Muteba, the baker, was one of the few arrivals from Kasulo who had remained in Samukinda. Nicolas Niarchos is a New York-based writer. In a warehouse at the site, I watched a man, his face grim, pulverizing ore on a concrete floor as two Chinese overseers scrutinized creuseurs from behind a barrier of chicken wire. Nicolas Niarchos has contributed to The New Yorker since 2014. Journalist Nicolas Niarchos' gripping New Yorker Radio Hour segment on WNYC, titled "The American Bombs Falling on Yemen", sheds light on a dark corner of American and British foreign policy. The residents had put them there to check erosion during the rainy season. She assigned two young men to escort me to the houses that Congo Dongfang had built. (In August, 2020, the companies being sued jointly filed a motion to dismiss, and in October the plaintiffs filed a brief in opposition.). But the homes turned out to have no electricity or bathrooms. The New Yorker — In June, 2014, a man began digging into the soft red earth in the back yard of his house, on the outskirts of Kolwezi, a city in the southern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Stavros Niarchos is the eldest brother of Theo Niarchos, who is a prominent art enthusiast. Edited and with an essay by leading photography writer and curator Charlotte Cotton, this critical publication surveys the work of a diverse group of artists, many working at the borders of the "art world" and the "photography world," all ... At some sites, the treatment of Congolese by their Chinese bosses is reminiscent of the colonial period. batteries,” and the company “has no plans to stop” using batteries that contain cobalt. (A Huayou spokesperson said that Congo Dongfang followed international standards in developing Kasulo, and plans to “gradually eradicate all forms of human-rights violation with a responsible supply chain.”). Serving up Groceries—and Solidarity—Across Greece 06 May 2021. In a stroke of luck, members of a CBS News crew met him while he was washing minerals. He is currently working on a book about the global cobalt industry. As they came into focus, it was clear that their construction was slapdash. When I first visited the area, in 2019, a toll booth outside the city was riddled with bullet holes. The book, which originally appeared in The New Yorker (December 6 & 13, 1969), proved to be an excellent companion.It's a portrait of Colonsay, "a small island in the open Atlantic, twenty-five miles west of the Scottish mainland," and a number of residents, including crofter Donald Gibbie McNeill, who has tenure of a hundred-and-forty-one acre farm, and laird Euan Howard, the Fourth . Nicolas Niarchos. “The hundreds of billions of dollars generated by the Defendants each year would not be possible without cobalt mined in the D.R.C.”, Terry Collingsworth, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, believes that the brutal conditions must have been apparent from the start. The sun was punishingly hot that day, and I was grateful when Nama Mavu, the local chief, invited me into her home for a chat. These colonialists may not have matched the atrocities of King Leopold, but they still saw the country in starkly exploitative terms. Late one night at Red's, which despite its name is the best blues joint in Mississippi - and perhaps in the South, and maybe even in the entire world, Anthony 'Big A'Sherrod was writhing around on the floor while raking out some of the most melodious sounds I've ever . I turned onto a side road and crossed a creek where men, women, and children were washing cobalt ore. On the other side lay a cluster of mud-brick houses. I wondered if the tailings contained any cobalt, and a young villager told me that they probably did—after all, the entire region rested on mineral deposits. Located at the site of the former Mid-Manhattan Library, the new, state-of-the-art library, designed by architect Francine Houben, of Mecanoo, with Beyer . But most of the best sites were quickly excavated, and the yield from newer pits was less than half as much. Find the best way to get in touch with Nicolas by joining Muck Rack. Chinese!” Mavu said that the villagers were seldom visited by foreigners, even though their factories and mines now surrounded the town. Kajumba and his friends were also at the site that night, but they were working a different seam. Corey Pandolph - cartoonist, 2011-2019. EFREN BONNER & NICOLAS NIARCHOS . Ed Park - short . Then, in 1978, Soviet-armed and Cuban-trained rebels seized Kolwezi and several hundred civilians were killed. Those families who had chosen to take a house had been shown a brochure with beautiful pictures. of Glencore, said, “China, Inc., has realized how important cobalt is.” He continued, “They’ve gone and tied up the supply.” He warned that if Chinese companies stopped exporting batteries, this could hamper the ability of non-Chinese companies to produce electric vehicles. On a recent trip there, I tried to visit Katebi Lodge, a new lakeside resort. I was initially skeptical that Ziki had begun working at such a young age, but Mutindi said that she has seen many such cases. One night in Kolwezi, I went to a Chinese-run casino with a few Congolese friends. Odilon Kajumba Kilanga is a creuseur who has worked in the Kolwezi area for fifteen years. The country’s next leader, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, was assassinated, in 2001, and his son Joseph took over. Huayou remains part of Apple’s supply chain. Glencore, Huayou, and Tesla have joined the alliance. New York Times: Donald Trump's Racism: The Definitive List — Donald Trump has been obsessed with race for the entire time he has been a public figure. “It was a big parcel of land,” he said. He insisted that I had “a bad comprehension of the issues.” He promised to address the dry well and the poor housing construction. The story of Balthus's life has been shrouded by contradiction and hearsay, most of it his own invention; over the years he created for himself a persona of mystery, aristocracy, and glamour. George Packer - staff writer, 2003-2016. The young man shrugged and said that the people in his village didn’t want to suffer the same fate as those in Kasulo. Rushing inside, they discovered that the man had carved out a series of underground galleries, following the vein of cobalt as it meandered under his neighbors’ houses. In her years growing up on the sunny shores of Sydney, Jessica Hart may never have dreamed of attending a royal wedding. For years, the villagers farmed the surrounding bush, growing large crops of manioc, but about a decade ago the land became polluted after some foreign businessmen opened a cobalt-processing plant nearby. Soon enough, they are lugging ore for adult creuseurs. The outcry over working conditions has led industry players to found the Fair Cobalt Alliance, an organization that, among other things, supports small-scale mining with safety equipment and clean water. Copper has been mined in Congo since at least the fourth century, and the deposits were known to Portuguese slave traders from the fifteenth century onward. Saturday, June 5, 2021. During this phase, Chinese companies were incentivized to make money by whatever means possible. In December, 2019, attorneys from International Rights Advocates, a law firm in Washington, D.C., sued Apple, Google, Dell, Microsoft, and Tesla for involvement in the injuries or deaths of child miners. Kajumba sighed and said that he should probably head home. Upon my arrival at the mine, I had been given a long explanation of safety protocols, but as I approached the creuseurs it was clear that they had only rudimentary equipment. At a school run by Good Shepherd, I met Ziki, a serious boy with large dark eyes. Creuseurs, many of whom have little formal education and enter pits every day fearing that they might die, can be superstitious. Found inside23 Nicolas Niarchos, “How the U.S. Is Making the War in Yemen Worse”, The New Yorker, 15 January 2018. 24 Editorial, “Catastrophe Could Lie Ahead in Yemen”, ... In the lobby of the fourth floor of the New […] February 3, 2009 . The company cleared the thickets of thorny acacias and miombo trees that had grown atop Kolwezi’s rich mineral deposits and built the town across the area’s rolling hills, with wide streets and bungalows for Europeans, whose neighborhoods were segregated from those where Congolese workers lived. In one case, Mutindi said, she saw the body of an eighteen-month-old infant who had been raped by a creuseur. Cart Muyej often cited the building of a new governorate office—a gaudy structure rising above a sea of ramshackle cinder-block houses—to show how he had modernized Kolwezi. Sister Catherine Mutindi, the founder of Good Shepherd Kolwezi, a Catholic charity that tries to stop child labor, said, “If the kids don’t make enough money, they have no food for the whole day. The disintegration of Gécamines transformed Congo’s mining landscape. The daily life of a New Yorker fact-checker. They have to keep the people in a peaceful mind-set, so they started to build a social relationship—training locals in how to grow out their culture, their schools.” He continued, “There’s less gray conduct now, and more of a sort of transparent business.”. Zanga Muteba, a baker who then lived in Kasulo, told me, “All of us, at that time, we knew nothing.” But one evening he and some neighbors heard telltale clanging noises coming from the man’s house. “My ancestors came here to build the railroad, and, when the construction of the railroad finished, they stayed.”. One day when he was eighteen, a friend who had moved to Kolwezi called him and urged him to join a coöperative of creuseurs which roamed from mine to mine, sharing profits. Rescuers nearly suffocated in the subterranean passages. The journalist Howard French, in his 2014 book, “China’s Second Continent,” writes that in Zambia, Congo’s neighbor, Chinese companies invested so extensively in copper mines that the flood of foreign money was said to be influencing elections. Mollie Panter-Downes - nonfiction writer, author of 'Letter from London', 1939-1984. After the incident, Radio Okapi, a media group sponsored by the United Nations, interviewed Kolwezi’s mayor, who said that a year earlier he had sent a report to his superiors urging the closure of the artisanal pits. After acquiring mineral rights in the region, in 2015, it built two cobalt refineries. Keston Sutherland is the author of Antifreeze, Hot White Andy, Neocosis, The Odes to TL61P, The Stats on Infinity, Stress Position, and Stupefaction: A Radical Anatomy of Phantoms, as well as many essays about poetry, society, and politics. According to Radio France Internationale, the Congolese authorities have accused Muyej of not being able to justify forty per cent of his cabinet’s expenses. “It had at least fifteen trees—avocado trees, mango trees. Contributing Writer Louis Sarkozy, the 22-year-old son of Nicolas Sarkozy, French president from 2007 to 2012, is dipping his . He had some stretches of good luck, but he never made the big score that would transform his life. “The younger children of four, five, six, seven, these will mainly be collecting—picking stones,” she said. (A representative for Muyej said that the Governor had done nothing wrong, and welcomed an audit of his finances.). At a meeting of investors in 2019, Simon Tuma Waku, then the president of the Chamber of Mines in Congo, used the language of a gold rush: “Cobalt—it makes you dream.”. Now in his seventies and retired, he wore a soiled lab coat over his emaciated body. Once diggers reached seams of ore, they followed the mineral through the soil, often without building supports for their tunnels. Kasulo residents were ordered to leave their neighborhood within two weeks. “Whenever we dig up a few tons, I send some money to my family,” he added. And now you want to stop us? Ed : Brooklyn College and City University of New York, Revised edition, Includesnew texts, introduction, biography, overview. "This book is utterly indispensable to an understanding of Matisse, and therefore of early modernism as well. Kajumba knew that the journey to Kolwezi was dangerous, but he said of the creuseurs, “If they tell you to come, you come.” At first, the work, though strenuous, was exciting; he began each shift dreaming of riches. Wednesday, April 27, 1966 les That Niarchos Must Pay Other maritime news Page B 7 New York, April 2fi WV-A Fed' eral judce ruled today that six American shipping firms owned and controlled by . As the man later told neighbors, he had intended to create a pit for a new toilet. “We have made a project proposal that we will submit to the authorities.”, The proposal, which Muyej didn’t disclose at the time, involved granting the mineral rights at Kasulo to a foreign company: Congo Dongfang International Mining, a subsidiary of Zhejiang Huayou, a Chinese conglomerate that, among other things, has supplied materials for iPhone batteries. Creuseurs in Kasulo were risking their lives to obtain some of the worst ore. One of Kajumba’s teammates told me that their coöperative of six used to regularly extract two tons of raw material from a single pit in Kasulo. Read Nicolas Niarchos's review on newyorker.com. He is now under investigation in Congo for corruption, and his vice-governor is running Lualaba. Huge sums of money continue to change hands in the region. According to a recent study in The Lancet, women in southern Congo “had metal concentrations that are among the highest ever reported for pregnant women.” The study also found a strong link between fathers who worked with mining chemicals and fetal abnormalities in their children, noting that “paternal occupational mining exposure was the factor most strongly associated with birth defects.”, This year, cobalt prices have jumped some forty per cent, to more than twenty dollars a pound. “They wanted to see what was down there.”. On 17-4-1985 Stavros Niarchos III (nickname: Stavros) was born in New York City, New York, United States . A Congolese translator who speaks Mandarin told me, “Chinese people are coming here for business to make money, so they can never be our friends.” He had overheard Chinese employers saying of the Congolese, “These people, they don’t really think.”, Creuseurs around Kolwezi frequently complained to me that Chinese-owned mines had replicated the harsh conditions of China’s own mining industry. Kajumba said that, though many people he knew in Kasulo wasted all their earnings on narcotics, he avoided such temptations. Most of the families moved away. The eighteen fact-checkers (twenty-one, if you count the three who are devoted to online work) who make sure the articles Rumors of the pit’s riches spread, and a day later some miners decided to disobey the féticheur. Some creuseurs washed ore in dirty ponds by the pits. To Mputu and his colleagues, the accident had supernatural trappings. Nicolas Niarchos On the streets of the Bronx, they favour Obama. 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