Investigative journalists venture into the field to uncover the truth of injustice and expose it to consumers, manufacturers, and policymakers. They claim that by creating accurate and moving depictions that raise awareness, a shift in consciousness will occur, leading to action. Yet, why has violent exploitation continued in the DRC after over a century of investigative journalism exposing the horrors of the colonial project to the West?

A recent example is Siddharth Kara's 2023 book Cobalt Red, which argues for reform using vivid descriptions of the horrible mining conditions he encountered in the DRC. In one passage, an interviewee, Lubuya, a mother who lost her son in a mining tunnel collapse, questions Kara about the purpose of his book. Kara responds:

“‘If I can describe the conditions accurately, I hope it may inspire people to help improve things here.’
Lubuya looked at me as if I were a fool.
‘Every day people are dying because of the cobalt. Describing this will not change anything.’”

Throughout his book, Kara fails to describe conditions accurately. He is not a dispassionate observer, unencumbered by the archive of colonial imagery. Despite being non-fiction, Cobalt Red mirrors the narrative arc of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: a western man travels into the heart of the DRC and discovers a horrible truth that haunts the reality of his comfortable Western life. Kara’s descriptions of the “subhuman existence” of miners, or how they “scavenged” for leftover minerals “like birds picking at bones,” echo Conrad’s imagery of Congolese people: “Black shapes crouched, lay sat between the trees, leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair.”

Scholar Christina Sharpe argues that incessantly reproducing representations of exploited Black people reinforces their subjugation, echoing Lubuya’s statement that “describing this will not change anything”:

“The repetition of the visual, discursive, state, and other quotidian and extraordinary cruel and unusual violences enacted on Black people does not lead to a cessation of violence, nor does it lead primarily to sympathy or something like empathy. Such repetitions often work to solidify and make continuous the colonial project of violence.”