The Ghost of Leopold
In 1998, Adam Hochschild published King Leopold’s Ghost, the definitive account of how Belgium’s King Leopold II turned the Congo into a personal extraction colony. Leopold never set foot in the Congo. He never saw a drop of blood spilled. He sat in Brussels and grew wealthy while an estimated ten million Congolese died mining rubber and ivory for the European market. Hochschild called this “something very modern.”
It was modern. And it is current. Because in 2026, the same geography—the Katanga region, now Lualaba province—is the epicentre of a new extraction economy. The mineral is no longer rubber. It is cobalt. The beneficiaries are no longer Belgian royalty. They are technology companies and automakers in Cupertino, Wolfsburg, Munich, and Palo Alto. The mechanism is the same: resources extracted at devastating human cost from one of the poorest populations on Earth, processed through intermediaries who obscure provenance, and consumed by the world’s wealthiest economies under a label—“zero emissions,” “sustainable,” “ESG-compliant”—that renders the human cost invisible.
Unlike many other great predators of history, from Genghis Khan to the Spanish conquistadors, King Leopold II never saw a drop of blood spilled in anger. He never set foot in the Congo. There is something very modern about that. — Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (1998)
The Open Veins of the Green Transition
Eduardo Galeano wrote in 1971 that the division of labour among nations is that “some specialise in winning and others in losing.” He was writing about five centuries of resource extraction from Latin America—silver from Potosí, copper from Chile, oil from Venezuela—but the framework maps precisely onto the cobalt supply chain of the twenty-first century.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo produces 78% of the world’s cobalt. An estimated 40,000 children work in artisanal cobalt mines, some as young as six, earning $1–2 per day. [PARTIALLY VERIFIED — UNICEF estimate ~2012, no updated census] They dig in tunnels that descend as deep as 100 metres, without helmets or safety equipment. They carry heavy loads of ore on their backs. They breathe cobalt dust that will give them chronic respiratory disease. In a 2024 survey by RAID UK and the University of Bath, 82% of miners reported skin problems, 85.4% reported breathing issues, and 52.7% reported a major injury in the past year.
The cobalt they mine travels through a supply chain of traders, depots, processors, and cathode manufacturers before arriving in the lithium-ion battery of an electric vehicle. By the time it reaches your dashboard, every trace of the child who dug it has been erased. The battery is “sustainable.” The car is “zero emissions.”
Colonialism hardly ever exploits the whole of a country. It contents itself with bringing to light the natural resources, which it extracts, and exports to meet the needs of the mother country’s industries. — Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
The Ledger That Lies
In 2026, Tesla leads the Lead the Charge Leaderboard with a supply chain sustainability score of 49%—the highest in the automotive industry. Tesla discloses that 55% of its cobalt is directly sourced from mines with binding environmental and social requirements. Tesla’s MSCI ESG rating is BBB. Average.
The best performer in the industry fails more than half the assessed criteria. More than half its cobalt is untraceable. And the rating is “average.”
Meanwhile, in Kolwezi, RAID UK tested the rivers. Five water bodies assessed. All polluted by acidified industrial waste. The Katapula and Kalenge: hyper-acidic. The Dipeta and Dilala: very acidic. None can host fish. None are safe for human consumption. The communities that live beside these rivers have no alternative water source. The ESG report does not mention the rivers.
Spend a short time watching the filth-caked children of the Katanga region scrounge at the earth for cobalt, and you would be unable to determine whether they were working for the benefit of Leopold or a tech company. — Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red (2023)
The Ordinary Transaction
In December 2019, International Rights Advocates filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of fourteen Congolese families against Apple, Google, Dell, Microsoft, and Tesla. The children in the case had been killed or paralysed in mine collapses. In March 2024, the US Court of Appeals dismissed the case. The court called the companies’ relationship with their cobalt suppliers an “ordinary buyer-seller transaction.”
An ordinary buyer-seller transaction. A child loses his legs in a tunnel, the cobalt he was digging ends up in a cathode, the cathode ends up in a battery, the battery ends up in a car that costs $45,000, and the court says this is ordinary.
It is ordinary. That is the point. That is the indictment.
The Honest Ledger
There are facts that the comfortable narrative does not deny but simply does not mention. The average cobalt per EV battery has dropped from 12 kg to 4.8 kg. LFP batteries use zero cobalt. The EU will mandate mine-of-origin traceability by 2027. These are real improvements. They are also insufficient.
Electric vehicles produce 40–52% fewer lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline cars. The green transition is real. The science is settled. The choice is not between EVs and the status quo. It is between a green transition that counts its full costs and one that hides them.
The child in Kolwezi does not need you to stop buying electric cars. He needs you to stop pretending the car is clean.
The Wretched
Frantz Fanon wrote that “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples.” He wrote this in 1961, about the colonial system that extracted rubber, ivory, and labour from the Congo at the cost of ten million lives.
The same sentence could be written today about the green transition. The clean energy that powers the Global North is extracted from the bodies of children in the Global South. The “zero emissions” badge on the dashboard is manufactured from the suffering of people who will never sit behind that dashboard. The ledger balances only because it does not count everyone.
If conditions of work are not modified, centuries will be needed to humanise this world which has been forced down to animal level by imperial powers. — Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
Somewhere in Kolwezi, a child is still digging. He does not know what cobalt is for. He does not know that the mineral he carries on his back will power a vehicle that costs more than his entire community will earn in a lifetime. He knows the tunnel, and the dark, and the weight. He knows that his hands are stained blue-grey and that his chest hurts when he breathes.
He is the invisible workforce of the future. He is the entry that nobody audits. He is the cost of your clean conscience.