Occasionally Random

The country was regarded through a Cold War lens. In fact, the way Congo was seen was not too dissimilar to the way it would be seen in the first decades of the twenty-first century, a prize in a game of great powers, all jockeying for resources. And, just as in the 2010s and 2020s, the people of Congo would be completely ignored in the struggle for power.

My working hypothesis about Congo, formed over some four years of writing about the country, was now being proved in the most terrifying way—namely, that people had been gaslit, lied to, and repressed for so long that their senses of reality had been irretrievably warped.

The batteries were reverse engineered—copied—[by the Chinese] from Japanese and Korean models. In the absence of mechanical equipment, Wang hired a thousand low-salaried workers to build electronics on the cheap and on the quick.

…the forests and the seas were now being ignored and destroyed in favor of a far greater stock of wealth in a world obsessed with energy. And that stock of wealth lay beneath the soil.

There is a cruel dichotomy that separates the haves—the rest of the world—from the Congolese and other people who inhabit the zones where the minerals that will power the future are mined.