The elements of power, p.10
The Elements of Power, page 10
Katumba had initially wanted to become a priest, but in Lubumbashi he had become fascinated by Gécamines, Mobutu Sese Seko’s giant copper-and-cobalt mining company. “Life at that time was supremely dominated by Gécamines,” he would later write. “We breathed Gécamines. We lived Gécamines. We dreamed of Gécamines.” When Wanzala and Katumba chatted with their classmates at school, they all shared their life plans. “He wanted to study mechanical engineering, just like I did,” Wanzala told me. “He didn’t plan on becoming a politician.”
For boys in Katumba and Wanzala’s time, studying engineering was a surefire way to end up working for Gécamines. The company seemed to be a haven in a country where the number of going concerns was dwindling under Mobutu’s corrupt rule; it supported vast swaths of the South financially and socially. In the Gécamines neighborhood of Lubumbashi, there were smart canteens, football fields for workers’ children, schools, hospitals, even Gécamines orchestras. “Gécamines djo baba, djo mama,” the saying went. “Gécamines, my father, Gécamines, my mother.”
Katumba would later remember that he wanted to emulate Gabriel Umba Kyamitala, the director general of Gécamines, and rise to the top of the mining agency. “The idol, the model, the sphinx of my fantasies was him. He was God, in his time, of the biggest mining giant in decolonized Africa.” Over the next few decades in Congo, Katumba’s childhood fantasies would eventually coalesce, but the ensemble they formed would more closely resemble the charred wreckage of a nightmare.
* * *
During the 1980s, in Kinshasa, Kufi lived the life of a Big Vegetable. He had cars, villas, staff, multiple wives, and girlfriends. “He was a great polygamist,” Gaylord Kilanga, Kufi’s son, said of his father. “He left behind twenty-something children.” But he was also, by all accounts, devoted to studying solutions for the betterment of the Congolese people. He served briefly as minister for primary, secondary, and professional education, and he traveled overseas to represent his country with UNESCO. “He was a Mobutist in his deepest essence,” Kilanga said. “A true believer.”
Kilanga can claim that his father was never involved in mining, but in effect, he and the rest of the Big Vegetables depended on it just as much as Katumba and his cohort in the South. Other companies, like the tin mining company Géomines in the town of Manono, had been stripped bare by Mobutu’s vultures by 1982. But Gécamines was still healthy; some 70 to 80 percent of Zaire’s foreign earnings came from the export of copper and cobalt from Katanga, and the firm was, de facto, the dictator’s personal piggy bank, what the Congolese call a vache laitière, or milking cow. From the late ’70s onward, the money that the company made from exporting copper and cobalt went into an account he controlled. During the 1980s and early ’90s, according to an analysis of World Bank documents, the dictator skimmed somewhere between $150 million and $400 million a year from the company’s ledgers. This practice, known in Congo as bouffer l’argent, or eating money, is one that the chairmen of Gécamines, as well as local and national politicians, continued to emulate into the 2020s.
As Gécamines crumbled in the late 1980s, the company, once strictly a state concern, turned to private groups like the Entreprise Générale Malta Forrest, the firm headed by George Forrest, to try and save itself. In late 1986, Gécamines decided to hire Forrest’s firm to help it remove arable topsoil so that it could reach ore deposits buried underneath. “Layer by layer, the engines descended toward the ore and fashioned the landscape so particular to open-pit mines, in steps,” Forrest later wrote. Private companies like Forrest’s were also burrowing into the state, first finding contracts to prospect for minerals on Gécamines’s behalf, then operating some of the mines through “public-private partnerships,” the first of what would come to be the dominant model for extraction in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, once Mobutu left. “Gécamines was facing real financial difficulties, all of its contracts were suspended, it was on the brink of asphyxiation, it was only just staying afloat,” Forrest remembered. “Little deposits, little gain—just surviving.” Soon, Forrest was in charge of several mines, one of which produced five thousand tons of cobalt a year, just over 10 percent of the world’s total production in the late 1980s.
Other illegal networks of Gécamines workers, organized by Greek and Lebanese traders, would steal cobalt from the Shituru and Luilu factories. Using teams of fifty to one hundred workers, and heavily bribing officers within the Zairean hierarchy, they were able to steal ten to seventy tons of refined cobalt a week. These traders, known as “cobaltists,” financed their operations by preselling cobalt on international markets or through grants from within their communities. They would export the material out of Zaire using double-bottomed trucks and then sell it to Chinese businessmen in Johannesburg. The “cobaltists” could not have realized it at the time, but they had begun to create a parallel supply chain for Zaire’s critical metals that would become of vital strategic importance well into the next century.
* * *
The Cold War was ending, and the U.S. and Europe began to cut their aid to Mobutu, whose profligacy and ruthlessness were regularly making headlines. In 1987, Mobutu signed an agreement with the Chinese to build a giant stadium in Kinshasa. He decided to name it Kamanyola, after a decisive victory that he had won against Simba rebels in 1964. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the desire in Washington to support Mobutu waned, especially as his human-rights abuses became more and more widely known, and China sensed opportunities to build bridges with Zaire.
Opposition leaders like Étienne Tshisekedi wa Mulumba were making their voices heard. Tshisekedi, a Luba-Kasai, was a former Kasaian separatist who had worked with Mobutu and then turned against him. His stubbornness was the stuff of legend. He was a recognizable figure at rallies, making fiery speeches from beneath the brim of his signature flatcap.
Starting in the early 1990s, partly to punish Tshisekedi, Mobutu and his officials began to tacitly support a Katangese movement against the Luba-Kasai, stoking interethnic hatreds that had been encouraged by Moïse Kapend Tshombe’s ministers during the Katangese secession. For many years, Mobutu had used the Luba-Kasai as the Belgians had—to run the mines. Now he began to orchestrate a campaign of ethnic cleansing against them, purging the Luba-Kasai from Gécamines. “The Kasaians are foreigners. Katanga is certainly a hospitable land, but the foreigners must not forget their status,” Antoine Gabriel Kyungu wa Kumwanza, Mobutu’s governor of Katanga, said in 1991. Some one hundred thousand Luba-Kasai were also forced to flee their homes in the South. Many were pushed into squalid displacement camps near the railway stations in Likasi and Kolwezi.
For Gécamines, the purges were an unmitigated disaster. Everyone who was in Lubumbashi and in Kolwezi at the time remembers the two pillages of the early 1990s—mass nocturnal ransackings in which the businesses, and especially the state-owned mining businesses, were stripped bare. For Forrest, they brought back eerie memories of the 1978 Kolwezi attack. “These events were disastrous for the country because a part of the economy was destroyed by these rebellions that pushed thousands of people to flee, leaving everything behind them,” he later wrote. He instructed his foreign staff to evacuate Luba-Kasai families. At least 661 Luba-Kasai people died of exposure or hunger, and scores more were killed in massacres. Some reports put the death toll between 50,000 and 100,000.
Chapter 13
A Battery and a Bubble
In the late 1980s, as Mobutu Sese Seko was laying waste to his country and Akira Yoshino was completing his experiments at Nobeoka, Sony, the Japanese tech colossus, was also on its own path to creating a lithium battery. Sony had broken ground with handheld video recording during the decade. But they had a problem: The available batteries were either too big and heavy or didn’t have enough power for the company’s devices. According to a corporate history, “Sony’s yearning for a battery that could be reused again and again was growing stronger every day.”
Spearheading this initiative was a charismatic man named Keizaburo Tozawa, the head of Sony’s battery division. Tozawa worked on the problem with a singular focus. He employed a management style that he based on a naval target-practice technique. “By shooting three guns at once, all aiming at the same target, the chance that one of the guns will actually reach the target is greater. With this approach, the target is reached faster and more accurately,” the corporate history contends. “In the same manner, Tozawa decided to start several research efforts simultaneously using slightly different approaches to reach the target of developing a lithium rechargeable battery.”
A lingering question about who first discovered the dream battery hangs over the history of lithium-ion. Sony had almost certainly seen Yoshino’s 1985 patent and had, in fact, been in contact with Asahi Kasei executives, who had demonstrated their battery to the corporation on January 21, 1987. Sony was far bigger and better resourced, but Asahi Kasei was worried that it could be gobbled up by the device behemoth, which had become, after the release of the Walkman, one of Japan’s most visible companies. The two firms forged a “joint work team,” which meant that their scientists could work together, and then Sony announced that it had come up with its own battery, which looked suspiciously identical to Asahi Kasei’s. “The question of how the two companies would end up with identical chemistries would always linger,” Charles J. Murray would later write in Long Hard Road, a history of the lithium-ion battery.
When Yoshino won the Nobel Prize, Asahi Kasei’s supporters took it as a sort of nod from the science gods that his had been the first workable battery. Sony, meanwhile, engineered its battery far better, and it would end up reaping more of the rewards. “The debate over who was first,” Murray writes, “would eventually be lost to history.”
Either way, Sony and Asahi Kasei both rushed to get their batteries into production. The peculiar mechanics of capitalist innovation meant that the race was now on to secure patents—John B. Goodenough’s for the LCO cathode, for example—and gear up manufacturing capability. The companies needed to dominate the field and produce as many batteries as possible. Sony, which under Akio Morita especially drew more on American corporate culture in the move-fast-and-break-things mold, rapidly began to engineer its battery. Asahi Kasei dithered, much to the frustration of the teams that had been working on lithium-ion and the new anodes.
On February 4, 1991, Sony announced that its new technology would be commercially introduced. The battery would be called a lithium-ion battery rather than a lithium battery—a necessary rebranding, as the latter was known to catch fire and all sorts of prohibitions on carrying them on commercial aircraft existed, set forth by the U.S. Department of Transportation. It would be a long time before Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphones began catching fire and the current prohibitions on stowing lithium-ion batteries in checked luggage would come into effect.
The battery’s popularity blossomed, and Japan became the epicenter of the new lithium-ion rush. The battery found its first use in Sony’s CCD-TR1 camcorder. Technologists quickly saw the far-reaching possibilities of the small, lightweight, and powerful cells: Laptop makers realized that lithium-ion batteries remained charged for longer, and the nascent cell-phone industry began testing out lithium-ion in its phones. By 1994, models powered by the new batteries, such as the Motorola MicroTAC Elite, began to pop up.
But no one seemed particularly concerned about where the metals to make these batteries were coming from. They seemed abundant, never-ending, even.
That’s not to say there were not warning signs: The price of cobalt shot up in the early 1990s, primarily because of instability in Zaire (other inflationary factors included an economic crisis over the border in Zambia, and the collapse of the U.S.S.R.). The pillage of the national mining firm following the purge of Kasaians from the country’s mining provinces made international traders uneasy, and they noted that the mines in southern Congo had suffered from chronic underinvestment. People began to stockpile the mineral, but then, when the U.S. decided to sell its strategic reserve of twelve thousand tons of cobalt starting in 1993, prices fell. With cobalt selling for around $8.50 a pound in 1999, the device-makers were not yet concerned about the source of metals that went into their products.
The same was true of lithium, another one of the ingredients in the new batteries. Everywhere from South America’s Lithium Triangle, which stretches across Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, to the United States, the metal that these days is known as “white gold” was dirt cheap. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the U.S. government began negotiating to sell a thirty-six-million-kilogram stockpile of lithium that it had squirreled away in order to build nuclear weapons. Bombs aside, the material was mainly used in the aluminum, ceramics, and glass industries, and few people foresaw that it would become vitally important—the U.S. Geological Survey wrote that in 1994, lithium was thought to be so abundant that supplies couldn’t possibly be exhausted by demand. Until the 2010s, in fact, according to the authors of one paper on the rise and fall of this metal in the U.S., “lithium prices were generally not sufficiently high to justify extensive exploration, nor encourage production from more than a limited number of high-concentration / low-cost operations.”
* * *
The 1980s had been a time of immense financial speculation in Japan. Anything seemed possible. But that bubble had burst in 1989; the 1990s was, for most Japanese, the hangover after the party. Morale plummeted. “The idea of Japanese economic supremacy would be forever discarded,” the journalist David Pilling writes in a history of Japan’s stagnation. There was one exception, however: For the first years of the 1990s, Japan was the center of all things to do with rechargeable batteries. Sony sat at the white-hot core of the boom.
By 1995, the conglomerate had released its third-generation battery, which was twice as powerful as its original model, and later that year announced that it would begin developing a car; by the spring of 1996, Sony had agreed to develop a battery pack for Nissan’s FEV-II, the first-ever lithium-ion-powered concept vehicle. Even though the FEV-II would never get beyond the conceptual stage, it was portentous, heralding a new era of battery-powered locomotion.
Akira Yoshino, John B. Goodenough, and M. Stanley Whittingham after winning the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Chapter 14
Getting Rich Is No Sin
By the mid-1980s, Robert Aronson, the early electric-car evangelist, was becoming frustrated. He had wanted to open an EV business in a tax-free zone in the Bahamas, but government bureaucracy had stymied him. So he set his sights on other markets. Aronson began closely following developments in the East. “That was just about the time that China was opening up,” remembered Barry Iseard, a British environmental scientist who serves as vice president and director of an Aronson-founded company, Apollo Energy Systems. Iseard met Aronson when the inventor showed up in a class he was teaching in the Bahamas in 1980: They had worked together ever since.
Deng Xiaoping, China’s paramount leader, had assumed power in 1978. A disciple of Zhou Enlai, the leader who had defined China’s aid framework during his 1964 Africa tour, Deng took to heart Zhou’s ambition to transform the country into a leading industrial power by the beginning of the twenty-first century. To do this, he began to move China toward a market economy. By 1984, China had started pursuing a contract system whereby the managers of state-owned enterprises would sign contracts with the state, and the employees of those enterprises would sign contracts with the firms. As Deng told the CBS correspondent Mike Wallace in 1986 during his first major interview with a Western broadcaster: “To get rich is no sin.”
The contract system was hardly unfettered capitalism, but U.S. businessmen sensed an opportunity—if the Chinese premier was saying it was no sin to get rich, why not give it a go? Aronson had friends who were keeping him abreast of opportunities in China, not least among them executives at the aviation and defense company McDonnell Douglas. Encouraged by their reports, he took a meeting on June 5, 1985, with some representatives of the state-owned Shanghai Aircraft Industrial Corporation at McDonnell Douglas’s headquarters in Long Beach, California. SAIC had been involved in lengthy negotiations with the U.S. firm and, in 1985, entered a coproduction agreement with McDonnell Douglas to assemble MD-80 aircraft. “It’s very slow but very positive,” a McDonnell Douglas executive told a reporter from The Washington Post in late 1984. “The Chinese invented the word negotiation. I may be retired and my successor may be retired, but I think we’ll make it with China.”
Aronson began to negotiate opening a factory in China with SAIC. After his June 5 meeting, he told his associates that they could make a huge profit by moving his operation to China. “In those days, labor was really cheap in China,” Iseard told me. “You could pay a Chinese person a month’s wages, which would be not much more than the hourly-rate wage for an American worker doing the same thing.”
In 1988, after three years of negotiations, Aronson signed a contract with a subsidiary of SAIC called the Shanghai Far East Aero-Technology Import & Export Corporation, or SFAIC, to begin producing batteries at a fixed price. His firm would provide the raw materials, the equipment, and the expertise, while SFAIC would provide the factories and the manpower. In September of the next year, the plant was up and running, but three months later, the state-owned enterprise said it could no longer guarantee the price of the batteries.
Aronson, like Elon Musk and many other battery entrepreneurs who would come after him, discovered that doing business in China was far from straightforward. Investors may have been lured in by Deng’s assurance, but they had ignored the second part of Deng’s comment to Wallace: “What we mean by getting rich is different from what you mean. Wealth in a socialist society belongs to the people.”
