#2556 - Siddharth Kara

Good to see you, man. People have thanked me for bringing attention to what’s happening around cobalt in Congo. You put yourself in danger to get those images. It’s an absurdly rich, violently exploited place, and your work matters.

That means a lot, Joe. People in Congo notice you keep bringing it up. I can’t return now; after Cobalt Red, I was told there was effectively a price on my head. I stay in contact, and conditions have not improved much.

It’s a bizarre foundation for miraculous technology. We can build AI and talk to anybody, while people at the bottom are forced to pull minerals from the earth. We barely get these materials in America, right?

Not much. The biggest deposits are in central Africa, with lithium spread into South America. We could mine more in North America, but we don’t want poisoned rivers or flattened forests here. We accept it happening far away instead.

Our Blood Batteries research used satellite images across Congo’s copper-cobalt belt. From the battery boom through 2022, vast forest, brush, and grassland disappeared. Near Kolwezi, water tested at roughly ten to 950 times World Health Organization guidance for metals including lead, cobalt, copper, uranium, and chromium.

So it’s a southeastern mining area, not the whole rainforest country. But we’d fight like hell if somebody did that in Austin. Is wrecking groundwater built into extraction?

Land must be cleared, but mining can be regulated: restoration, containment, and keeping runoff out of rivers. Separating mixed-metal ore takes harsh chemicals. In Congo, those protections are largely absent. Chinese state-linked firms dominate much of it, and tech and EV companies know the supply chain they’re buying from.

This region supplied First World War ammunition and uranium for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s the resource curse: where there’s treasure, pirates arrive. Villages are displaced by mines the size of cities, and families survive inside a toxic economy.

At least 300,000 people dig cobalt by hand on a typical day. About 37 percent face outright slavery, and close to ten percent are children. I’m not saying people can personally fix it. But don’t casually replace a working phone every year. Demand has consequences.

I love EV technology—I own a Tesla—but every version has tradeoffs. Even brake dust is urban pollution. Carbon-ceramic brakes may cut wear, but they’re expensive and don’t make the problem disappear.

Exactly. Reduce cobalt, then people point to lithium iron phosphate or solid-state batteries. Fine—but lithium now ships from a major Congo deposit too, and conditions around Manono are horrific. Those people are attached to our lives, however distant they seem.

You could have been born there. We got a favorable roll of the dice. The blanket bootstrap thing is nuts when people have no clean water, no health care, no boots, and work that poisons them.

Moral progress happens when empathy reaches farther outward. Imagine before birth not knowing whether you’ll land in a secure Western home or a war-ravaged poor country. You’d hope lucky people would see you and use their good fortune to help.

And “artisanal mining” sounds like a nice coffee shop. It’s an insane label.

It means raw human labor: mothers carrying babies, kids hauling 40- or 50-kilogram sacks, people waist-deep in poisonous dirt. Cobalt harms through contact and inhalation. Material children pull from militia-controlled pits enters the formal chain and winds up in phones, tablets, and cars.

North of Kambove, militia men with AKs threw me down, searched me, and demanded my phone. A local colleague had me get a governor’s stamp before we went; showing it probably saved my life. The mine was industrial on company paperwork. In reality, it was hell on earth.

That ability to stop seeing people as people brings us to your new book, The Zong. It’s about greed, murder, and the ship that helped ignite abolition—and it connects horribly well to this.

The Zong was one of more than 40,000 Atlantic slave voyages carrying roughly 12.5 to 13 million Africans. Its story exposed the trade’s machinery and helped launch organized abolition. We learn plantations and cotton, but not enough about the global banking, insurance, and suffering behind them.

Africans were marched to coastal forts, often dying before arrival. At places like Cape Coast Castle, people were held underground for months, then inspected, branded, and sold. The crossing was a floating dungeon: chained people packed below deck amid waste, sickness, blood, and vomit.

The Zong carried 440 Africans, went badly off course, and the crew panicked over water. Across three days they threw roughly 130 to 140 living people—starting with women and children—into the sea. Owners filed an insurance claim for lost property, not murdered human beings.

An anonymous letter asked why there was no murder charge. Granville Sharp and faith-driven abolitionists made universal human rights a public argument. The captain admitted rain had fallen during the killings. A small group turned horror and fraud into a movement.

Religion can offer compassion, forgiveness, redemption, and responsibility. That doesn’t erase the Crusades, the Inquisition, or grifting pastors. Humans are unbelievably good at dressing up greed and brutality as a greater good.

That’s humans, that’s greed. But there are greater angels. The abolitionists show faith can drive empathy: see your neighbor as a brother or sister, not a thing to use.

The Zong gives me hope because truth reached people who had never visited Africa or met the victims. They used testimony, pamphlets, boycotts, and moral pressure. Congo needs that awakening: people who learn the truth, form a conscience around it, and refuse to look away.

You’re a hero, man. This is horrific, but people would not know without people willing to document it and tell the story. I’m scared to read The Zong after this conversation—but that’s exactly why it needs to be read.

Thank you, brother. I just hope people carry those at the bottom of these chains in their minds when they look at what powers their lives.