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It is the same final judgment made
on Kurtz in Heart of
Darkness: his trading
methods were unsound and had to be abandoned.
Sven Lindqvist, "Exterminate All the Brutes"
One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide
The presence of Africans, Black
people, laboring in fields to pick cotton and cut tobacco leaves, or
the presence of a Black butler, manservant, maid, nanny at the door
or in the kitchen or nursery supplied 18th and 19th Century American
writers with imagery of the romantic dream. It was, as the late Toni
Morrison explains in Playing
in the Dark, a romance
with whiteness, teased out with pen and paper and, above all, a
composed mindset. Here, writes Morrison, was the initiation of a
journey of exploration of identity,
that is, whiteness. The
violence of slavery already underway, history needs an explanation, a
justification for what may seem to some a wrong, even a legal and a
moral horror.
Early American writers busied
themselves replicating journeys (narratives) that ended, Morrison
notes, with whiteness materializing as if a mist, either a “closed
and unknowable” whiteness or a “white curtain” and
a “shrouded human figure” with skin as white as snow.
“Both images occur after the narrative has encountered
blackness.” In the former, “the expiration and erasure of
the serviceable and serving black figure” conjures a whiteness
“closed and unknowable.”
The images of whiteness is a
commentary on that peculiar institution of slavery.
When all is well, or perceived to be
well, all are encompassed within
the master plan. For above all, happy, singing, cheerful Africans and
African Americans produce enough bales of cotton to transport
ultimately to ports in New York and onto ships bound for the European
markets. Traffickers in human beings, merchants, ship makers,
auctioneers, slaveholders are building an empire of fortune, but,
nonetheless, resistance, too, is present, at the origins of any grand
scheme to dehumanize and demoralize. The “closed and
unknowable,” that is, nothing more than “imported”
images of “shadows” from European culture, writes
Morrison.
This romance with whiteness allows
for “an exploration of anxiety” caused by the presence of
these “shadows” within the images of whiteness. In plain
language, these “shadows” represent fear, for, as the
Europe came to discover, few want to submit to a system of cruelty
and indifference. The “shadows” are then an exploration
of white fear of those Black bodies. As whiteness as a narrative
advances to justify white violence, a response to fear of the “closed
and unknowable,” it also serves to stabilize the public’s
acceptable of the permanence of a slavocracy.
While the chains have fallen, on
some days it’s hard to say how free we as Black Americans are
to go about our business, shopping, driving, walking, sleep while
Black. What was legalized decades ago - that insidious “one-drop”
of “black blood” rule and pogroms to recapture plantation
escapees - appears as our national nightmare, a shadow too hard to
shake from the American consciousness.
After the Civil War, in the eras of
Reconstruction and Jim Crow, many Americans believed in continuing
the narrative romancing of whiteness. Many, apparently, still do.
What’s within this mythical idea of whiteness isn’t
democratic, and no one within its sphere of influence is free.
There is the ghoulish question asked
with every capitalist’s marketing venture from a real estate
deal for downtown Chicago to the labeling of a new product guaranteed
to make winkles disappear: What people would reject whiteness
and wish to escape?
If ever there were a rigged
system…
It’s more than a matter of
trading methods.
In Africa, children understand the
value of an education. They want to learn, and children on the
continent are well aware of how an education can lift them from
poverty and help them, in turn, become contributing citizens within
their communities. African children want to go to school - but for
the cost of school fees.
When I taught a year in Ethiopia -
albeit college and university, undergraduate and graduate students -
I, with my group of educators, spent a part of our in-country
orientation touring elementary schools. It was a pleasure to see how
eager these little children were to learn. It was pleasing, too, to
see how these children understood the value of sitting in a seat at a
poor but nonetheless functioning school.
There were many mornings, on my way
to teach, when I would cross paths with little ones in their school
uniforms with their notebooks walking in groups, often through mud
and on chips of glass or animal feces, on their way to school.
It’s no different in the
Republic of Congo (DRC). Without knowledge of a time when their
ancestor’s bodies and their nation’s resources were
claimed as property of Belgium’s King Leopold, the children in
the Congo just want a chance to realize their potential as human
beings. If not for a reminder of a peculiar arrangement of humanity.
A Congolese child who walks in his school uniform one day may be seen
the next, digging in a cobalt mine for $1.50 a day, if he is lucky.
He’ll work six days a week, too, leaving no time to return to
the classroom.
It’s not just a matter of
trade, you see, although trading is involved in this business of
asking young children to give up their lives, give up their futures,
so that a few profit and millions glorify the cutting-edge of smart
technology.
The cobalt industry seems to revolve
around Glencore, founded in 1974 (when I’m still in college,
thinking, the revolution
is coming!), is, according to its website, in operation in over 35
countries, at over 150 sites, and it has over 160,000 employees. “One
of the world’s largest globally diversified natural resource
companies,” Glencore claims that people
are at the heart
of its business.
People are front and center, at the
heart of the Glencore corporation.
Under the heading, “Who We
Are,” the narrative speaks about the corporation’s
concern for “safety”: “That’s why we
prioritize safety at all our assets; why we seek to minimize our
impacts on the environment and communities.”
Well, tech companies, and their
people, in particular, their CEOs, are certainly at the heart of
Glencore’s operations, that is, Apple, Google’s parent
company Alphabet, Dell and others honor a partnership with Glencore.
I’ll return to these companies soon. But, as for safety, the
Congolese children in these cobalt mines operated by Glencore are as
young as six years old! Because of “their families’
extreme poverty,” many of these little ones are forced to leave
school (The Wrap.com,
2019).
What do these children know about
cobalt? According to a CBS News, December 2019 report, cobalt is a
“mineral vital to the production of the lithium-ion batteries
in everything from smartphones to electric cars.” The demand
for cobalt in this world in which these children have been born, has
located the Congo as the place to cash in on an abundance of the
mineral. Half the world’s cobalt is produced in the Congo.
Unfortunate for the Congolese children not born a Bill Gates or an
Elon Musk. Or a Trump, who favors countries like Norway as opposed to
any “shithole” country in Africa. But he does love to
Tweet!
Elon Musk has a partnership with
Glencore. His Tesla corporation requires some 6000 tons of cobalt per
year (CNBC News).
“The cobalt supply chain faced
challenges during the first half of the 2020 as the Coronavirus
pandemic hit markets around the world,” writes a report in
Cobalt Market Update, Q2
2020). But not to worry,
the report continues, “many believe the future of cobalt, a key
metal in the lithium-ion batteries used to power electric vehicles
(EVs), is bright in the long term…”
And the future of these Congolese
children? Will their futures be as bright
as the billionaires who,
I’m sure, went to the best of schools, even private boarding
schools, and universities in the West?
Cobalt, discovered in 1735.
Atomic number 27.
Think the children digging in these
cobalt mines know this?
If you are wondering, yes, the
children are maimed and crippled, and many die. There are pictures!
And it’s not just Musk, but
also those tech companies (Dell, Microsoft, Apple, Google) we all
know and have come to depend on. Whole generations of young adults
have no idea how humans lived without a smartphone. Not exactly
small, ma and pa companies. Giants, in fact. In partnerships with
Glencore! The bottom line is money, after all.
A number of news outlets have tried
to expose this atrocity conducted in plain site by giant corporations
against children in the Congo. Forbes,
The Guardian,
and CBS News
among them and not “left-wing conspirators,” I don’t
think, have also reported on the lawsuits brought against Apple,
Google, Dell, Microsoft, and Tesla. According to these reports,
lawsuits have been filed by “human rights,” on behalf of
14 parents and their children.
There have been “anti-slavery”
charges leveled at these corporations by advocates such as Siddharth
Kara, who work to bring to “light this atrocity against
humanity.” One of his cases includes the subjugation of girl
children to the inhumane practices of child trafficking and labor. In
the mines Kara highlights, girls work for $0.75 per day!
Keep in mind that Bill Gates’
billions in income lags behind Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg 3-digit
billions, and he might be eclipsed by Musk soon!
In one case brought by Jane Doe 1 on
behalf of her nephew, a student needed six dollars to pay his monthly
school fees. The children commence to work in a cobalt mine operated
by Kamuto Copper Company, according to another report from The
Guardian. “Kamuto
is owned and operated by Glencore.” The nephew, working at this
Kamuto operated mine, died. He was “buried alive” when an
underground tunnel collapsed on him.
The family has never been able to
recover his body, according to the report.
The child just wanted to go to
school. He had the right to expect that adults would protect him, see
to his safety and wellbeing, assured he would never be put in harm’s
way, never work digging in a mine, never suffering abuse and stress
on his young body. What happened to his bright
future?
Glencore spokespersons and lawyers
claim the corporation “does not tolerate any form of child
labor, or compulsory labor.” It’s operates, instead, “in
a manner consistent with the universal declaration of human rights.”
It would seem that for these
corporations, tech companies, what is actually happening at these
cobalt mines in the Congo is “closed and unknowable.”
There’s a bottom line for some of the greediest people in the
world, promoting, willingly or unwillingly, rewards for armies of
clones who, in turn, face their smartphones and fire away!
“Cobalt provides a stability
and high energy density that allows batteries to operate safety and
for longer periods” (Forbes,
September, 2018). In the
brave new energy world of the not-so-distant future, battery storage
is thought to make possible boundless clean energy and convenient
technologies like fully electric vehicles and multiple hand-held
devises, even though batteries are not particularly cost-effective
relative to larger storage methods such as pumped hydro or compressed
air.” The report continues, “but for small devises, and
even automobiles, it is essential.”
You can imagine it: the courtroom,
the high-powered lawyers, defending their corporation clients. Check
out the suits, pants suit, the hair, the posture of confidence. These
men and women, most likely, graduates of the best law schools money
can buy.
How could my client possibly
abuse children? Atrocities against humanity? My client?
Like our ancestors before us, some
of us have long heard and read these denials of wrong doing our whole
lives. As for the parents of these Black children, they aren’t
asking for a display of theatrics from these lawyers defending the
“innocent,” that is, the corporations.
The bane of our existence now is
these corporations and their bottom line! And no, these corporations
aren’t alone, for our acceptance of cruelty and indifference,
particularly when it comes to the general public’s silence
surrounding corporate “impacts” on the lives of these
Black children, situates us as complicit in the continuation of a
slavocracy rather than the creation of a truly democratic society.
When will we learn to end this
romancing of whiteness?
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