The subject of this book is the relationship between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the West. The country possesses vast reserves of gold, copper, diamonds and uranium, as well as oil, cadmium, cobalt, manganese, silver, tin and zinc. Cocoa, coffee, cotton, tea, palm oil, rubber and timber are all exported from the country today. Under any consideration, its people should be rich. Yet these resources have been stolen. Western intervention started with the colonisation of the country by the Belgian King Léopold in the 1870s, and continues to the present. While the diamond traders have prospered, the benefits have not been shared. Instead, the conflict between different interests has fuelled a civil war in which millions have died. At one point in the early 1960s there was a real attempt to wrest power from the external forces. But a civil war was fomented and the elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was killed. The Western powers were implicated in his murder. This episode was the first serious attempt to create a democratic government of the Congo by the Congolese, but it failed. Nothing on the same scale has been attempted since. Over a period of 130 years, the wealth of the Congo has been exported, its people starved and enslaved. For the past decade, especially since the death of the country’s long-standing dictator General Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, the country has been involved in terrible wars, which have also involved several of the surrounding states. The Congo is perhaps the prime example of what happens to a territory that owns minerals wanted by the capitalist West. The story of the country shows what can happen to countries rich in minerals. Its story has been repeated across the continent, in Angola, Nigeria, Algeria and elsewhere.
Writing about the Congo for a British audience is a chastening experience. Two celebrated books stand in the way: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost. Many readers, we anticipate, will be familiar with the rough outlines of the Congo’s history, at least between 1870 and 1900. They will know that the country was once the personal possession of a single ruler, King Léopold of the Belgians. They will know also that his dominion was a time of particular brutality. More readers, we anticipate, will be unfamiliar with the middle and later sections of our book: the account of the fifty years’ rule of the Congo after Léopold; the events of independence from Belgium and of Mobutu’s rule; the demise of the latter and the civil war that has followed. An American audience might be more familiar with the events of the last ten years. A Belgian audience would be more familiar with events surrounding the murder of the Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba. As for Congolese narratives of their country’s history, they have a tendency to confound all expectations. For example, André Yav’s Vocabulary of Élisabethville, the first written history of the Congo to have been produced in today’s Lubumbashi (it was written in 1965), and described more fully in our second chapter, treats Léopold as a sort of benevolent sage, a man with a white beard who was planning only to bring resources to Africa. ‘If King Léopold II had not died we would not have remained in slavery as we did under King Albert the First.’ By contrast, we follow Hochschild in arguing that Léopold was a tyrant. He established habits of private theft and absolute rule that have cursed the country since.
Many people have heard the heroic story of the anti-slavery campaigners, who fought in Britain, America and Belgium against the tyranny of ‘red rubber’. There is much less knowledge of the way in which that same campaign looked two ways at once. Unusually among British protest movements, for example, it had more than a hundred supporters in the House of Lords. It was able to draw such backing because of a strong feeling among the rulers of Britain that the Congo should never have been Belgian. Having been discovered by British explorers, the country was properly ‘ours’.
Another way in which a British perspective threatens to distort is by focusing on the extraordinary tragedy of Léopold’s era; previous writers almost seem to have forgotten that a tragedy of similar dimensions has been unfolding right in front of our eyes. The conflict that began in the Congo in 1998, and that still smoulders on, especially in the north and east of the country, has resulted in several million deaths. The United Nations has estimated that 2.5 million lives have been lost. Amnesty puts the figure at over 3 million. The International Rescue Committee has its own figures of deaths between January 1998 and the end of April 2004: 3.8 million.1 It is extraordinary how little discussion there has been in Britain of these killings: they are the much larger product of the much smaller Rwandan genocide; but events in Rwanda, by contrast, are much better known in the West. The last two chapters of our book build towards this recent history, explaining why the conflict began, and showing how other historical possibilities were missed.
The chapters follow a chronological sequence. The first main chapter, ‘Missionaries and Traders’, addresses the period between 1870 and 1908. This was a moment of land-grab and plunder. Western rulers and businessmen saw their roles as being those of missionaries or explorers. Yet the purpose of Stanley, Livingstone and King Léopold of Belgium was as much to spread trade as Christianity. Léopold in particular instituted a system of effective slavery in the production of rubber, which both guaranteed profits to his circle and held back the chances of any healthy development in the region. Vast profits were made. Léopold used the proceeds to build palaces and monuments. Around half the population, meanwhile, or some 10 million people, may have died. Reports of the brutal treatment of Africans in the Congo led to a popular campaign for self-government. The demand for reform of the Belgian Congo was raised in America, where politicians threatened to investigate King Léopold, and above all in Britain, where the opponents of this private empire included the writers E.D. Morel, Roger Casement and Arthur Conan Doyle. The Belgian deputy Émile Vandervelde toured the region and in one famous case defended the critics of the empire in the Congo’s courts. The future of the country was determined by a shift in the demands of the Belgian opposition. Once the Socialists had accepted the need for a reformed colony, then the conditions for the next period were in place.
The second chapter, ‘Miners and Planters’, examines the era from 1908 to 1945. Following the formal annexation of the Congo by Belgium in 1908, the relationship between the West and the Congo altered. In a new period, the emphasis was supposed to be on reforming away the excess of empire. The rubber merchants remarketed themselves as industrialists. In order to support the manufacture of heavy industrial products, the state was obliged to begin spending on schools, hospitals, trains and roads. By the end of the 1914–18 war, mining, and especially copper mining, had become the mainstay of the economy. Yet the conditions of forced labour in the mines continued, with large numbers dying as they were dragooned to work. Anger against colonialism was never long concealed. One of the first forms it took was the religious movement of Simon Kimbangu. As the economy grew, significant workers’ strikes took place, including a miners’ strike in 1941 and a dockers’ strike in 1945. The country possessed a large and stable working class, but, as a result of the legacy of forced labour, it was one with a low rate of unionisation. Meanwhile uranium for the first atomic bombs dropped on Japan came from the Congo, and so the country became of vital national interest to America.
The third chapter, ‘Rebels and Generals’, looks at the period after 1945, when the most important players were not the West, but the people of the Congo. Through mass protests they showed that they were no longer willing to be governed in the old way. In an era of decolonisation, serious discussions began as to how the African state might be used to build up a strong, democratic society, governing in the interests of its own people. This moment was brought to an end in 1961, by direct foreign intervention. Patrice Lumumba, the figure who best expressed the demand for radical democratic rule, was accused of being a Soviet stooge. He was murdered, on the orders of America and Belgium, and with the connivance of the United Nations. The defeat of this movement for an African democracy led immediately to civil war.
The fourth chapter, ‘The Great Dictator’, examines the West’s return, from 1965 onwards, as the champions of the most regressive, militarised rule under President Mobutu. The West assisted General Mobutu to power as the strong man who would protect American interests in the Congo and across central Africa. With the backing of America, Belgium, France and other Western countries, Mobutu destroyed the economy using the mining companies and the central bank as his personal wealth. Meanwhile, the regime justified itself using an ideology of ‘authenticity’. In 1971 the country was renamed Zaïre. In 1972, Katanga was renamed Shaba, in an attempt to destroy the region’s long association with campaigns for secession. With Western backing for repression, Mobutu was able to remain in power for over thirty years. Yet even now, an opposition movement continued, based in the cities, and with the support of student groups and others. In the early 1990s, it seemed to have the support needed to topple Mobutu by parliamentary means and without war.
The fifth chapter, ‘The Failed “Transition”’, addresses a second moment of hope, not on the grand scale of 1960, but something more modest: the idea that in the aftermath of the revolutions in Eastern Europe of 1989, President Mobutu might peacefully be persuaded to concede power or resign. Between 1990 and 1992, a protest movement was born, taking root in every city among workers, the young and the poor. Students at the University of Kinshasa sparked the protests. Food riots followed. Under considerable pressure, Mobutu accepted a certain liberalisation: rival political parties were tolerated, and an all-party National Conference convened. Yet, in a pattern that has been repeated elsewhere in the continent, the protest movement was unable to replace the leader. Instead, the enduring poverty of the country, in a context of declining trade and production, served fatally to undermine the opposition, making it a movement of people with anger but no confidence in their own ability to affect change. Mobutu survived. The failure of the protests eased the way for the later wars.
The sixth chapter, ‘Speculators and Thieves,’ describes how over the last dozen years an older model of military state capitalism has given way to private capitalism. Not just in the Democratic Republic of the Congo but globally, the demands of the West have become more urgent. Structural adjustment has diminished the central authority. A weakened state has been unable to defend itself against civil war. Following the genocide in Rwanda, widespread clashes took place between Zaïre’s Tutsi minority and newly arrived Hutu militants. The conflicts continued, spiralled, and drew in other players. In the words of one recent UN report, foreign companies ‘were ready to do business regardless of elements of unlawfulness … Companies trading minerals which the [UN] considered to be “the engine of the conflict in the Congo” have prepared the field for illegal mining activities in the country.’ It was at this moment and with Rwandan backing that Laurent Kabila began his successful bid for power. Mobutu gave way to Kabila, Kabila to his son. Yet the most important changes have been systemic, in the general nature of the relationship between the West and the South post-1989. In the Congo, this has meant a return to features common of nineteenth-century capitalism: naked plunder, theft and greed. Other features of the war have included the presence of America as an arbiter behind the scenes, the military and economic rivalry of the Congo’s neighbours, and a change in the nature of economic activity, in war conditions: the break-up of large units of capital, in favour of smaller units, privately owned. In the early 1980s, state-owned Gécamines produced 90 per cent of the country’s copper output and a large share of world output. Production has fallen sharply, partly because of lower copper prices, partly because of the changing global context, partly because of domestic Congolese crises. During the recent wars, large-scale copper production came to a halt. The most profitable sectors of the Congolese economy are now the trades in coltan and diamonds: goods that can be produced by artisans, working with their hands. The state raises just $5 in taxes per person per year. What is there to distribute? The entire country has been stripped bare.