A Very sobering, devastating, stone cold Real Deep read.

At 42% dive into the article Is Brutal regarding child rape and hard-to-read atrocities. Almost too much to keep going.

The brief dive into the magical dragon deep in the ground keeping watch “ore” the treasure is Intriguing.

Fascinating article and excellent reporting! It's so crazy to imagine "artisanal diggers" tearing apart an entire town but when there is no way for these people to get fairly compensated for the minerals on their land what else is there to do?

Videos of Kasulo taken during the height of the 2014 cobalt rush show orange tarpaulins covering fresh pits and bags of minerals littering the streets. Michael Kavanagh, a journalist, visited the district a year later, and published an article in the Times observing that the profusion of holes made it look “as if it had been bombed.” At one point, after creuseurs tunnelled beneath the main road running west to Angola, the road collapsed.

“We used to mine in the bush, in the forest. You stopped us. You gave all the city to big industrial companies. Now we discovered minerals in our own plots of land, which belonged to our ancestors. And now you want to stop us? No, that is not going to work.” Muteba recalled, “People started to throw rocks at the mayor, and the mayor ran away. And, when the mayor fled, the digging really started.”

I asked Ziki what he thought of people who profited from cobalt mining. “I have sadness in my heart when I think of people who buy the minerals,” he said. “They make so much money, and we have to stay like this.” When I told him that Americans paid more than a thousand dollars for the latest iPhone, he replied, “It really hurts me to hear that.”