Siddharth Kara, Associate Professor of Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery at Nottingham University, discusses his latest book Cobalt Red (2023). Covering the historical developments that led to the European exploitation of the African continent, especially by Belgian King Leopold II in the Congo region, Kara describes the tragedy of Congo as having been the historical and contemporary site of extensive human and labour rights violations. Geographically located on a wealth of resources pivotal to both older and more recent automobile revolutions, Kara expounds how from 1888 onward this region was exploited for its rubber in order to supply tires for the First Automobile Revolution and then again from the 1990s to the present day where the Electric Vehicle Revolution, computers and smartphones necessitate cobalt to produce rechargeable batteries. Kara observes how Congo sits on some of the earth’s most valuable resources as he chronicles the region’s tragic history from the colonial period where all the Congo’s value was siphoned out to the world’s elite, especially King Leopold, only to have this exploitation replicated 130 years later with cobalt given that the Democratic Republic of the Congo has more cobalt reserves than the rest of the planet combined. Kara remarks, “Now instead of a king, it’s mega-tech companies and electric vehicle companies…generating immense profits while the people of the Congo eek out a subhuman existence on a few dollars a day.” Kara covers the myriad human rights violations as a result of cobalt mining from child slavery to the sexual exploitation of girls and women while sustaining that “the very legitimacy of our global economic order is put in perile if it’s built upon this kind of colonial age oppression, degradation, and exploitation of the poorest people in Africa.”

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