Every time we make a call on our mobile phones, there is a possibility we are fuelling a bloody conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
For most of us, mobile phones have become fifth limbs. We use them for calling friends, exchanging text messages, surfing the internet, and we even use them as fashion statements, sending people messages about the kind of people we would like them to think we are.
But a vital component in our phones - and the same goes for our laptops and game consoles - cannot be made without a heat-resistant mineral that is mined in the DRC, among other places.
The DRC, in Central Africa, is a country blessed - and cursed - with natural mineral resources. One of them is coltan, a raw material that is used in tantalum, a heat-resistant powder essential for making the capacitors.
Capacitors build and store electric charges, and they are used in every cellphone in the world, along with laptops and PlayStations.
Just how much of the world's reserves of coltan the DRC holds are unknown, but it is in high demand. It has been since the world entered the digital age in the 1990s, and by 2000 its price rose ninefold to US$340 per pound in the space of a year and kept climbing beyond the US$800 mark at a time that coincided with dotcom bubble and the release of Sony's groundbreaking PlayStation 2.
