May 31, 2021 Issue

Nicolas Niarchos is back in the magazine! He’s been absent for a while. He was one of The New Yorker’s best “Bar Tab” writers. Remember his great “Bar Tab: Berlin,” February 8 & 15, 2016 (“At the bottom of the stairs, in a barrel-vaulted watering hole, long lines of people waited for the bathroom from whence burst ebullient gaggles of young women and a madly coughing guy in a Thrasher hat”)? In this week’s issue, Niarchos has a “Reporter at Large” piece titled “Buried Dreams.” It’s about cobalt mining in southern Congo. That’s not a subject high on my list of interests. But because the piece is by Niarchos, I decided to check it out. I found it quite absorbing. I learned, among other things, that southern Congo sits atop an estimated 3.4 million metric tons of cobalt, almost half the world’s known supply, that cobalt is a key ingredient of lithium-ion batteries that are used to power everything from call phones to electric cars, that China is the world’s largest producer of lithium-ion batteries, and that the industrial cobalt mines of southern Congo are largely owned by China. I also learned about the brutal conditions at some of these Chinese-owned mines. Niarchos writes, 

At some sites, the treatment of Congolese by their Chinese bosses is reminiscent of the colonial period. In a video shared with me by Mutindi, of Good Shepherd, a Congolese guard with a Kalashnikov slung across his back beats a man who is lying, semi-naked, in mud, his arms bound. Behind the camera, a man otherwise speaking Mandarin starts yelling “Piga!”—the Kiswahili word for “beat.” In the background are seven of the trucks that Congo Dongfang uses to transport cobalt ore.

Of course, I’m interested in the style of Niarchos’s piece as much as I am in its substance. I relish the way he writes in the “I.” For example:

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. No Chinese employee interacted with me, and nobody responded when I waved in greeting.

One night in Kolwezi, I went to a Chinese-run casino with a few Congolese friends. I was immediately allowed inside, but they were stopped at the door and told that they could not gamble. Black Africans, the casino’s staff explained, can’t be trusted with money. At a roulette table, a host of drunken white South Africans addressed a Congolese croupier as “Black man.”

One Sunday morning, I met Kajumba and Trésor Mputu at the Temple Évangélique de Carmel, a hangar-style megachurch in the center of Kolwezi.

Passages like these give the piece the force of real experience. This is a different, more serious Niarchos than the one I know from “Bar Tab.” And while I admire “Buried Dreams,” I still prefer the sensuous lines of those wonderful sybaritic drinking columns. This one, for example:  “Behind a brown door on a blasted section of Jackson Avenue, a whip-thin saloon that bears the neighborhood’s name is bringing back a version of the past, with the clink of hand-cut ice in tumblers and the waft of freshly cut orange peel” ("Bar Tab: Dutch Kills," November 2, 2015).