Book Review: How Is Your Phone Powered?

THROUGH CAPITALISM –

Jan. 23, 2023 – A lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Kara has written on sex trafficking and other forms of so-called modern slavery, part of a new group of abolitionists who claim explicit parallels with the historical fight against the slave trade. Like his previous books, “Cobalt Red” takes the form of a righteous quest to expose injustice through a series of vignettes of exploitation and misery. Kara proposes to take us “down the only road that leads to the truth,” a journey into the Katanga mining region, toward the cobalt hub of Kolwezi, “the new heart of darkness.”

Ever since its seizure by the Belgian king Leopold II in 1885, the Congo River and its watershed have supplied the world — not least the United States — with riches: ivory, rubber, palm oil, diamonds, uranium. Yet today more than three-fourths of Congo’s population live below the poverty line, while few have access to clean drinking water, and even fewer to electricity. “Never have people of the Congo benefited from the mines of Congo,” a community leader tells him. “We only become poorer.”