Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Social Action Project Intro for 10/11 - Coltan in the Congo

For my Social Action Project (SAP) I would want to advocate the social justice issue of Coltan extraction from the Democratic Republic of Congo, or simply the Congo. Since its independence from Belgium in 1960 the Congo has had a lot of civil violence, corruption, and country wide instability (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/cg.html). This instability and civil war has led for the mining of Coltan to keep on going. According to BBC news an US refugee agent reported the parties involved in the war are continuing it solely to mine natural resources. Coltan is one of these natural resources. Companies starting with Sony in 1999 fueled the mining of Coltan with the Play Station 2, later by LCD TV’s and smart phones. (http://citizenshift.org/node/32169&term_tid=6) Due to Coltan’s nature it must be dug up by hand, which separates it from other minerals mined in the Congo. Heavy machinery cannot be used to mine Coltan due to its heavy and bulky nature as raw ore. It is easier for the local people to mine it instead. It is very dangerous for the Congolese people to mine Coltan by hand and often they are injured on the job. Most of the labor that mines Coltan used to be run by villages, are now run by warlords to finance their military operations. There are two main military groups in the Congo; Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (ADFL) and Rassemblement Congolais pour la Democratie (RCD). Ethically speaking the mining of Coltan is a disaster. Large corporations negotiate with ruthless warlords to get their hands on Coltan is a frightening practice. What is more frightening is that hardly anyone who uses these products knows about what is going on in the Congo, and even fewer are doing anything about it.


For my Social Action Project I want to do something with guerrilla art, or a guerrilla campaign. Examples where this has been used in the past are everywhere. An example of guerrilla art was in one of my blog posts, Friday October 3, 2013. In that blog post I talked about the World Wildlife Fund’s guerrilla campaign to raise awareness of the decreasing number of Giant Pandas in the world by placing 1,600 pandas in a town square in France. This is an example of the type of demonstration I would like to do because it gets the intended message across without harming anyone, and is also creative. The WWf’s demonstration was peaceful, did not harm anyone, neither physically or emotionally, or damage any property. Another example of guerrilla art is from Keri Smith (http://www.kerismith.com/popular-posts/how-to-be-a-guerilla-artist-2/). Her suggested formats range from harmless and legal demonstrations such as posters or book inserts to more illegal actions such as graffiti. I would want to use the concept of guerrilla art to make posters to spread my SAP topic of Coltan. The posters would show a smartphone and a child digging by hand for Coltan to invoke the emotions of a person who is looking upon the poster. On the bottom of the poster would be link to a website or wiki that would easily explain the problem with the Coltan mining process and show other websites, foundations where people can go to help if they want to. My hope is for people to be moved, or at least intrigued by the poster and want to learn more about how Coltan affects the people of the Congo.

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