André was unusual among the children working at Kilimabunga. A month earlier, his father had tasked him with making money for the family, giving him some cash to go to the mine and trade minerals. “I would stay at the base of the hill,” he told me when we spoke a few months later. “I waited for the children so I could buy the minerals.” He spoke quietly but with an unchildlike confidence. “I developed a network thanks to my family.”

  By buying and selling the minerals, André had risen a step above most of his peers in the supply chain, and even women, boys, and older men would sell to him. “Yes, I had benefits from my job,” he told me. “But the conditions for some children were not good.”

  As the children at Kilimabunga were laughing and making their defiant declarations about death, a man in his thirties wearing a black bomber jacket approached. Vital Kamungu was the program director of a school that sought to take children out of the mines and provide them with an education. He had an offer for them: They could go to school, be fed breakfast and lunch, and take food home for their parents. “There is food, there is water, there is electricity, there is everything you need,” he said. Many decided to stay, but André considered his options: He decided to take his chances at Kamungu’s school.

  * * *

  A few years before, Kamungu had begun working with a Catholic charity called Bon Pasteur, or Good Shepherd, which operated a two-story school in a mining area of Kolwezi; now he headed the school for Still I Rise, an Italian NGO that ran a school called Pamoja, which means “together” in Kiswahili. He was the program manager there, and his job included traveling to mine sites, where he would try to persuade children and their families to come and study.

  Still I Rise had begun as an emergency school on the Greek island of Samos during the mid-2010s refugee crisis in Europe. The organization’s thesis was that much of the education provided to refugee and migrant children by relief organizations was rooted in religious institutions, and Still I Rise tried to provide a holistic education that emphasized a child’s mental health.

  I had first witnessed its work in Samos back in 2018. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I volunteered at Still I Rise in Greece, which was suffering from a shortage of teachers while travel bans were in place. I taught writing to a smart, funny group of teenagers, all of whom were excited for a better life but stuck in the unintelligible limbo of the European refugee system. Some of them had been on the island for more than a year. We created a newspaper at the end of one class, and a boy from Afghanistan wrote a playful observational piece about the Chinese trader who had set up a hardware store next to the school. Another of my students was Congolese and a keen writer of poetry. “I am a Black Man, an African and a Refugee,” he wrote. “Give me a chance.”

  Both times I visited, I was surprised to see many Congolese people in the camp on Samos. A good number of them were refugees, fleeing violence, but some were not from war-torn parts of the country: They told me that they had come to Europe because there were no opportunities for them back home—a sad state of affairs, considering the vast wealth Congo sits atop.

  Still I Rise started opening schools in other countries: Syria, Kenya, and Yemen among them. By 2021, the program raised money to rent a low-slung building in Kolwezi for around $1,200 a month. The school would be both a place of learning and somewhere to imagine a better life. The nonprofit began training teachers. Pamoja’s stated aim was to provide “high quality education, targeted child protection actions, and holistic nutrition, psychosocial and health support programs to the child and the whole family.” In such a poor region, parents often expect their children to supplement the family’s income, even if the work is dangerous.

  * * *

  When I visited Pamoja in March 2022, it smelled of detergent and fresh paint. André and his cohort—the school’s first class—had been there less than a month. The school would count 120 students at full capacity, and it had an entirely local staff. The building had three classrooms, a refectory, and a psychosocial support office. Outside, a gazebo was being erected so that children could take classes in the open air. I sat in on a French class and watched without understanding as children played a game where they had to clip and unclip pegs from a clothesline. At recess, Kamungu asked if there were any pupils who might be interested in speaking with me.[*] Six students volunteered, and we sat in Pamoja’s breezy main hall as they told me their stories.

  Many of them had similar tales: stories of families barely scraping together enough money to feed them, let alone send them to school. The government had promised that schools would be free for all children, but in reality, money was siphoned off in Kinshasa and teachers remained unpaid, so they levied fees from their students’ families or refused to teach. Most of the students told me they often didn’t eat at home. “There were days that we ate and days that we had nothing to eat,” Julie, an eleven-year-old with tight braids, told me.

  “I borrowed things. I bought things. I went and took out loans,” Norbert, a ten-year-old, said. One day, his mother took him to a mine site. “My mother told me to hold on to the black ore, and to throw away the white stones. The metals were in the black stones. And other stones—white, brown—I would throw them away.” Cobalt? “Exactly, cobalt.”

  Norbert had “always wanted to study,” but he went to the mine because he knew that his family would not otherwise be able to afford to clothe him. “My mother bought clothes for me when I worked with her. After, we would sell the ore. She paid me with clothes.”

  They talked in cold detail about their time in the mines. Jamila, a twelve-year-old, told me that when her mother died, she and her siblings did not have money to pay for school. “The school kicked us out when we did not pay, and our grandmother had to come and collect us. She said we had to go and work,” Jamila said, so she and her siblings went to a pit where they spent their days hauling bags of rocks and sorting them one from another.

  The army and police had been sent into some sites to secure them, and to make sure that children and pregnant women weren’t working there, but they had not done much. “Where I worked, there were soldiers before, and then a security company that replaced them,” said Dieumerci, a thirteen-year-old in a crisp new Pamoja uniform. He had worked in the mines for a year before Kamungu brought him to the school. “Anyway,” he said, “if anyone found a child working there, you would just pay, and they left you alone.” He told me that he would make around ten thousand Congolese francs (about $5 in U.S. dollars at the time) a day, and a quarter of that would go to paying off mine guards.

  It would have been highly illegal for people to buy products from children this young; miners were technically supposed to belong to a cooperative and be trained by a standards body called SAEMAPE. Almost three years before, the governor of Lualaba Province, home to the capital city of Kolwezi, claimed that there were barely any children in the mines, and that there would soon be none. On the way into town, he had established a buying center called Musompo, ostensibly so as to better control the use of child labor and ensure that ore was coming from registered cooperatives.

  The children told me a very different story: They sold to Congolese buyers, and some said they sold to Chinese buyers, no questions asked. Others said they sold ore directly to purchasers at the mines. Two of them told me they would help other children or family members bring the ore to Musompo, the marketplace that the governor had championed, where children were absolutely not supposed to sell minerals. Musompo still only existed as an informal marketplace by the middle of the 2020s, hardly the modern trading spot the governor had proclaimed more than a half decade earlier. Trafigura, the Swiss commodities firm, had been brought in to centralize cobalt trading, and a new governor had made much to-do about the project, claiming it as her own. But a geologist who has covered the region for years told me that she is privately unhappy with the financial arrangements and benefits that accrue to her from Musompo; she apparently also has a bad relationship with the national mining ministry. Norbert Kalenga, a thirtysomething trader I had met in Kolwezi, explained that his project to build an equitable cobalt trading cooperative had been frustrated. He vented over text in April 2025, “Until now [Musompo] does not exist!!!”

  Despite the promises that children would be removed from the mines, all the children I spoke to told me that they had seen other kids working beside them. “I dug with other children at a site called Tshimbala,” Dieumerci said. “I felt tired, and I often had bruises and scratches on my body.” He had seen other children suffer much worse, he told me. “I saw other children wounded,” he said. “I saw other children in a terrible condition.”

  * * *

  Not everyone had suffered from artisanal mining. After he seized power in 1997, M’zee Laurent-Désiré Kabila had permitted the practice to create, he often said, a new class of wealthier Congolese. Norbert Nawiji was one of them; as a young man, in the 1980s, he had studied pedagogy and nursing, but Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire was crumbling. “This story started suddenly, with the war and the end of Mobutu,” Nawiji said. “People couldn’t afford to send their children to school, to find things to eat.” By the time Kabila came to power, Nawiji was working at mines near Kolwezi. After a few years, he began work as a négociant, buying and selling ore. “The middle class was forming itself,” he said.

  Nawiji realized that he could make even more by establishing his own dépôt, a fixed trading house where he could set prices for ore. He applied to the government to put up shop, showing identity cards and commercial documents; finally, he received his carte de négociant, which allowed him to create his dépôt in the Musompo trading area. When we met in Kolwezi in September 2019, a few days before his fifty-seventh birthday, Nawiji wore a dark zip-up jacket. His two smartphones kept ringing—a sign, in Congo, that he was a successful man.

  By the early 2010s, Nawiji explained, the industry was becoming more regulated for official traders like him who wanted to, he said, follow the letter of the law. “People who understood the industry saw that there was a danger to this artisanal work,” he told me. He was against children working in mines and thought it a good thing that the law was catching up. But the change in the law, he said, was being used by politicians to sell off mine sites and declare that only cooperatives linked to them could work in specific areas.

  The amendment didn’t address all the people who were already working in artisanal mining, though. “The problems started when people started to leave the mines that they had known well, because of certain government provisions,” Nawiji remembered. “There began to be deaths, and people began to get wounded. There are people who have been handicapped in every way imaginable.”

  More and more miners were pushed into working illegally, and creuseurs like Odilon Kajumba Kilanga had to bounce from site to site, paying off soldiers and policemen who had been sent to enforce the new regulations. In some cases, entirely new, completely unregulated mines sprung up. Creuseurs became “geologists all by themselves,” Nawiji said. “If there were minerals there, they exploited them.”

  In theory, the system laid out by the mining code, with its cooperatives and training bodies, could make artisanal mining into a sustainable career. But in practice, it had become a form of bonded labor for many people. Even if artisanal mining supports poor families in the region, it’s hard to applaud it in its current state in Congo. The lives of many creuseurs are cut short and marked by suffering. Many are not lucky enough to clamber out of poverty like Nawiji. They are instead left with physical and psychological injuries from mine collapses and violent confrontations with the police and the army.

  * * *

  To some, no types of artisanal mining are acceptable. They point out that children who work in the mines are often drugged to suppress fear and hunger. When we spoke in 2019, Sister Catherine Mutindi, the founder of Good Shepherd Kolwezi, told me: “If the kids don’t make enough money, they have no food for the whole day. Some children we interviewed did not remember the last time they had a meal.”

  The dangers for children do not stop there. Mutindi inveighed against one superstition that holds that sex with a virgin girl will enhance one’s luck in the mines. It is no rarity for children to die while being raped. While I was in Kolwezi, Mutindi showed me photographs of the bruised corpse of an eight-year-old girl who had been abducted and raped by a creuseur the previous week. (The miner was later apprehended; she sent me a video of him in prison.) In one case, Mutindi said, she saw the body of an eighteen-month-old infant who had been raped by a creuseur. In a place like Kolwezi, with its high levels of corruption, people could get away with such murders if they were able to pay off the police.

  In 2019, at a school run by Good Shepherd, I met Ziki, a serious boy with big dark eyes. He was fifteen, but because he had been malnourished for long periods, he looked much younger. His parents had been killed in a roadside accident when he was three; afterward, he’d been sent to live with his father’s sister. “My aunt sent her kids to school but sent me to the mines,” he said. For almost a decade, he lived as a drifter, roving between mines with a group of other children. Soldiers beat them frequently if they could not pay bribes. “I was full of bitterness,” he said.

  Things had become worse in the 2010s, but the world was also starting to prick up its ears and catch whispers of what was happening in Katanga. Ever since Amnesty International and AFREWATCH released a landmark report on artisanal mining in 2016, the issue of child miners in Congo has become better understood and deplored internationally, but conditions have barely changed on the ground. In fact, in times of higher cobalt prices, more children have been sent to the mines. When the price of cobalt drops off, copper prices allow artisanal miners to continue selling the ore—just at a lower price. In the wake of the report, some companies that have been known to use cobalt in their batteries, such as Apple, said they would stop buying from firms with artisanal miners in their supply chains, firms like Huayou. For the time being, at least.

  Skip Notes

  * I checked before I arrived that the school would confirm with the students’ parents or guardians if it was okay to interview their children. I also spoke with the psychosocial support counselor to check whether any child had an elevated risk of being retraumatized by my questions, and whether I should avoid particular topics.

  Chapter 31

  Kasulo

  By 2014, Odilon Kajumba Kilanga had been in Kolwezi for about six years, bouncing between mine sites with the two other men in his three-man creuseur crew: Yannick and Trésor Mputu. That summer, they heard a story that gave them hope they would soon be rich. The tale began in Kolwezi that June, when a man began to dig into the soft red earth in the backyard of the home he was renting in the suburb of Kasulo. By some accounts, this man was a policeman; by others, a Kasaian migrant who had made Kasulo his home.

  As the man later told neighbors, he had intended to create a pit for a new toilet. About eight feet into the soil, his shovel struck a slab of gray rock that was streaked with black and punctuated with what looked like blobs of bright-turquoise mold. He had struck a seam of heterogenite—cobalt ore.

  The man took some samples to a mineral trader, someone like Nawiji, although various people also told me this trader was Chinese. At the time, Musompo, the mineral market outside Kolwezi, had not yet been completed, and the road into the city was lined with corrugated-iron shacks, known as comptoirs, where minerals were bought and sold.

  One trader told the man that the cobalt ore he’d unearthed was unusually pure. The man returned to Kasulo determined to keep his find a secret. He stopped digging in his yard. Instead, he cut through the floor of his house, which he was renting, and dug to about thirty feet, until he hit pay dirt. He carted out the ore at night. “All of us, at that time, we knew nothing,” said Zanga Muteba, a baker who then lived in Kasulo. But one evening, Muteba and some neighbors heard telltale clanging noises coming from the man’s house. Rushing inside, they discovered that the man had carved out a series of underground galleries, following the vein of copper and cobalt ore as it meandered under his neighbors’ houses.

  When the man’s landlord caught wind of these modifications, the two got into an argument, and the man fled. “He had already made a lot of money,” Muteba told me when we met in the town of Samukinda in 2019. Judging from the amount of ore the man had dug out, his neighbors estimated he had probably made more than $10,000—in Congo, a small fortune.

  The story, which had the dimensions of a fable, was retold in Kolwezi’s smoky bars, in its dimly lit living rooms, and around the mouths of the deep, dark pits where creuseurs looked for copper and cobalt. Like many other miners who heard the tale, Kajumba and his team rushed to mine in Kasulo. Hundreds of people there “began digging in their own plots,” Muteba said. Many of Kasulo’s ten thousand residents were day laborers, and they figured they had a shot at making a fortune in their backyards. Murray Hitzman, the former U.S. Geological Survey scientist who spent more than a decade traveling to southern Congo to consult on mining projects there, saw Kasulo in the early days. He told me that residents were “milling about all the time,” hoping for word of fresh finds.

  The government quickly took notice and tried to stop the digging. “You’re going to destroy the neighborhood!” the mayor warned.

  But, Muteba said, “it was complicated for people to accept the mayor’s request.” Muteba had a thriving bakery and didn’t have time to dig, but many people ignored the mayor’s order: The prospect of a personal cobalt mine was worth any risk.