Episode Info
- Season16
- Episode4
Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove
Guest
Siddharth Kara
Siddharth Kara is an author and activist who wrote 'Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives,' detailing an undercover investigation of cobalt extraction and the exploitation and violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Episode Summary
As the world rushes to meet its targets for a green-powered revolution, the demand for materials like cobalt are set to double by the year 2050 due to its critical role in the manufacturing of lithium ion batteries, and the rising demand for electric vehicles. Author and activist Siddharth Kara sits down with One Decision's Julia Macfarlane to discuss his new book, "Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives'' which details his undercover investigation of what is happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo—home to the world’s largest sources of cobalt. Although cobalt is blue, Kara argues that the exploitation and violence against the people and children who extract it from the ground for us, and the damage done to their homeland, means that its price is paid for in blood. Plus, analysis from former MI6 Chief Sir Richard Dearlove on the scale of the suffering and if the Congo had a stronger identity, how it would be able to determine more of its own fate.
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Transcript
COLD OPEN
Mcfarlane: What you're hearing is the sound of onlookers cheering as a miner in the Democratic Republic Of Congo is desperately digging with his hands into a huge amount of red clay soil, pulling out several trapped miners from the rubble of a collapsed mine. Every so often, he looks up anxiously as rocks, boulders, and debris continues to fall from a height in front of him as he battles to save as many trapped people as he can before the rest of the earth subsides. These are the human beings who are risking their lives to bring you and me the materials used to make our computers, our phones, and our everyday devices.
INTRODUCTION
Mcfarlane: This is One Decision, the podcast that looks at the choices made that shape our world. I'm your host, Julia McFarlane. Our guest today is Siddharth Kara, writer and journalist. He's made it his life's mission to cover issues of human trafficking and exploitation. And his new book is the result of years of hard work, undercover investigation, and on the ground reporting of what is happening in the Democratic Republic Of Congo, home to the world's largest sources of cobalt. Demand for this element is set to double by 2050 due to its critical role in the manufacturing of lithium ion batteries and the rising demand for electric vehicles. Cobalt is blue, but Siddharth Kara argues in his book that the exploitation and violence against the people who extract it from the ground for us and the damage done to their homeland means that its price is paid for in blood. Cobalt Red is available worldwide, and I asked Kara, first of all, to give us a picture of what exactly he found happening on the ground in these cobalt mines.
INTERVIEW WITH SIDDHARTH KARA
Kara: The price of our rechargeable lives, the price of our smartphones and gadgets and electric vehicles is paid in the blood of the Congolese people, full stop. If you were to go to the cobalt mining provinces in the Southeastern Corner of The Congo, and you can look it up on a map, go to a town called Lubumbashi and just follow Northwest to a town called Kolwezi, that's where more than half the reserves of the world's cobalt can be found. If you were to go there as I did and walk around, you would see a complete apocalypse, an utter catastrophe. The entire countryside has been obliterated, destroyed. Big mining companies, most of which are run by Chinese companies, they have just gobbled up the earth, clear cut millions of trees, created enormous chasms, open pits, to excavate cobalt. And when I say enormous, the largest cobalt mining concession, concession means the territory a company is allowed to exploit, the largest cobalt mining concession in that part of The Congo is about the size of London. So you have to imagine, a city sized swath of countryside that's just been obliterated and destroyed. These mining companies also dump toxic effluents into earth, the air, the water, so the entire countryside has been contaminated and the people living there are being poisoned slowly. So there's a public health catastrophe, a widespread of cancers, respiratory ailments, thyroid disease, acute dermatitis, birth defects. They're slowly being killed every day. Now on top of that, the people who do the mining work, hundreds of thousands of some of the poorest people in the world, scraping and scrounging in pits and trenches with their bare hands, with shovels or strips of rebar to try to scrounge cobalt out of the ground as quickly as possible to meet our insatiable demand for this crucial metal that's used in our batteries. And cobalt is toxic to touch, it's toxic to breathe. So the 10 year old children scraping at the ground are suffering toxic contamination. The thousands of mothers with babies strapped to their backs, both being subjected to toxic contamination. And they do this for maybe a dollar, maybe $2 income a day, suffering all this hazard, all this injury, all this degradation at the bottom of a supply chain that reaches up into companies worth trillions of dollars and touches the lives of billions of people around the world. I mean, that's just—
Mcfarlane: Apocalyptic is the word you used to describe it. And you paint the picture of an absolute hellscape and suffering on a massive scale. You've written this book where you recount what you saw with your own eyes, the years that you've spent and the effort that you went into gaining access on the ground to see this, to verify this. UNICEF says that 40,000 boys and girls work in the mines at the moment. Child labor is something that a lot of these companies say that they're totally against. You've just published your book. What has the reception been?
Kara: Well, even I didn't know the scale and severity of what was happening in The Congo before I went there. So you can imagine as this truth, the truth of this horror is revealed to the world, not unlike when the truth of Leopold's horror was revealed to the world. The response has been shock, disbelief. I've received thousands of messages from people around the world, emails, social media messages that typically start with the following sentence. I had no idea. I can't believe this is happening. And I think those two sentiments are extraordinarily important. Number one, that people didn't know. They didn't know that their lives are touched, tainted, facilitated by so much suffering, by the blood of these people and the destruction of their environment. And then the outrage, how can this be happening today? You see, what's happening in The Congo is like dialing the moral clock back to colonial times. This is not supposed to be happening. The Congo is teeming with abundant natural resources, but those resources have been the great curse of The Congo. Those treasures have attracted the attention of one wave after another of pillagers, ransackers, pirates, imperialists. And really, the table was really set for what's happening today. The table was really set by King Leopold who took control of the Congo, in 1885, as personal property was 77 times the size of Belgium. And the same year, and this is very important for your listeners to understand, the same year that Leopold secured the Congo, 1885, is the same year that a fellow named Carl Benz invented the internal combustion engine vehicle. And they initially had steel clad wheels that were a bit clunky and you couldn't go very fast before they fell apart. Three years later, a Scotsman named Dunlop invented a rubber tire and the Congo just happened to be sitting on one of the largest tropical forests with rubber trees in the world. And Leopold deployed this mercenary army that terrorized, enslaved, butchered native population of the Congo to extract rubber sap that was brought downriver and exported into Europe for his personal enrichment. So the first automobile revolution brought the first great massacre of the Congolese people for their resources. One after another, once the minerals were found in the southeastern corner called Katanga today, as we have this new vehicle renaissance, the second great vehicle renaissance from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles. Lo and behold, once again, The Congo is sitting on the most vital resource needed for that transition, which is cobalt. Cobalt is used in almost every lithium ion rechargeable battery used in the world today. So phones, tablets, laptops, and crucially, electric vehicles. In The Congo, this little patch of The Congo holds more reserves of cobalt than the rest of the planet combined.
Mcfarlane: You mentioned how these tech barons have essentially replaced the kings, the old barons of these colonial companies. And you went through quite the arduous process and actually fact checking what a lot of companies, what a lot of these tech firms say is how they mitigate the risk of being involved in these abuses. You got statements from a bunch of companies. Apple works to protect the environment and to safeguard the well-being of the millions of people touched by our supply chain from the mining level to the facilities where products are assembled. Samsung has a zero tolerance policy against child labor as prohibited by international standards. To assure the cobalt in Tesla's supply chain is ethically sourced, we have implemented due diligence procedures for cobalt mining. Glencore plc is committed to preventing the occurrence of modern slavery and human trafficking in our operations and supply chains. We do not tolerate child labor or any form of coerced, compulsory, or bonded labor and actively seek to identify and eliminate them from our supply chains. That's what these companies, that's what they say. And you took it upon yourself to actually fact check whether these claims are true, and you write, in all my time in Congo, I never saw or heard of any activities linked to either of these coalitions, the Responsible Minerals Initiative, and the Global Battery Alliance, which these companies use as sort of third parties to do a lot of this due diligence for themselves. You never saw any trace of any of this due diligence. You saw a lot of these abuses in front of you happening with your own eyes. You spoke to the people who had lost family members, who lost children, who were able to demonstrate to you exactly what happened. So in that sense, how can these companies continue to put out these very perfunctory statements? How can we get them to address this and to implement change?
Kara: Yeah. You know, even as we listen to those statements, they just sound like puffery, you know, marketing PR statements, and that's all it is. And that's why it's so important to listen to the voices of the Congolese people. They are revealing the truth on the ground. Zero tolerance policy on child labor, okay, fine. You may have that policy, but there are children working in your cobalt supply chain every day. You just have to go for yourself and you'll see it. Adherence to international human rights norms and so on, none of that is actually representative of what's happening on the ground.
Mcfarlane: Would you call on Tim Cook, on Elon Musk to go to The Congo and to see all of this for themselves? Have you contacted either of them? Have you sent them copies of your book?
Kara: I'll take them there. They just have to express a desire to want to see the bottom of their supply chains. And this is an important thing that we have to make clear. This entire supply chain, this blood for cobalt supply chain only exists because of the enormous demand created by those companies at the top of the chain. Now there are bad actors at various levels down the chain, but the chain only exists because of the demand, enormous demand for cobalt created by companies like Apple, Tesla, Samsung, and so on. Those CEOs are billionaires many times over in no small part because of cobalt. So surely they could take a week of their time, take themselves down to The Congo. Don't be like Leopold who made his billions and never even stepped foot in the place. Come down to The Congo and I'll take you around. And I'll say, this is the child digging out your cobalt. This is the entire forest that was razed to make space for the mine for your cobalt. And something tells me if they actually took the time and effort to go down and see it for themselves, maybe they'd be motivated. Perhaps and surely they would be motivated to want to engage in more substantial and meaningful efforts to address these atrocities rather than just issue these vacant PR statements.
Mcfarlane: I think one of the key issues you outlined in your book is that nobody in this long chain, the agents, the companies, the intermediaries, the governments, nobody considers themselves personally, individually responsible for the miners themselves, even though all of those parties I just mentioned all profit directly from them. You mentioned, you know, the change that a single man like Tim Cook or Elon Musk could affect if they themselves take up the initiative to actually go there and do something about it. Who needs to take responsibility first primarily? Is it Tim Cook or Elon Musk or any of these multinational CEOs? Is it the government of Congo? Is it Western governments who trade with them? What is the fastest and most efficient way of approaching this problem in order to abolish this system and this chain of exploitation and to start from scratch again? I mean, is it even possible to change the exploitation in Congo and turn it into an opportunity for these people?
Kara: Absolutely. I mean, the great tragedy here is most of the violence and harm, exploitation and degradation taking place at the bottom of cobalt supply chains doesn't need to happen. It could all be stopped in short order, most of the major problems. Now, it would take time to replant trees and unpollute the rivers and so on, but the violence, harm and degradation of the people digging out the cobalt out of the ground, that could end very quickly, in short order, if there was will, if there was will to do it. So imagine a hypothetical situation where you had three or four of the CEOs of the biggest tech and EV companies in the world who came down to The Congo and said, okay, we're going to stop pointing the finger of responsibility at someone else, and we're going to take responsibility ourselves. Right here today, we're going to make sure every worker digging out cobalt from the ground is paid a decent wage. What do I mean by that? Instead of $2 a day, which is not enough to survive, and as a consequence, parents have to take children out of school and put them to work so they can also earn a dollar so the family can eat that day. So rather than that scenario, let's just pay everyone $10 a day, okay? Like a dollar an hour, basically. That's enough for mother and father to earn, keep children in school, buy clothes, buy food and survive. Number two, remember I said cobalt is toxic, toxic for everyone. Everyone's slowly dying as they dig for cobalt. Why don't we give them all masks, goggles, boots and so on? Some PPE. It's not that expensive. So that at least they're not being contaminated every day. And then we do the second level of activity. If we're relying on the labor and resources of these people, why not strengthen their communities? Let's build some more schools. It's not that expensive. Why don't we build some public health clinics? Not that expensive. Some nurseries so the mothers with babies don't have to strap them to their backs. I mean, all these little things that are not expensive, they would represent in totality a rounding error on the balance sheets of these companies. They could be done in short order and would drastically reduce the harm and violence and suffering taking place at the bottom of cobalt supply chains. Then you move on to things like replanting trees, cleaning up the air, cleaning up the environment, running things as we would for our own people.
Mcfarlane: I think it is so important that you put forward what are ostensibly very small changes, but that could have huge, huge impact to make these conditions even vaguely tolerable and accessible. Because the truth of the matter is the appetite and the demand for cobalt is inevitably going to double, going to triple, going to quadruple as the decades go by, as, you know, governments are going to try to embrace the green clean energy revolution. And on that, I wanted to ask you specifically about how electric vehicles have really sort of pushed the scale of this demand really off the charts. You said that in your book, the rapacious appetite for cobalt is a direct result of today's device driven economy combined with the global transition from fossil fuels to renewables. Demand for cobalt is expected to grow by almost 500% from 2018 to 2050, and there is no place on earth to find that amount of cobalt other than the DRC. It is the amount of cobalt that is needed, of refined cobalt that is needed in every single electric car battery, kilos and kilos of it. You argue that there is no such thing as a clean supply chain from the DRC. I mean, all of this is a real problem because, you know, we do need to transition from fossil fuels. We do need to get rid of petrol and diesel and oil that's choking the planet, but this exploitation of The Congo is such an unacceptable injustice. And so I wanted to ask you specifically on this push for electric vehicles right now today. Is it doing more harm than good?
Kara: The push for electric vehicles today is doing enormous harm to the people in the heart of Africa. No question about that. And this is what's driving all this future demand and this scramble for cobalt is this transition to electric vehicles. And I completely agree. We need to pursue important climate sustainability goals for our children and grandchildren. But how can we save the planet for our children while sacrificing the children of the people of Africa? How can we make our environment greener by destroying theirs? And that's the hypocrisy of this. You see, we've charged forward so fast in trying to achieve these climate sustainability goals that no one bothered to stop and look, are we trampling on anybody along the way? And that's precisely what's happening. And we are pursuing our green future by destroying the environment in the heart of Africa.
Mcfarlane: I mean, do you have an electric car? It's probably an unfair question, but do you have an electric vehicle? If you don't, is it partly because of your experience that's put you off it, at least for now? If you do, do you feel guilty every time you step into it?
Kara: No. I have the same car I've had for about the last sixteen years or so. I tend to use things until they're completely used up. But I won't buy an electric car now. No, I mean, I have seen children with their legs amputated because they were shattered in a pit wall collapse. I've seen mothers pounding their chest in grief because their child was buried alive in a tunnel collapse. It's painful for me to walk around and see electric vehicles on the road. I mean, I understand it and consumers who buy them feel rightfully that they're making a green choice. They're trying to be responsible. But they, you, I, we've all been made unwitting participants in this great horror. Every time we plug in our phone, you and I didn't make the bargain that, okay, I'm gonna buy my smartphone knowing that children in The Congo are suffering degrading slave like exploitation so I can charge up and check my social media accounts. We didn't make that bargain. That was forced on us by the companies that did not see fit to ensure that the basic rights and dignity of the Congolese people was respected. And same with the electric vehicle companies and the government mandates, they're all forcing this unwitting participation on us, simply because they don't see fit to ensure that the human rights of African people are preserved and protected and that their environment isn't destroyed so that we can save ours. So that's why I won't buy an electric vehicle until I'm confident that those issues, these pressing issues, we simply can't just keep going back to the colonial mindset. It's just not acceptable, and I can't participate in it.
Mcfarlane: You have a smartphone. I'm sure you have a laptop. We're communicating right now with technology that is made up of constituent parts sourced from The Congo. I mean, I'm a journalist. I need to have a camera. I need to have a mobile phone, laptops, all of these awful devices which are tainted with this suffering. I mean, it's not realistic really to boycott technology. Technology has been, in many ways, a large force of good. It has empowered a lot of people, enabled them to start businesses and things. And how can we reconcile that? What would you suggest to people? Because, you know, calling for boycotts of these things is just not realistic in the twenty first century.
Kara: No. I agree. It's impossible to not use personal tech devices in the modern world. And that's why I say this great horror has been forced upon us by companies that didn't see fit to preserve and protect the basic human rights, dignity and well-being of the people at the bottom of the supply chain. We have to use our smartphones. We have to use our tablets and other gadgets. We can't function without them. No question about it. And they have enormous benefits to society, absolutely. Now I would say, as consumers, we've also been marketed this idea that we have to upgrade everything constantly. This year's camera has another megapixel in it. Oh, really need to get that. And I think that's where we can make some personal decisions. Do we have to upgrade everything every year because that only continues increasing demand for all of the components in those gadgets, especially cobalt, which is almost all coming out of The Congo. So maybe we can use the same phone a little longer and not keep participating in this demand push. Again, use the same laptop a little longer rather than renew it all the time.
Mcfarlane: I wanna segue a little, and I wanna talk about China, which was a really fascinating angle of your book. Chinese companies now make up the majority of companies sourcing cobalt from the DRC. You wrote that China cornered the global cobalt market before anyone really knew that it was happening. All the way back in 2009, under the previous president in The Congo, Joseph Kabila, he signed this deal with the Chinese government for access to mining concessions in exchange for development, for assistance, a commitment to build infrastructure, roads, health clinics, schools, hospitals, things like that. And before anyone knew what happened, Chinese companies had seized ownership of 15 of the 19 primary industrial copper cobalt mining concessions down there in Southeastern Congo. So they now dominate mining on the ground. They have around 80% of the refined cobalt market and probably half of the battery market as you write in your book. I wanna start off. Firstly, how have the Chinese handled the responsibility of these mines? And did they ever build any of this infrastructure that they promised? Have they sort of given back to these populations in the mining towns in the way that they said they would?
Kara: Well, right now China is taking their turn as the colonial overlords of Africa. I mean, full stop. They have gone across the continent signing these infrastructure for resource deals all over Africa with particular focus on mineral extraction, and that gets to The Congo. And before anybody else, they saw the future was going to be rechargeable batteries. And they locked down and vertically integrated that supply chain. And now they control 70 to 80% of mineral extraction, copper cobalt extraction from The Congo. Most of that cobalt goes up to Mainland China for commercial grade refining and they last year supplied 80% of the world's supply of refined, commercial grade refined cobalt and about half of all the rechargeable batteries in the world were manufactured in China. So from dirt to battery, and increasingly beyond that to consumer facing tech and electric vehicles, they have vertically integrated the supply chain. Now suddenly, The United States and Western Europe are scrambling to figure out what to do because this is a vital supply chain, particularly for all the EV mandates that are coming through. And yet they're not on the ground. They don't have any reasonable proportion of the share of these vital battery component metal supply chains. And everyone is beholden to China. In terms of how they operate on the ground, well, they pay little to no regard to the human rights of the Congolese people. When you actually spend time there and walk around and observe and talk to people, you see this very thick layer of racism from the Chinese against African people. And again, they're just replicating what came before. It was Europeans down in Africa before that. But you see this racism, you see this anger swelling with the local population as they see their countryside obliterated. There's no sustainable mining taking place at all. As they see their lakes dried up, their rivers polluted, everything destroyed, Chinese companies just ransacking the place and running off with metals and minerals. So they see the complete destruction of their countryside, of their earth, of their environment, as well as this oppressive degradation of them themselves, their people. And there's not much they can do because it's such a poor war torn country and China's just taken control.
Mcfarlane: It is an incredible sort of journey you take us on as you sought to expose the truth of what is going on in The Congo. But I wanted to ask you just a little behind the scenes question because one of the reasons why this systemic exploitation is so intractable is because actually it's pretty impossible to get there and to see what's going on and to prove it and to document it and to show to people out in the rest of the world what is happening. I mean, you have done that with this book, which is really quite incredible. And so I just want you to explain for our listeners really how difficult it was for you to conduct your investigation because it kinda helps explain why the scale and the magnitude of the suffering has been allowed to go on because there have been so many people who've worked to conceal it from the outside world.
Kara: Yeah. Horror thrives in darkness. And in this case, as in almost all cases, there are a lot of powerful interests whose job it is to keep truth seeking out, to keep the light out and to allow the horror to persist. And so the mining provinces, especially because there's so much money at stake, are heavily militarized, heavily guarded. So there's the army, mining police, informal militias, which is just commando units geared up with AK-47s and machetes that are just patrolling, monitoring, keeping their eyes out for anyone who doesn't belong. So it took many years and many trips for me to get into the mining provinces to kind of keep peeling the layers back a little deeper with each trip as I expanded my relationships and built more trust in mining communities and figured out how to get around the obstacles as carefully as possible and see as much as I could. And to this day, there are still many things I never was able to see. Stories I heard of some horror atrocity, like a child slave farm in a certain area for digging cobalt that I was just never able to get to because I couldn't find a guide willing to take me there because the militia controlling that area was known to be so enormously violent. But one time on one trip, I may have been blocked by guards at getting into a mine and the next trip I figured out another way and I got in and I was able to see what happened. With each trip, it's just I kept feeling greater shock at what I was seeing. When I thought I had seen it, when I thought I had seen the worst, there was still something worse than that.
ANALYSIS WITH SIR RICHARD DEARLOVE
Mcfarlane: Our thanks to Siddharth Kara for joining us, discussing his new book, Cobalt Red. Now my cohost, the former chief of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, was not unaware of the exploitation going on in the DRC. But upon reading Kara's book was taken aback by the scale of the suffering that had been found. I asked him what his reactions were to Kara's book and our discussion on the situation there.
Dearlove: Well, reading it, I was not surprised, but I was intensely depressed. And I suppose I make that judgment because in my early career I served in East Africa. Okay, this was not The Congo. But I think what I find really depressing and shocking is the weakness of civic government in these countries. I think Congo is an extreme example, and the fact that theoretically there is a structure, there is a rule of law, but in practice it just doesn't apply. And you have these shocking, enclosed problems in which the local authorities, the regimes, are complicit, because there are a lot of people making an awful lot of money. And there are always what I would describe as big men. There's this term in African politics, big manism, which is replicated at a governmental level, at a tribal level, at a local level. And we seem incapable of creating the sort of pressures to install the rule of law, to install any sense of economic fairness. So you have this dreadful exploitation, particularly in areas which are rich in natural resources. I don't think this is so true in the sort of agricultural areas, but where you have mining. And I mean I just take you back, the issue I remember very clearly professionally is what we used to refer to as blood diamonds, and the sort of exploitation of diamond mining, and the horrendous injustices that were produced by the availability of this resource which could make people very rich. But the people that, as it were, mined for the diamonds and suffered got very little of the benefit, if any of the benefit. It's very depressing.
Mcfarlane: It is very depressing and it is unfortunately not the only example that we have. And it's kind of an inevitability that where you have an abundance of any kind of resource for which there is rapacious international appetite for. You mentioned Blood Diamonds and the legacy of Blood Diamonds in particular in Sierra Leone is very well known, but you also get it in places like Bangladesh where there is a huge appetite for fast fashion and all of the fashion workshop clothing companies that source out of there and the huge amounts of exploitation that go on there. It's not just the Congolese and the cobalt, which comes from that country. But what makes the DRC different from a lot of other places where there is exploitation of human beings in order for mass production or mass extraction of something like a rare earth or precious metal or anything like that is because it is so difficult to access. And so a lot of this abuse and exploitation and the harrowing conditions that Siddharth writes about is not something that is easily accessible to outside observers, to people who are not involved in the process of exploitation themselves. I mean, he describes the fact that a lot of these mines are impossible to get to because no one is allowed to go anywhere near. There are sort of gangs and militias which are guarding a lot of these areas. There are Wagner mercenaries and all kinds of different armed groups.
Dearlove: Have you, I'm sure you have read, or if you haven't you know about it, the novel by Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. And Heart of Darkness, I think in the early pages of Heart of Darkness there is this description of a naval ship sitting off the coast firing shells into the jungle. And I mean it's a symbol of pointlessness and unless the Congolese themselves can create a system of civic governance, how do you get a government established which has a sense of fairness, responsibility, a good justice system, efficient administration? They've certainly got the potential wealth, but at the moment the results are chaotic. And we've all seen in bits of Africa when you have these commodity booms, look at Nigeria, you know, with oil. I mean, it was catastrophic, the effect it had on the Nigerian people as a whole. And did the country become wealthy and rich? No. It didn't. Individuals became wealthy and rich.
Mcfarlane: Yeah. Although I feel like if Congo were to get to the stage where Nigeria is, it would be doing a whole lot better.
Dearlove: Well, it would do and I mean, Nigeria has begun to emerge, you know, as a very significant African power. And there are lots of positive and good signs that are a consequence of its development. So it's not all downhill by any means. But look, I don't know a lot about the current politics of Congo, but its history has been pretty catastrophic.
Mcfarlane: Right, well I really want to ask you about that colonial legacy, and there is so much to say on colonial patterns and history sort of repeating itself in The Congo today. But just before we go on to that, because also I know you are such an enthusiastic student of history. It's always great talking about the historical background to these things. But what is happening right now in The Congo, there is as Siddharth has said, he has listened to people who have lost their children because their children were taken away and bused away in droves to work in these mines and never seen again. Young children who are taken out of schools in order to work for a dollar a day at these camps. Mothers who are working with their kids strapped on their back, handling hazardous materials. You know, these materials that are not safe to touch or not safe to breathe, they are getting health problems. They're all dying of cancer because of handling these toxic elements in these mines where there's no safety regulations. A lot of them are forced to work. Slave labor conditions were met, Siddharth says. Exploitation, the absolute ruin of the landscape in which they live in. Based on his observations and his investigation, do you think we are living in a period now where the systematic exploitation of what is happening to people in The Congo is comparable to the historic legacy of Western colonialism in the seventeen hundreds, the eighteen hundreds?
Dearlove: I think it's impossible to make that comparison. All I would say is that the situation in Congo, which is imposed partly by the Congolese themselves on their own people, is catastrophic. And the fact that there isn't the strength of civic government to, as it were, run this as a respectable beneficial industry, so that the local population who are mining these resources see benefit. I think it's a great tragedy. If you maybe go back to some of the real injustices of slavery, but bear in mind that the emancipation movement in The UK started in the 1840s, that the British Navy was deployed globally to abolish slavery. There are two sides to the coin, if you see what I mean, and it's a very complex historical issue. And to make judgments on the basis of how we view the world now, I think is very dangerous.
Mcfarlane: I think what is striking about the fruits of Siddharth's investigation is that it does put forward the argument that a lot of these systems of exploitation, which much work was done hundreds of years ago to dismantle, are replicated, resurrected, repeated in some instances.
Dearlove: Yeah, I think I would agree with you on that. But you know, when I went to Africa in 1966, it was a place of enormous, I mean, okay, East Africa, I mean there was a huge amount of optimism. Kenya had been through a difficult period of Mau Mau, and even now the sort of belief is that there was a cover up about Mau Mau. This wasn't a cover up at all, that's, you know, reconstructed history. There was a clear awareness of what had happened, but the Africans themselves in a country like Kenya were very, very optimistic about their future. And they were a sort of shop window for an independent African country. Okay, they've had a problematic political history since, but not entirely unsuccessful.
Mcfarlane: I mean, Kenya, fair enough, is an example of a potential success story. But I think what is interesting about Congo, you mentioned one of the issues, one of the many issues with the exploitation that happens in Congo today is that you have a lot of these systems are held up, are enforced, are made possible by a lot of the locals. And that's one of the sort of the tricks that has been used since colonial times, whether it's, you know, the Belgian colonialists or the French or the Brits or, you know, the Chinese businessmen or the Russian mercenaries, the corruption of local regional sort of governors or tribal leaders or big men as you refer to it, they are also pretty integral in keeping these systems in place against their own brothers and sisters in the Congo. And that is a part of the system of exploitation, that it requires members of people who are Congolese themselves to enforce a lot of these systems. You mentioned that one of the other issues is that there is weak governance, that there is not strong civilian institutions in the country. I think that is a really key point. And we know that the Congolese have tried since independence. They have tried to govern themselves. And so I want to ask you about, for example, the assassinated Congolese independence hero, Patrice Lumumba. For our listeners who aren't aware of the history in Congo, Lumumba was shot dead by a firing squad in 1961 with what is now generally accepted, the tacit backing of the former colonial power Belgium. Lumumba was the first democratically elected prime minister in the independent Congo. Richard, are you familiar with Lumumba's story? Can you talk to us about what happened with him?
Dearlove: Yeah. No. I'm familiar with Patrice Lumumba and I wouldn't say I know a great deal about it, but yes of course I am, people of my age are well aware of what happened. But I mean I think that you have to view that whole period of African history really through the optic of the Cold War. And it was a question of communist international Eastern influence. It was, you know, the struggle was for control of various countries. Lumumba was very much associated with the sort of communist side of the equation. And I'm not an expert and I'm not going to sort of, you know, pontificate, but those events in Africa during that period were very much a projection of this ideological divide between East and West. And certainly, I mean, back to East Africa again, you know, my job in East Africa in the 1960s or the late 60s when I was there was to ensure that the Soviet or Chinese influence was not the prevalent one, and that the West retained its primary influence over the regimes of East Africa, which it did, with the exception that Tanzania during a period was quite sympathetic to a certain amount of Chinese involvement, it wasn't dominant. The problem is that effectively there was a civil war in The Congo, with factions backed by the East and by the West. And I think this is really the tragedy of Africa. It has been, as it were, influenced by a reflection of global politics. I think now what you see is an emergent Africa which has its own identity, which is beginning to shift and express its dominance because of its richness in resources and its importance to the global economy. But it's still very susceptible, the Congo is an example of this, let's say, to the Chinese coming in and exploiting the natural resources because they're so important to the burgeoning battery technology industry and it needs these rare earths, which are abundant. Lots of other things are abundant in The Congo. If it had a stronger polity, it had a stronger identity, it would be able to determine more its own fate. But it seems to me at the moment that it's at the mercy of these sort of trading influences, and the primary one, unfortunately, in Congo's case appears from reading this book to be Chinese and not more magnanimous in terms of its attitude towards the future of the country.
Mcfarlane: I think that's so interesting, and I think it is why it's so important that we understand geopolitics and all the different levers at work, and the fact that a lot of these conflicts and these interregional sort of challenges for dominance and influence, they're patterns that we have seen in cycles. I mean, what you were saying about the Cold War and the different powers vying for control over certain countries, that was exactly what we were discussing with regard to Cambodia during the Cold War and how that played a huge role in the exacerbation of that civil war and all kinds of things related to the killing fields.
Dearlove: Yeah, but I think Africa in a way is the continent of the future. And what I mean by that is its resources. I mean its problem is the usefulness of its population, the explosion in demographics in terms of the rate of increase, and the challenge for African economies to accommodate this massive growth. But on the other hand, as and when individual African countries get their act together, they have the opportunity, I think, to be enormously successful. But we're really in the foothills of this development, this problem, which, you know, I hope in my lifetime as it were, one begins to see a different political result in Africa because, I mean, having lived there and understood it, it's an extraordinary place.
Mcfarlane: That's it for this week's episode of One Decision. We drop new episodes every Thursday. Like and subscribe so you never miss an episode. Drop us a line. Tell us your thoughts. What decisions have impacted you and where you live? You can write to us. Our email is 1decision@1decisionpodcast.com. From me and the team, thank you for listening, and see you next time.
