Congo-Kinshasa: 'We Miners Die a Lot.' Appalling Conditions and Poverty Wages - the Lives of Cobalt Miners in the DRC

[The Conversation Africa] It was a cool, dusty morning in July 2021, when I first visited the Kamilombe cobalt mine in Lualaba Province in south-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Situated just outside Kapata on the south-west outskirts of Kolwezi, a mining town that has historically served as an important centre for copper and cobalt, Kamilombe is now one of hundreds of spontaneously emerging cobalt mining sites in the region, where an enormous workforce of artisanal miners, called "creuseurs", extract and process cobalt ore