Made in the Democratic Republic of Congo: The land and lives behind the promise of cobalt – why we should feel compelled to unpack climate elitism.
Written by: Leah Mpinga
*Originally published via Climateimaginations.org/nature-narrations
Dorothée Baumann-Pauly
It had been almost a month to the day of living in New York City. 18 days of graduate school and approximately 3 hours since I had finished my last class of the day in 601 Schermerhorn. Coincidentally, my uncle was in town, having just come off the heels from a conference at the Harvard Kennedy School, the topic of discussion; the future of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In a dim smokey Club Macanudo, myself and his acquaintances were enthralled in conversation about the conference, last night’s gala, the bright-eyed students at the other Ivy, and the future of a potential net-zero Congo. Once again caught between two worlds, one where I was privy to the inner thoughts of the Congolese political class and my new cohort of climate scientists. One where I had a birthright, the granddaughter of a Prime Minister (the reeking privilege of a nepo-baby), the other where my uncle jarringly pointed out, “just a number”. Suddenly, conversation halts.
“Le président vient de finir son discours” (The president has finished his speech).
Besides the unplanned family reunion, it was also the U.N. General Assembly. President Felix Tshizekedi of the DRC has just finished addressing the Assembly, in his delegation Minister of the Environment Eve Bazaiba. During his speech, the fifth president of the nation said it was time for the country to take full control of its destiny. The president also addressed the issue of fair carbon pricing and the unsuccessful 2009 $100 billion dollar pledge for climate finance initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa. Undoubtedly, these topics were at the forefront of African current affairs with the African Climate Summit having adjourned three weeks prior in Kenya.
The question is why should you care? Well, you could choose not to, but if you plan on driving an EV or taking a plane that is powered by fuel, or having any kind of device with a microchip you probably should. The magic ingredient in all these items: Cobalt.
According to Our World in Data, the D.R.C is responsible for 0.01% of global emissions since the 1700s, producing less than 0.02% of annual global emissions in 2020. Nevertheless, it holds the top spot for cobalt production at an astonishing 300,000 tons a year. Today, cobalt is seen as one of the world’s most important critical minerals, a by-product of copper mining essential to the creation of lithium-ion batteries. Yes that’s right, the batteries found in the cute EV you’ve been eyeing up or convincing your family to commit to.
Government, artisanal mining and multinationals: Who pays and who benefits?
Questions of environmental justice have often been centered around who pays and who benefits. In this context, who sees the positive ends of the trade-offs of mining cobalt? Nearly 80 years on, countries like the United States who turned to Congo for the uranium in the Atomic Bomb are turning to its government and population to help them out again. Amongst the largest multinationals mining for Cobalt include; Microsoft, Glencore and Tesla.
The issue remains however, in the southeastern region of Katanga many Congolese people are living in abhorrent conditions. These conditions can only be described as dating back to the era pre The Industrial Revolution. In an article published by the New York Times, it details the locals of areas like Kinsafu seeing next to no profit from cobalt extraction. The early supply chain of cobalt is plagued by informal artisanal mining and the imminent relocation of indigenous tribes, like the one chiefed by Kinhayle Mangi. Unfortunately, little distinction can be made between the cobalt produced by legal industrial projects and the cobalt extracted in mines by men, women and children.
The exploitation of the Katangan people is not new. It has been historically exemplified in the Belgian backed secession war of 1960-1963, the harassment of populations by Mobutu Sese Seko during The Cobalt Crisis of 1979-1982, post nationalisation of mines and now the geo-political race between the U.S. and China.
Whilst global powers are making transition investments and advances, rural populations in the DRC are still without clean and affordable energy. While our consumer issues are debates over whether we should thrift, follow plant-based diets and make efforts to compost, families in Congo are cooking their food and lighting their homes with timber and dung.
In the context of the “climate bubble”
So, whether it be in the clouds of smoke in an Upper East Side bar or in the hallways of Columbia University, it is here or anywhere that you realize no one with the privilege of education on climate change is “just a number.” Those who are carrying our transnational burdens and the pressure of correcting our past mistakes are those who bear the consequences of being a number. They are forgotten. Yet, they survive without the megaphone of an Ivy league education, a country with strong institutions and the common decency of the world’s interest. One thing that is clear in the climate bubble is the reconstruction of language and education coded in elitism. We focus on the individualism of our ambitions, the issues that we perceive as important, and accept the lack of perspective within the hierarchies created by paternalistic entities of the past and present. Whether we now say Global North or Global South, which came from developed and developing, earlier western and local, and at the core coloniser and colonised. Nonetheless, we blindly take the privilege of being able to learn and selectively choose. We are happy to make change, if the change is good for us. We take our biases and project them onto those who we’ve deemed as behind, who’s words and cultures we’ve decided to exclude, and to quantify as immeasurable. We use our language to cleverly ask those why they’re in our space and what qualifies them to be here. Fundamentally, we’ve been taught to care without caring enough. Whether it’s with a laugh, an eye roll, a comment or deafening silence our climate activism has not expanded far enough. Our relationship to land and to people remains anthropocentric in nature and dismissive in practice. A lot of the time in my writing I discuss the principle of Ubuntu. I am because we are. I recognise that I denounce elitism whilst also sitting on my high horse. However, my wish is solely for “just numbers” to become people, for people to become voices and voices to become change. Change that denounces the individualism we’ve been taught and the communities we’ve forgotten. Those who have always paid, must at some point benefit.
Foreign Brief
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