‘Neptune Frost’: Saul Williams’ Sci-Fi Musical Is An Afrofuturist Sight To Behold [NYFF Review]
Coltan, short for columbo-tantalite, is an ore containing the metal element tantalum, which due to its resistance to corrosion and high permittivity is used in capacitors essential to the functioning of smartphones, laptops, and other high-tech devices. It is found chiefly in Africa, most abundantly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi, where foreign corporations, and the cronies they install in corrupt local governments, rely on local (often child) labor subsisting on poverty wages and working in incredibly unsafe sites, to carry out a program of unsustainable ecological destruction.