it in further conflict and instability. Further, many multinational corporations operate and have a vested interest in the DRC, especially in the districts that make up the former Katanga Province. This province is rich in minerals, specifically cobalt, holding more cobalt reserves than the rest of the world combined. This article seeks to argue that, although the scale of death is far removed from King Leopold II’s overt colonial rule of the Congolese, the level of exploitation and carelessness for the lives of the Congolese, as exemplified in the mining districts of Katanga, is not so different. It is far easier for the international community to feign ignorance over the fact that most people’s daily lives in the global north are built on modern day slavery.
King Leopold II was the ruler of Belgium from 1865 to 1909 and owned the Congo Free State as his personal colony from 1885 to 1908 at which time the Belgian Parliament bought it as a state colony. Leopold’s brutal reign started and operated under a large-scale campaign that claimed that the colonization of the Congo was truly humanitarian. He founded the International African Association, a hollow organization funded and made up of elites created to keep up the illusion of his altruistic goals. This front in part allowed for the establishment of his own personal commercial enterprise in the Congo, one that did not require buying from or fighting another imperial power. Under the pretense that he was achieving humanitarian goals and ‘civilizing’ the people of the Congo, Leopold ordered the forced labor of the Congolese to access and ship the natural resources of their country to enrich himself. During Leopold’s reign of the Congo, the main resource exploited was rubber, with impossibly high quotas to be retrieved by the Congolese. By the beginning of the 20th century, Leopold’s Congo had become, as historian Adam Hochschild writes, “the most profitable colony in Africa.” The forced labour of the Congolese to collect rubber was mostly done through taking women and children hostage and subjecting them to dehumanizing treatment until the men could reach the quotas expected of them. Many estimates agree that around half of the Congolese population died between 1880 and 1920. Although the first census was not done until 1924 due to Belgian concern over a dwindling labour force, it is estimated that around 10 million people died under and right after Leopold’s reign.
There are detailed accounts by the few truly humanitarian minded journalists and missionaries who went to the Congo during this time as well as the later discovery of horrifyingly frank accounts by Belgian and other officials working under Leopold documenting the atrocities committed against the Congolese. This included but is most definitely not limited to massacre, sexual violence, forced starvation, and forced labor. Roger Casement, serving as a British consul, described what he saw in the Congo in the 1880s as a “veritable hell on Earth.” Though his account was shocking, it stood only with a few others whose work sought to expose the colonial atrocities and genocidal levels of death in the Congo. However, if not for the tireless work of a few humanitarians, including Roger Casement, his colleague Edmund Morel, and George Washington Williams, there would not have been the larger call for change that facilitated the move from the Congo being Leopold’s personal possession to a state-owned colony. However, it is important to note that Belgian colonialism was similarly characterised by exploitation and abuse of the people and the land.
The scale of death and the immense profit being made by Leopold himself should have raised questions for the international community. Nevertheless, for decades Leopold ruled without any large-scale criticism and the Congolese people suffered and died for it. It is not hard to see the racist underpinnings of the entire colonial project, even Leopold’s so called altruistic mission was worded as aiming “to pierce the darkness which hangs over entire peoples.” Yet, this “altruistic” mission made it much easier to pretend that no atrocities were committed. Most other imperial powers understood to a degree that what was said versus what happened on the ground, most often to people of color, did not need to be the same thing. So as long as they didn’t hear of a problem, it functionally did not exist.
Flash forward to today, the Congo has continued to be exploited for its natural resources. Before, it was Leopold and the Belgians, and thereafter it has been the ruling despotic leaders and multinational corporations. While the mining and extraction of other mineral resources continue in the DRC, this article specifically examines cobalt mining. Cobalt, although used for a millennia as a pigment, is now essential to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery and in other low-carbon innovations. This includes the cathodes of smartphones, electric vehicles, and other electronics. The rise of the digital age as well as a push for a greener planet has made the acquisition of cobalt essential to the international economy. With over half of the world’s reserves of cobalt, the DRC’s natural resources continue to be highly valuable to the rest of the world. As a result, multinational mining corporations began mining cobalt in the DRC in 2012 and continue operating to meet this fast-rising demand. However, despite the age of King Leopold II being long gone, the human rights violations of those living in the Katanga area continue. The leveling of towns and neighborhoods in order to expand mining areas has forced many into mining themselves. Impossibly low wages force children out of school and into the mines to support themselves and their families. Meanwhile, the long-term health of those working in the mines is compromised, as cobalt itself is toxic to touch and breathe and mining it can lead to large-scale pollution in the area. Siddarth Kara, a researcher of modern-day slavery, writes that any cobalt sourced from the DRC “is tainted by various degrees of abuse, including slavery, child labor, forced labor, debt bondage, human trafficking, hazardous and toxic working conditions, pathetic wages, injury and death, and incalculable environmental harm.”
Like the altruistic organisations that Leopold created, these atrocities being committed on the ground are brushed over by the construction of hollow coalitions and impact statements that promise third party assessment and monitoring of the supply chain of cobalt in the DRC. Siddarth Kara, a researcher that has visited Katanga in recent years, claims to have seen no evidence for these coalitions. He writes that the reality is that he has “never seen more extreme predation for profit.” Many companies in the cell phone, electric vehicle battery technology, and mining fields claim to source their cobalt from industrial mines instead of from artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM), which essentially are shallow mines with workers using basic tools in incredibly dangerous conditions to collect cobalt by hand. However, this claim is meaningless as this informal mining industry is very much active and almost always funnels cobalt into the formal mining industry. Up to 30 per cent of the global supply of cobalt is supplied by ASM. While these trillion-dollar corporations claim to care about human life, even suggesting that they bring development and education to the poor, for the most part, they are not held accountable. There is a lack of reportage on this area of human rights violations and almost no voices of those in the Katanga area reach mainstream media. Just as Roger Casement had written over a hundred years earlier, Kara states that the mines upon his visit seemed to him like, “like some rung of hell.”
The UN defines modern day slavery as an “umbrella term” including practices like forced labour, human trafficking, and debt bondage: all situations in which a person is exploited and cannot refuse or leave their situation. Like the Congolese forced to work under Leopold, those at the bottom of the cobalt supply chain in ASM experience modern day slavery to supply corporations with the minerals they need to make their products. There are a multitude of complexities regarding not only the cobalt industry but also the socio-political state of the DRC that this article cannot address, including the increasing presence of Chinese corporations overseeing mining as well as the presence of local militias. Nonetheless, it is essential to acknowledge that despite being a century later many Congolese in Katanga, as well as many people in the Global South, are living in the same conditions as they were under colonial and imperial rule and once again subject to the blind eyes of the world. It is paramount that more Congolese voices are heard and raised to the global level to improve their working and living conditions.
Bibliography
Van Lierde, Jean, ed. (1972). Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1968-1961. Little, Brown and Co. Boston.
Kara, Siddharth. 2023. Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. St. Martin’s Press.
Hochschild, Adam. 1999. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Houghton Mifflin.
Viaene, Vincent. “King Leopold’s Imperialism and the Origins of the Belgian Colonial Party, 1860–1905.” The Journal of Modern History 80, no. 4 (2008): 741–90. https://doi.org/10.1086/591110.
Zuckerman, Jocelyn. 2023. “For Your Phone and EV, a Cobalt Supply Chain to a Hell on Earth.”Yale E360. Yale School of the Environment. March 30, 2023. https://e360.yale.edu/features/siddharth-kara-cobalt-mining-labor-congo.
United Nations. 2021. “International Day for the Abolition of Slavery.” United Nations. 2021. https://www.un.org/en/observances/slavery-abolition-day.
Featured image credit: JUNIOR KANNAH / AFP via Getty Images.
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