The elements of power, p.39
The Elements of Power, page 39
There are questions, however, about solid-state’s sustainability. Eric Frederickson, Call2Recycle’s vice president, told me that they are “virtually unrecyclable.” Such batteries also often use materials like cobalt and lithium, which would continue creating the same demand for materials from complex parts of the world.
But what if you didn’t have to use cobalt, or even lithium, for a battery? Marek Slavik, cofounder of Theion, a Berlin-based battery start-up that makes quasi-solid-state batteries, is asking that question. He told me in the summer of 2023 how his firm had made a powerful battery using sodium and sulfur. The materials needed to make sodium-sulfur batteries are cheap and common all around the world. “We have a very lightweight cathode material that is abundantly, democratically, and geographically available,” Slavik said. “We need simply to also pull it out from the petrochemical industry. That is their waste product. We are transforming waste into cathode materials.” Such batteries, however, are still barely out of the laboratory.
Yet more scientists homed in on sodium without sulfur. Sodium is cheap because it’s abundant in the earth’s crust and can even be extracted from seawater. As a result, sodium-ion batteries are much more cost-effective than their lithium-ion cousins. China, it must be said, is already ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to sodium-ion. At the Battery Show in Stuttgart in 2023, Shmuel De-Leon, an Israeli battery expert, said he was “shocked” by what he had seen at a Chinese battery fair two weeks earlier. Before going there, he had thought that only one company was making sodium-ion batteries. “I want to tell you that I found ten,” he said. Later that year, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence counted thirty-six Chinese companies involved in sodium-ion cell production and research. In February 2023, a Chinese automaker called JAC had launched the first sodium-ion-powered car.
In Stuttgart, at a booth for AMTE Power, a British company that had created a sodium-ion battery, I held a cylindrical sodium-ion cell in my hands. Fergal Harrington-Beatty, the company’s head of sales, told me he believed that the technology would eat into LFP’s market share. It was marginally lower than LFP in terms of energy density, he said. Sodium-ion was far from a perfect solution: One of the most vaunted technologies, which used the pigment Prussian blue, produced a toxic waste that was hard to dispose of. The fact that yet another blue pigment was being used to produce power felt like a bit of a cosmic joke.
In the U.S. and Europe, however, the supply chain for sodium-ion was not established, and few people wanted to invest in the technology until it became cost-efficient. Scientists at research institutions like the University of Houston would continue to develop and refine powerful new types of sodium-ion batteries, even as businesses trying to put such technology into production faltered. AMTE Power was sold in 2024 after it failed to raise enough money. That was not the case in China, where state-run companies, and firms like BYD and CATL, were forging ahead in battery science and production, putting in the groundwork before the rest of the world even realized what had happened.
* * *
Maybe the answer to the critical metals conundrum is in fact right in front of us, or, rather, in the ground beneath our feet. Over the years I researched this book, what became clear was that the Chinese were only the latest in a long stream of people who had exploited Katanga for its wealth. At the center of the Belgian dreams in Congo were vast riches, not the charity that Leopold had promised he would bestow upon the country. The land had long been in the grip of rulers who had prospered from its immense natural resources, and it would remain in their grip after the Belgians had left. In the town of Tervuren, near Brussels, Leopold built a pompous neoclassical museum to celebrate his conquest of Africa. Visiting in 2021, I saw copper crosses and huge, heavy I-shaped ingots that people had created out of Katanga’s copper well before Belgium took control of Congo. I imagined ancient people lugging them across the savanna, moving them with little fuss along trade routes that crossed Africa. When Europeans later traversed these well-trod routes, they would be lauded by their own countrymen as intrepid explorers.
But the resources could also help Congo, not simply condemn the country to an endless “resource curse.” Maybe we don’t need new technology to help power our lives. Maybe Congo could even benefit from its own resources in the energy revolution. My experience at the Glencore mine had shown me how mining could be carried out in a modern manner, with an emphasis on safety. In plenty of places around the world—in Australia and Tanzania, for instance—sustainable mining has been shown to be possible. A trip to the Congolese town of Bunkeya in 2022 showed me how Congolese people—and, by extension, people living close to critical-metals mines around the world—could build better places to live from the resources beneath their feet.
Bunkeya is still governed by a descendant of Msiri, the Yeke king whom the Belgians, spurred on by Thys, killed to take Katanga. Remarkably, it is a community that has kept a strong sense of identity despite the years of violence and colonialism it has suffered. What’s also remarkable is that the people of Bunkeya have managed to funnel their portion of the mining royalties from nearby Tenke Fungurume not into some corrupt pocket but back into agriculture, potable water, and the building of community infrastructure. To be sure, this money is only a small portion of the money made at TFM, but civil-society leaders in Lubumbashi took me through the numbers and showed me how the mwami, or king, had ensured that the community was given its share of the mineral wealth before it was stolen. According to them, the mwami had only managed to do so through vigorous advocacy in Kinshasa.
It was even more remarkable because elsewhere that money was being stolen. In February 2022, the government in Kinshasa had begun an investigation into Tenke Fungurume to try and ascertain the true size of the reserves and whether China Moly owed the state money, and suspended the firm’s mining rights. They agreed to settle with China Moly in April 2023. The firm had to pay some $800 million over six years and a minimum of $1.2 billion in dividends over the mine’s operational life, and said that it expected the money to “play a stronger role in promoting economic development and job creation.” A senior U.S. official told me that even more money appeared to have been paid upfront by China Moly. He lamented that whatever was being paid was being poorly spent or “put into pockets” and stolen. He insisted that the Congolese government had to be transparent. “What are you doing with that?” the official questioned. “Show us that you’re building something productive for your population—they couldn’t.”
I had come to Bunkeya in 2022 on the anniversary of the mwami’s coronation, which takes place in July and is one of two yearly celebrations in the territory of the Yeke. I parked outside in the main square, crossed the main street, which is called Boulevard Msiri, and headed in through the red-and-white-painted gates of the royal enclosure of Mwenda Bantu Kaneranera Godefroid Munongo Jr., the current mwami. Unusually for Congo, no one came up to me, a foreigner, and pleaded, “Makuta, makuta” (Money, money). The sound of drumming and gunshots came from up ahead of me, as I passed a series of abodes, little thatched huts in miniature, homes for the spirits of each of the mwami’s ancestors.
In a tented courtyard, the mwami sat enthroned in white robes as his ceremonial bodyguard, in red tunics, fired ancient muskets into the air. Someone told me that the guards’ guns dated back to the colonial days. Traditional chiefs from across the country, the Mwaant Yav, and a Luba dignitary, as well as African aristocrats—a sultan from Chad, a king from Ghana, and a chief from the Republic of the Congo—lined up to salute the mwami and give him gifts.
Afterward, a foreign agriculture expert showed me how farming had been improved by the king, how he had constructed clinics and roads, even how he was thinking about building a model mine on a hill near town. Here was a community that stood in stark opposition to what was happening in many other towns throughout the South, where big companies and anarchic profit seekers were tearing the social and physical fabric of towns apart, a community that showed that money from cobalt could benefit the poorest in Congo.
In a way, Bunkeya has gotten lucky: There are few mines in the immediate vicinity of the town, and the people there have retained a strong sense of their own culture, something that has been stamped out in other parts of the South. This is not coincidental. By denying the history of Africans, European colonialists encouraged a view of the continent’s populations as people in need of civilizing influences and deracinated them. As the development studies scholar Kevin C. Dunn has written of Congo, “External actors have frequently attempted to characterize the country as divided, chaotic, and lacking the ability of self-articulation, which in turn has allowed external actors to speak for it.”
Such external articulations allowed the slave trade to flourish along the coast of West Africa, and later allowed explorers to claim huge swaths of land for European monarchs. The parallels with today are plain to see, in the condescension through which people speak about Africa and Africans; in the ignorance that is afforded to African affairs by major U.S. and European powers; and in the treatment of African workers by their Chinese bosses. Colonial myths are repackaged for the twenty-first century: that Africans are incapable of self-rule, that corruption is somehow a natural state on the continent, that they cannot manage their own resources. It is somehow fitting that the lithium-ion battery, which is in many ways the ultimate product of globalization, a thing that allows people to move power, and to take power from a desperately poor place and place it into the hands of the rich, is so sourced in Congo. And it is fitting, too, that localized measures might be the answers to the injustices in the battery supply chain.
Writing for The New York Review of Books in 2018, the journalist Howard W. French explained that one of the key rhetorical moves of colonialism has been “emphasizing the civilizational virtues that are being shared with less fortunate or explicitly inferior peoples, while minimizing one’s own self-interested objectives and downplaying the violence and dispossession that are usually essential to the subjugation of others.” The deletion of African history was essential in this project, French said, to establish mastery over people in the colonies. Any evidence of ancient civilization was ascribed to external influences. “To accord local agency in such matters would have undermined a long-standing narrative about the inherent inferiority or even subhuman nature of Africans, which was vital in giving Europeans license for their actions.”
Bunkeya flies in the face of these assertions. In some ways, it always has. Msiri resisted colonial rule there in the 1880s, even though he was an invader himself. These days, under his distant descendent, it is trying once again to break free, resisting the control that has been foisted upon it since Msiri was murdered.
* * *
To meet climate goals that will make a dent in global warming, we need to massively invest in environmentally responsible mining. At the same time, much still needs to be done to focus the world’s attention on the devastation wrought by many forms of mining—to our shared planet, to local lives and livelihoods—and how to mitigate it. Such goals might seem antithetical, but I believe there is hope.
Perhaps the power-storage space suffers most from a lack of imagination. Many mining companies seemed uninterested in the possibilities provided by clean energy. “The big miners haven’t invested in the critical-metals projects because they’re too small,” Brian Menell, the TechMet CEO, told me. “One billion dollars barely moves the dial.” But he also thought that few people had woken up to the opportunities offered by critical metals. “There is still a degree of naivete,” he noted. The problem, Menell argued, was that businessfolk and politicians in Europe and the U.S. didn’t look beyond the short term and invest in projects that were important for the future. “You need political will, which you don’t have,” he said. “We should have auto workers in Detroit demonstrating for more mining; we should have students demanding that their universities invest in clean mining. If investment doesn’t happen, we won’t make our climate change goals over the next twenty years.”
One way to reconcile the goals of the new-energy revolution with the terrible toll it takes on communities is fairly simple: We should listen to the people from the places where we get our minerals. We must listen to them about pollution in their communities and consider their dreams for a healthier, more balanced world. Such people are commonly erased, thanks to big-stakes financial dealings and complex, often deadly geopolitical games in the cutthroat competition for resources, but citizens of wealthy countries cannot simply hope that innovation will save the planet, or ignore the horrific suffering that has come to be accepted as an unavoidable price for cleaner cities. To do so risks entrenching a system of cruelty and pollution that will eventually, in ways we are only just beginning to understand, prove as destructive as any hydrocarbon.
In the end, most places in southern Congo aren’t like Bunkeya. Most places have been built on the buried dreams of miners, and upon a painful history of exploitation.
Sometimes, they have literally been built on human bodies.
On one of my early trips to Congo, I spoke to Charlotte “Maman Ocean” Cime Jinga, the parliamentarian who once served as Kolwezi’s mayor. She complained about just how cavalier the government was being with miners’ lives. The bodies of creuseurs who had died from a cave-in at KCC’s mine had been unceremoniously dumped, she said. These were people like Françoise Ilunga’s husband, Nitunga. “There is a mass grave, unmarked,” she told me. Officially, forty-three people had suffocated or been crushed to death, but she contended that there had been many, many more. In an attempt to lower the death toll, officials had hastily ordered trenches be dug at the city cemetery and buried the bodies of those whose families hadn’t come to claim them.
The mass grave at the Cimetière Mwangeji, 2022
Maman Ocean’s words haunted me throughout the COVID pandemic. I resolved to find the grave with Jeef Kazadi when I returned to Katanga in March 2022.
We made some inquiries and found out that such a mass grave does, indeed, exist. It lies in a far-flung part of the Cimetière Mwangeji.
We arrived at the cemetery in the early afternoon. Mwangeji sits on a giant plot in the middle of town next to a series of shops that sell wooden coffins. Marcel, a nineteen-year-old IT student in a blue suit, was headed for his lunch break. He worked as a gravedigger to make some extra cash, he said. He knew where the unknown creuseurs had been buried. There were about thirty of them, he remembered.
Marcel ushered us into the cemetery, which was quiet and huge and overgrown. Graves were everywhere in the soft soil, and only a few paths wended their way through them.
At the yard’s southern wall, two men were digging. They shouted that I should get out. “You don’t have the right authorization to be here,” they told me. I needed to ask the new mayor for permission to enter, they said.
Marcel led me away, taking me on a roundabout route through wooden crosses staked into the ground. “Mwangeji is full,” he said. “There is no terre vièrge.” No virgin ground. The empty areas only appeared empty, because the tall grass and bushes that covered the cemetery were burned at the end of the dry season to free up space for more graves. The wooden crosses would burn in the flames.
He brought us into an area of thick bush. After a few feet, the foliage thinned out. It was here, he said. He pointed at a patch of scrub. Thirty men’s bodies had been dumped here after the tunnel they were in collapsed.
There were no markings. Reed grass had grown from the soil, and it was red and long and feathery. It shuddered in the breeze.
Thirty bodies lay in the ground below my feet. They belonged to men who had been digging out the metals that keep our world powered, and they had been crushed, deep under the earth, in Congo.
Acknowledgments
Munu umua kawena mua kukuma bionso. A finger, according to a Luba-Kasai proverb, cannot do everything by itself. And, though I do tend to type slowly using one finger on each hand, the same is true for a book like this, which has benefited from the input and thoughtfulness of scores of people. I am immensely grateful to everyone who spent the time helping me to learn about the issues surrounding critical minerals in the modern world, welcoming me into their homes and offices. Thanks especially to Odilon Kajumba, who opened up about the world of mining in Congo; to Sadip in Bahodopi, who spoke about how his land had been destroyed and served me delicious cooked bananas; and to Mohammad Aris in Ternate. I was lucky to meet Aminatou Haider in Las Palmas and I thank her for the time she gave me after a long trip.
I’d like to thank Jeeftour Kazadi Kamwanga, without whom this work would not have been possible, and who suffered the indignity of detention at the hands of the ANR. Jeef, on reste ensemble.
Thank you to my family for putting up with me during this, for listening to me drone on about mining and metals, and for all their support after I was arrested. To my mother and father, I’m sorry for all the frights, and to Lex and Inès, thanks for bearing with me.
Adam Eaglin at the Cheney Agency was the first person who encouraged me to look into critical minerals back in 2018 and helped shape my pitch and many drafts. At Penguin Press, thank you to Will Heyward, Natalie Coleman, Scott Moyers, Chelsea Cohen, and Lauren Morgan Whitticom. Kris French, Angely Mercado, Cadence Bambeneck, Aina de Lapparent Alvarez, and Amanda Braitman, thank you for your fine-toothed checking work. I’d like to thank Anthony Del Corso for all his help putting this book together, and Gurveen Kaur for being a great sounding board.
At The New Yorker, Daniel Zalewski first saw the potential for a long narrative about artisanal miners, and David Remnick took a chance on a piece from Congo (and then helped me get out of prison). David Rohde published my work on Western Sahara. Peter Canby helped me with key questions at various stages. Research and fact-checking by Katie Nodjimbadem, Lucie Kroening, and Han Zhang were essential. Thanks, too, to Fabio Bertoni, Willing Davidson, Hélène Werner, Virginia Cannon, Bruce Diones, Patrick Radden Keefe, Carolyn Kormann, Colin Stokes, Becky Cooper, Jon Blitzer, Steph Taladrid, Michael Agger, David Kortava, Camila Osorio, Anakwa Dwamena, Yasmine AlSayyad, and so many other checkers and editorial staff, past and present, whose encouragement kept me going.
