Even before our current rush to transition to non-fossil-fuel electricity, minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo had been powering our modern lifestyles. Cobalt provides essential components for lithium-ion batteries—the ones in cell phones, computers, and the increasingly ubiquitous EVs—and most of the cobalt for these devices comes from Congo. But even that's not the first such rush on the country's buried resources turned modern treasures. In the late 1930s, when the process of nuclear fission was developed, physicists used uranium, which turned the element that humans had no use for into a coveted one. And because those scientific discoveries happened just before World War II, harnessing the power of splitting atoms became a matter of global security. Then as today, Congolese people were the overworked, manipulated, and terrorized miners doing the dangerous work at the center of modern advancements. Ngofeen Mputubwele tells their story—one that wasn't (explicitly) depicted in this summer's blockbuster Oppenheimer. As he watched the film, Mputubwele writes, "I kept seeing what was missing: Black miners hauling earth and stone to sort piles of radioactive ore by hand." The point isn't to add a little-known footnote, but rather to counter the belief that Congolese are "ancillary to modern life." They were the "essential ingredient, the sine qua non, of arguably the most consequential creation in modern history." —Matthew McKnight | Features Editor |
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