actually existing...

the congo: a case study in the constitutive violence of innovation

the two ends of technology's lifecycle

on november 15 2025, a makeshift bridge in a mine 42km outside of kolwezi, democratic republic of congo, collapsed, killing at least 32 - unofficial estimates run considerably higher. the kalando mine is one of many in the DRC's "copper belt" responsible for providing large percentages of the world's copper alongside cobalt, a key component in powering the rechargeable batteries in today's tech gadgets and electronic vehicles. the trench that the miners fell into is on one end of the battery supply chain, impossibly distant from the other, which looks more like a showroom of polished new cars and gleaming consumer electronics.

alongside large, mostly chinese-owned firms, these minerals are torn from the ground by so-called "artisanal" miners - congolese men, women, and children, often in discarded flip-flops or barefoot, armed with scrap rebar and makeshift shovels. bags of the scavenged ore are frequently sold to intermediaries for a few cents per kilogram. the deaths of artisanal miners are routine and under-reported. tunnel collapses bury dozens at a time while dust from the blasting and hauling clogs lungs in a country where respiratory disease is the leading cause of death.

after being extracted from the earth in the congo, most of the world's cobalt is processed in china into high-purity compounds and battery cathodes. china is also the number one consumer of this refined cobalt on account of its battery manufacturing industry - CATL, the biggest manufacturer of electric vehicle batteries in the world (which also owns a near 25% stake in the congo's kisanfu mine, the largest cobalt producer in the world), is a chinese corporation that partners with companies like BMW, tesla, toyota, and other producers of EVs and consumer electronics.

in the markets of the global north, cobalt reappears as a triumph of innovation propped up by the marketing language of “green transitions” and “sustainable futures”. environmental harm and human suffering are framed as solved problems, managed by abstract “supply chains”, distant corporations, and third-party auditors. here, the rechargeable battery is not a trench wall or a collapsing bridge, but a symbol of personal freedom and responsible consumption that has touched a vast majority of life: in fact, in the united states, adults are statistically more likely to own a smartphone leveraging this very same cobalt in its batteries than to live in a household with safe, consistent access to food. the differences between the two poles of the battery's lifecycle are stark and, crucially, not incidental. to understand why, we can look at how the congo has consistently occupied its current position of exploitation - not as an exception or unfortunate side effect to the story of innovation, but as its necessary precondition.

the shape of extraction

the state of mining in the democratic republic of the congo represents a disturbing but logical continuation in a pattern of exploitation. in the late nineteenth century what would come to be the "belgian congo" was carved out as a private resource colony under the king of belgium. its land and people were exploited to supply rubber, ivory, and minerals for the industrial and technological revolutions of the day. as a result of the colonial atrocities that facilitated this extraction - some of the starkest in history - the population of the congo fell by as much as 13 million. less than a century later, still before congo's formal independence, the same territory's resources would feed another technological revolution as nazi germany and the united states looked to the belgian congo's uranium deposits to fuel their nuclear programs. uranium from the shinkolobwe mine in katanga - the same province as the bridge collapse - was refined into the material used in the bombs dropped on hiroshima and nagasaki at the end of the second world war.

until its dissolution in 1960, the belgian congo would continue to power the west's burgeoning militarization in the cold war. bridging the gap between imperialism old and new, copper, cobalt, and uranium were extracted and expropriated for weapons and aircraft manufacturing and powered the nuclearization that defined the militaries of the 1950s, while plantation exports like palm oil, rubber, coffee, and cocoa continued the long-established tether between congolese labor and patterns of western consumption.

lumumba

in 1960, patrice lumumba was elected congo's first prime minister on the back of a growing nationalist movement. months later, the congo negotiated independence from belgium. lumumba's platform rested on a demand that, in retrospect, reads as almost unbearably direct: that the congo's resources should belong to the congolese. fearing the nationalization of congolese natural resources, the union minière du haut-katanga, a belgian mining company established in the early 20th century, funded congolese businessman and politician moïse tshombe and his pro-western CONAKAT (confederation of tribal associations of katanga) party in their efforts to secede katanga - the province most rich in minerals - from lumumba's central government.

tensions between lumumba and the west, initiated by his intent on achieving congolese self-determination through a rejection of foreign exploitation, erupted when he turned to the USSR after the united nations neglected to provide sufficient support to combat katangese secession. less than a year after independence, lumumba was deposed by joseph-désiré mobutu with support from the united states and belgium. he was ultimately assassinated by belgian operatives in collaboration with katangese leaders backed by the US.

the timeline is worth sitting with: lumumba demanded nationalization and was killed within months. it is difficult to construct a cleaner demonstration of the rule that would govern congolese resource politics for the next sixty-five years - that self-determination over extraction is a demand that the system will not tolerate. in the whirlwind of katangese reunification that followed lumumba's death, the UN did intervene militarily, to precisely the extent he had requested just two years before. by then, mobutu had emerged as leader of the democratic republic of the congo, consolidating a western-backed dictatorship that would last more than three decades, until 1997.

mobutu's zaire

like lumumba, mobutu presented an aesthetic of nationalism and self-determination. in the late 1960s and early 70s, he nationalized the union minière du haut-katanga, creating gécamines in its place - a state-owned mining company that immediately became one of the world's top producers of copper. in 1971 he changed the name of the country to zaire and that of the capital, léopoldville (named after the belgian king who first colonized the congo almost a century prior), to kinshasa - names that reflected pre-colonial congolese culture. similarly, mobutu changed his own name from the french-sounding joseph-désiré mobutu to mobutu sese seko. but under the veneer of liberty, progress, and congolese independence, mobutu was keeping the door to foreign exploitation wide open, and enriching himself in the process.

following the creation of gécamines in 1966, the new company briefly delivered on its promise. national revenue tripled between 1967 and 1970, and the congolese state - now controlling some 40% of national value added - built out a nationalized health and education system that, for a moment, achieved 92% primary enrollment. it did not last. mobutu brought belgian technicians and executives back into congolese mining through management contracts structured so that both he and foreign interests profited, while newly-nationalized enterprises funneled revenue directly into foreign accounts under his personal control. expropriated businesses, plantations, and commercial properties were handed to loyal family members, officials, and military officers with no experience running them. when global copper prices crashed in 1974 - falling by more than half within a year - the strain exposed both mobutu's mismanagement and the fragility of an economy built on a single export. infrastructure deteriorated while the state hemorrhaged capital and skilled labor.

by the mid-1980s mobutu's personal fortune was estimated at $4 billion, funding brazilian coffee plantations and a marble palace complete with its own airport, exotic animals, and a crocodile-filled moat, while ordinary congolese people faced collapse and rising poverty. that collapse, layered onto ethnic tensions spilling over from the rwandan genocide next door, brought mobutu's three-decade rule to an end in 1997 - and, within a year, plunged the country into war.

the congo's wars & the modern resource dimension

while ethnic tensions and the rwandan genocide provided the spark for the congo wars, the region's vast natural resources quickly became central to the conflict. the collapse of centralized state authority and the influx of foreign armies transformed the congo's mineral wealth from a source of mobutu's kleptocratic revenue into both a prize worth fighting for and a means of financing that fight.

beginning in the early days of the first congo war rwandan, ugandan, and eritrean forces - collaborating with kabila's AFDL rebels - pushed into eastern zaire. as rwandan forces destroyed refugee camps harboring génocidaires and forcibly repatriated tutsis, they engaged in mass-scale looting of stockpiled natural resources. military units seized existing reserves of diamonds, coltan, and other minerals from mines and warehouses in the eastern regions, converting accumulated wealth into immediate wartime funding. this opportunistic extraction helped finance the campaign that would ultimately topple mobutu's regime.

only a year after mobutu's fall, the second congo war began. president kabila turned against former allies who had sponsored his rise to power - rwanda and uganda - and expelled foreign troops from the DRC. What had begun as wartime looting during the first congo war evolved into systematic exploitation during the second. the war lasted, officially, until 2003 and drew in nine african nations and approximately 25 armed groups on either side, leading to an estimated 5.4 million deaths and an additional 2 million displaced peoples.

top military officials and influential businessmen from occupying countries established illegal networks that transformed mineral extraction into a self-perpetuating war economy: resource control provided the means to continue fighting while simultaneously becoming the primary incentive to do so. while the extent of the expropriation of minerals is not wholly documented, import and export numbers tell the story of its scale. between 1998 and 2000, rwandan diamond exports increased 90-fold despite having no domestic diamond production, while DRC diamond exports plummeted from nearly $1 billion to $211 million. the money from these exports not only funded the war state required to maintain control but enriched the elites of expropriating countries, continuing a pattern all-too-familiar to the DRC.

china in the congo - from kabila to tshisekedi

the world bank and IMF, diagnosing the wreckage of mobutu's zaire in the 1980s, laid the blame almost entirely on state mismanagement and nationalization itself, with little weight given to the copper price shock that had triggered it. that diagnosis became the rationale for the 2002 mining code: gécamines was privatized, and a newly "liberalized" fiscal regime - tax holidays, low royalties - opened the door for the foreign ownership structure that governs congolese mining today. joseph kabila, who signed that code into law, was initially elected president in 2006, after heading congo's wartime transitional government following the 2001 assassination of his father, laurent-désiré kabila - the same AFDL leader who had overthrown mobutu four years earlier.

a hallmark of kabila's terms was a joint economic partnership with china, sicomines, in which china pledged to invest in congolese infrastructure - civil and industrial - in exchange for rights over mining concessions in the country. it is the same shape of arrangement, updated for a new century, that put CATL's stake in kisanfu at the center of today's cobalt trade - foreign capital in exchange for the ground itself. initial funding went toward two hospitals, two universities, and some 6,600km of roads - unsurprisingly, many of them built to move ore. in exchange, former katangese governor moïse katumbi estimated that china owned 60 of the 75 mineral processing plants in katanga, and that 90% of the region's minerals were bound for china. notably, the chinese companies holding stakes in sicomines are not required to pay taxes in the DRC until the congo repays the $3 billion in infrastructure loans that financed the deal.

in 2019, after three years of election delays that sparked violent domestic protest over kabila's alleged corruption, félix tshisekedi was elected president in the first peaceful transition of power in the DRC's history. he was reelected in 2023, after meeting with chinese president xi jinping earlier that year to "strengthen the partnership with china" and renegotiate mining contracts over the country's mineral reserves. that renegotiation was not a formality: congo's own state auditor argued the original $3 billion infrastructure commitment badly undervalued what gécamines had contributed to the deal, and pushed for a figure closer to $20 billion. in january 2024, the government announced it had secured an increase to $7 billion - progress, though still a fraction of what its own auditor calculated the country was owed. tshisekedi remains congo's president, having withstood a coup attempt in mid-2024 by the self-styled "new zaire government in exile" and its leader christian malanga - a fittingly-named footnote harkening back to the history of a country whose contemporary economy still runs on the same rails laid by belgium.

today

the bridge outside kalando collapsed under the weight of the same trade that put a phone in most american pockets. between the two sits a hundred and thirty years of the same transaction, restaged under different flags for a rotating cast of technologies each hailed, in its moment, as innovation's frontier - rubber and ivory, then the bomb, now the battery. in each case, by the time the goods reach their consumer they've been fully laundered of the trench they came from; the commodity remembers nothing of the hands that dug it. but this is not a failure of the system to account for its costs. the miners in flip-flops and the showroom of gleaming electronics are not opposite ends of a supply chain that broke somewhere in the middle. they are the starting and ending points of the same machine, running exactly as designed - and the design has always required, as a condition of the innovation itself, that congo pay in bodies what the rest of the world pays in currency.

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