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Pre-Imperial History

[1] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books.

“The archaeological evidence has allowed some writers to describe a Sangoan people, who inhabited the region of central Africa some 50,000 years ago. They worked with choppers and scrapers and travelled between caves lit by fire.1 The first known inhabitants, however, were pygmies, hunters and gatherers living in the forests of the north and north-east. The Egyptians knew of pygmies in Africa probably from the time of the fifth dynasty (c.  ) when an expedition brought back ‘a dwarf’ from the land of Punt. Pharaoh Pepi II of the sixth dynasty (around  ) had images of pygmies drawn on his tomb. By the last centuries , small numbers of Bantu-speaking people had migrated into Congo from the north and west (today’s Nigeria and Cameroon) and settled in the south. The Bantu were agriculturalists who employed Iron Age technology.” (p. 7)

[2] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books.

“The Mongo, who remain in the Great Forest area of the Congo today, inhabited the forest regions east of Mbandaka from at least the first century , when they left traces of their life as hunters and yam farmers. Their main strategies for gathering food included gathering, trapping and hunting. Their diet included fruit, palm kernels, mushrooms, caterpillars, snails, termites, spices, root drinks, monkeys, antelopes, boars, elephants, fish, maize, groundnuts, beans, yams, bananas and oil palms.3 The dense, wet landscape provided people with a rich diet, and useful tools.” (p. 8)

[3] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books.

“Although the first settled farmers may already have been working the land, agriculture only took off after the use of iron became widespread. Later farmers used pottery and metal, settling on lands with good soil and rainfall. Agricultural innovation took place: around   we have evidence of local peoples eating millet and cowpeas. People also learned to keep cattle for their milk and blood. Cattle herding encouraged the creation and appropriation of surpluses, and the rise of hierarchical societies. So too did control of the trade in valuable minerals.” (p. 8)

[4] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books.

“Relatively little is known about the development of the more complex societies but a more complex division of labour, into chiefs, diviners, doctors and mediums had evolved in the region by around 1000 CE. Early kingdoms included the empire of the Luba, founded in the early sixteenth century and based around lakes Kisale and Upemba in central Shaba. The empire of the Bakongo was founded around the fourteenth century at the mouth of the river and included parts of today’s Angola as well as today’s Congo. This empire came about as the Bakongo migrated south across the Congo river. Their main commerce was in ivory and hides.” (p. 8-9)

[5] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books.

“After the fifteenth century, food crops, such as manioc, increased the range of agricultural products, but population densities were never high and agriculture remained based, for the most part, on shifting cultivation rather than settled agriculture.” (p. 9)

[6] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books.

“Africa was not unknown to Europeans at this time, particularly the coastal regions of the Maghreb and of Egypt, but there was virtually no knowledge of the vast regions south of the Sahara. Beyond the familiar world of the Mediterranean coastal areas and the Near East, few ventured to go. Rumours abounded, however, and the trans-Saharan trade revealed to the European merchants established in the cities of North Africa the wealth (in gold and ivory) of ‘black’ Africa, far to the south. Books described the incredible wealth of lands beyond the seas, the extraordinary challenges that awaited explorers and the strange people and monsters lying in wait to attack them. The storytellers usually had little first-hand knowledge of these exotic regions.” (p. 11)

[7] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books.

“ In 1482 Diogo Cão became the first European to visit the area of the modern Congo, when he reached the mouth of the Congo river and sailed a few miles upstream. It was the river that drew his interest. The Congo was the greatest river that any European had seen. For  leagues it emptied fresh water into the ocean. The waves breaking on the beach were an astonishing yellow colour, and the ocean was muddy-red as far as the eye could see. Cão recognized the importance of the Congo river as a possible source of transport and trade. He set up a stone pillar marking this Portuguese ‘discovery’. He claimed the river and lands around it for the Portuguese king.” (p. 11-12)

[8] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “Cão regarded himself as the man who discovered these territories, yet the empire of the Bakongo already possessed a ruler, Nzinga Nkuwu, who led some – million people. The population of the capital Banza (later São Salvador) was around 40,000. Its citizens traded shells, sea-salt, fish, pottery, wicker, raffia, copper and lead. Nkuwu’s authority was semi-feudal in character. Local lords had the right to control land, in return for which they paid taxes to their king. His people were skilled in iron-and copper-working and especially weaving. They grew bananas, yams, and fruit; they kept goats, pigs and cattle and fished. From palm trees, they manufactured oil, wine, vinegar and a form of bread. The society was prosperous and self-sufficient. Yet the Bakongo were said to lack any concept of seasons, or a calendar, and the wheel had not been discovered.” (p. 11-12)

[9] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books.  “In the aftermath of Cão’s visit, Nkuwu opened up his kingdom to Portuguese influences, and soon missionaries, soldiers and noblemen could be found at his court. Following further visits in and , Nzinga Nkuwu even agreed to convert to Catholicism, starting Africa’s first Catholic dynasty. In 1506, Nzinga Mbemba Affonso succeeded him to the throne. Affonso was an intelligent, literate man, who understood that his country might gain from certain forms of European learning, their science, woodworking and om [sic] masonry, their weapons and their goods. The challenge was to allow selective modernisation, to take the best parts of Western knowledge, while declining the worst parts, the cruelty and the greed. missionaries and traders Over time, the actions of the Portuguese began to alarm the Bakongo. Their worries grew as the Portuguese extended and professionalised the slave trade. Prior to then, slaves had been part of the domestic economy, and were even sometimes exchanged, but the trade had never been central to the economy of the region. Under Portuguese rule, the number of slaves increased, and their economic role grew.” (p. 12-13)

[10] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books.  “Nzinga Affonso was a remarkable, learned man. In  his son was consecrated as a Roman Catholic bishop, the last black man to hold such a position for four centuries. Affonso became a great witness to the horror of sixteenth century Portuguese colonialism. Many of his letters survive, including one sent to King João III of Portugal in : Each day the traders are kidnapping our people … children of this country, sons of our nobles and vassals, even people of our own family.… We need in this kingdom only priests and schoolteachers, and no merchandise, unless it is wine and flour for Mass.… It is our wish that this kingdom not be a place for the trade or transport of slaves.13 The ruler of the Bakongo understood that many of the richest of his people were complicit in the slave trade. So taken were they by these new Western goods that they were willing to sell even their relatives. The only way to stop his people from doing this was to limit their access to the West. Of course, Affonso was no better than his times. He did not argue that all slavery should be abolished. He felt rather that it should be regulated, and conducted with respect to the society in which it took place. The Portuguese system horrified him because it was incapable of recognising any limit. In 1526 , Affonso reported that the Portuguese were inciting his nobles to rise against the throne. By the mid-1530s, 5,000 Bakongo slaves were being sent west each year. Some used the passage to rise up against the traders.14 In their absence, the society from which the slaves had been taken was reduced almost to penury. It was no longer able to defend itself from its rivals, descending from lands to the east.” (p. 13-14)

[11] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books.  “New societies flourished on the ruins of the Kongo and Yaka societies. The kingdom of Kuba was founded in the sixteenth century by a federation of immigrants, the Bushong. They settled in the area along the Kasai and Sankuru rivers. Beside the Bushong groups, the Kuba federation incorporated among its members the previous inhabitants of the region, the Twa and the Kete, who continued to live alongside the new arrivals. The Kuba monarch was elected for a limited, four-year term. Women were eligible to stand for office. The kingdom lasted till 1910. Further south, there were several large civilisations, based in present-day Katanga. A Luba state was formed by clan fusion perhaps before 1500, a Lunda state before 1450. The Luba had four kingdoms by the seventeenth century: Kikonja, Kaniok, Kalundwe and Kasongo. The Lunda state arose to Luba’s south-west, covering about 400 by 800 miles with two tributary states by 1769, Yaka and Kazembe, each with a capital so named. A Bemba empire began to form towards the end of the eighteenth century under Lunda pressure. These civilisations traded with the Portuguese but were not conquered. The Luba empire broke into Yeke and Swahili–Arab spheres in the 1870s and 1880s, while Yeke and Chokwe broke up the Kazembe and Lunda states. Despite the destruction of their main allies and their own defeat, the Portuguese retained an interest in the region. In the late eighteenth century, Lisbon-backed African and mulatto traders (pombeiros) traded with the kingdom of the Kazembe to the south. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Arab, Swahili and Nyamwezi traders from present-day Tanzania also penetrated the highlands of the Congo from the east, and began a trade there in slaves and ivory. A lively Arabic literature began, describing travels through northern and central Africa.20 Some traders established their own states. One merchant, Muhammad bin Hamad, or Tippu Tip, from Zanzibar ruled much of eastern Congo, into the 1890s.” (p. 15)

Pre-21st Century Imperialism

[12] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “Aspiring to become a modern-day pharaoh, King Leopold began his African venture in September 1876, with the Brussels International Geographical Conference. Convened by the king, the Conference established an association of business entrepreneurs, geographers and physicians whose declared objectives were to learn more about Africa and to fight against the slave trade. Formally the honorary president of the Association internationale africaine (AIA), Leopold was the effective leader of the association and coordinator of the activities of the national chapters. He used his cunning and great diplomatic skills in disguising his colonial enterprise as a humanitarian venture for scientific research and economic development in Central Africa.” (p. 15)

[13] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “Stanley returned to Central Africa in 1879 and organized a large expedition designed to acquire for the king of the Belgians ‘a slice of this magnificent African cake’.9 Using duplicity and/or force, Stanley obtained ‘treaties’ from African rulers who, by placing a thumb mark on a piece of paper, ceded their territories to the AIC and its flag, a blue standard with a single gold star in the middle. Using dynamite to build a road through rocky mountain ranges in Lower Congo, where the Congo River is not navigable due to rapids, Stanley earned the name of Bula Matari, or ‘the smasher of rocks’.11 He went on to establish administrative and trading stations along the river from Boma to Kisangani. Construction of the Kinshasa station on the south bank of the Malebo Pool opposite the French station on the north bank (Brazzaville) was completed in March 1882, and Stanley reached the site that came to bear his name at Wagenia Falls on 1 December 1883. Establishing the minimum infrastructure of empire would keep Stanley in the Congo until June 1884. His work succeeded in providing King Leopold with the empire-building record he needed to justify his claims to the territories and resources of the Congo basin in Central Africa. Using his personal fortune and diplomatic skills, the king moved rapidly to reap the rewards of Stanley’s achievements by seeking the recognition of his self-proclaimed sovereignty over African territories in Central Africa from Portugal and the major imperialist powers, namely, Britain, France, Germany and the United States. With the help of an old friend and confidant, the former US Ambassador to Belgium, ‘General’ Henry Shelton Sanford, Leopold obtained a sympathetic ear from US President Chester Arthur, who called upon Congress to support what the king’s lobbyist had presented as a humanitarian venture. After a ‘rather incoherent’ debate on 11 April 1884, the US Senate adopted a resolution recognizing the AIC flag as the ‘flag of a friendly government’. On 22 April 1884, the United States became the first country in the world to recognize King Leopold’s claims to the Congo through a declaration by Secretary of State Frederick Frelinghuysen” (p. 16)

[14] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “The Berlin West African Conference, whose major focus was the freedom of navigation and commerce in the Congo basin, was held between 15 November 1884 and 26 February 1885. It was attended by delegates from 14 countries, namely, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Holland, Italy, Sweden-Norway, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Turkey and the United States.16 The interests of the AIC were effectively represented by the Belgian delegation, which remained in constant touch with King Leopold in Brussels. The American lobbyist Sanford also attended the conference as an observer for the king. Although absent, the Belgian monarch had his interests articulated by a well-orchestrated public relations campaign.” (p. 17)

[15] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “That international recognition nearly coincided with the Berlin Conference resulted in the myth that the conference formally recognized King Leopold’s Etat indépendant du Congo (EIC), or Congo Free State (CFS). There is no provision for this in the Berlin Act. However, the announcement and the standing ovation constituted a symbolically strong endorsement of Leopold’s enterprise by the imperialist powers, which were relieved for having finally resolved the Congo question. It is evident that in addition to Leopold’s ability to use money and diplomacy to achieve his aims, rivalry among the major powers, each of which did not want to lose the Congo to another major power, accounted for his victory. For them, it was preferable to cede this vast territory in Central Africa to the king of a weak and little country such as Belgium, so as to maximize the chances of having this area serve as a free-trade zone for the more developed countries. The main question then, as it has been in the postcolonial period, is not so much who controls this resource-rich country as who should be excluded from such control. The king took advantage of this international triumph to set up his personal rule in the Congo in 1885. In April the Belgian parliament passed a resolution authorizing him to be sovereign of two independent states simultaneously. This was followed by a royal decree on 29 May proclaiming the existence of the CFS, and Leopold’s official accession as king-sovereign of the Congo on 1 August. As history would repeat itself on 24 November 1965 and on 17 May 1997, the people of the Congo were never consulted, and played no role in the proclamation of their absolute ruler. Contrary to another widespread myth, the African continent was not partitioned at the Berlin Conference, where Europeans presumably drew up arbitrary territorial boundaries for Africa as a whole. However, while partition was not part of the official business of the conference, more important negotiations took place behind the scenes in what amounted to preliminary partition on paper. The real scramble for Africa or partition on the ground took place after the Conference, as European powers rushed to annex African territory through conquest. They attempted to comply with a basic ground rule of the Berlin Act, according to which effective occupation was the empirical test for legitimate claims to a colonial territory. In reality, effective military, economic and administrative presence was not established in many a hinterland until 1900. Consequently, many claims were settled through negotiations between the colonial powers, although some cases were determined by the balance of power, as in the British–French confrontation at Fashoda.  According to the British historian Ruth Slade, the ultimate significance of the Berlin Conference was the arrogant belief that ‘European powers had the right to annex African territory for their own advantage’.23 Only Ethiopia under Emperor Menelik II succeeded in checking this arrogance, by its historic victory over Italy in 1896 at the Battle of Adwa. The Congo case illustrates both the lack of effective occupation at the time of partition and the arbitrariness of territorial boundaries. Stanley’s expedition, on which King Leopold’s claims were based, had covered the territory along the Congo River from Boma to Kisangani. But when the two men sat down to draw up the original map of the Congo on 7 August 1884 at Ostend,24 it covered a vast territory in Central Africa stretching ‘from the coast to Lake Tanganyika, from four degrees north of the Equator to six degrees south’.25 This is the map that Germany had reluctantly accepted in its bilateral treaty with the AIC on 8 November 1884. Anticipating French objections to the inclusion in this map of the Kouilou-Niari or Pointe Noire region, Leopold went into his study on Christmas Eve, 1884, to ponder over changes in the design. By the stroke of a pencil he modified the map, giving up the said territory in the southwest and adding in compensation new lands in the southeast. He extended the map beyond six degrees south of the Equator and annexed the Katanga region.26 Although the adjustments made ultimately resulted in the loss of areas whose rich oil reserves were not yet known, such as Pointe Noire and the Cabinda enclave, they represented a masterful stroke with respect to Katanga, which was to prove extremely rich in minerals, particularly in its ‘pedicle’.27 The new boundaries did eventually win international recognition, thanks in part to indifference by France and Germany, and to a ‘stupid blunder’ in Britain.” (p. 18-19)

[16] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “Practical difficulties of organization and governance eventually led the state and the company to put their assets together and entrust the management of their joint venture to a new organization, the Comité spécial du Katanga (CSK), in 1900. The CSK became the real landlord and government of the Katanga province. Until independence in 1960, the CSK was one of three major mixed economy corporations sharing concessionary authority in land and mineral rights with the state. The other two were the CFL and the Comité national du Kivu (CNKi). The␣ major achievement of the CSK was the creation of the UMHK.71 The number one firm in Katanga and the Congo, the UMHK, was established as a compromise between King Leopold and the British entrepreneur Robert Williams, owner of Tanganyika Concessions Limited (TCL).” (p. 31)

[17] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “Although Leopold and his successors did their best, and with success, to give greater weight to a Belgian national interest in the Congo’s economy in general and in the mining sector in particular, the tendency of capitalist exploitation to become transnational, or what is known today as globalization, did provide an entry to the vast riches of this country for the bourgeoisies of other imperialist countries. The British and their South African partners were actively involved in the life and work of the UMHK through companies such as the TCL and Robert Williams and Company, a labour recruitment firm that supplied white and black workers from Southern Africa to the UMHK.74 The TCL was also the majority owner of the Benguela Railway, the best route for the mineral exports from Katanga through the Angolan ports of Lobito and Benguela. Just how significant this entry as well as the subsequent integration of the entire copper mining region in the Southern African economic complex would prove to be in the international class struggle was later demonstrated by the British and South African support for the Katanga secession (1960–63). Other powers had their vested interests in the Congo, but to a much lesser degree than Britain. If the American stake became stronger after 1940, the Ryan and Guggenheim groups were already involved since 1906 with the Forminière in diamond mining, and the Rockefeller group had some interests in the CCCI. German concerns were also involved in the CCCI, and Australian prospectors played a major role in locating gold deposits in the northeast. As Maurel suggests, ‘this tendency towards the internationalization of the Congo under the leadership of some world monopolies explains sufficiently the gravity of the 1960 crisis, which threatened the common financial interests of Belgian, British, American and French imperialisms’.” (p. 32)

[18] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “The post-war boom also contributed to a rising of collective ambition. Between 1950 and 1953, copper prices rose by  per cent. American companies began to speculate in Congolese industry. Modern Kinshasa emerged as a wall of concrete and glass. In 1952,   Forbes magazine ran a special issue praising the Congo as an investors’ paradise. One survey of several dozen Belgian companies compared the profit rates of European businesses that operated either just in Belgium, or in both Belgium and the Congo. Within the first group, profit rates in 1950–59 stood at between 7.85 and 9.49 per cent. In the second group, profit rates varied between an impressive 15.10 per cent and an extraordinary 21.48 per cent.” (p. 73-74)

 What did everyone want (then)?

[19] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “The Congo occupies an area of 2,345,409 square kilometres in the heart of Africa. It is landlocked, except for a coastline of 40 km containing the mouth and lower reaches of the Congo River, which connects the country to the Atlantic Ocean. The third largest country in Africa after Sudan and Algeria, it shares borders with nine other countries in Central, East and Southern Africa. Economically, the country has enormous wealth in natural resources. Known primarily as a minerals-producing country, it has such an ecological diversity that it is also rich in non-mineral goods, including forest and water resources. Approximately 77 per cent of the total land area of 2,2267,600 sq. km is made up of forests and woodlands, including the tropical rainforest in the equatorial zone; the Mayombe Forest near the west coast, another important source of marketable timber; and the productive woodlands and grasslands of the savannah zones north and south of the equator. The natural vegetation comprises many valuable tropical trees such as ebony and mahogany, which are indigenous, as are wild rubber trees, palm trees, grape-vines, plantain and banana trees. Coffee, tea and cotton plants are also major agricultural products.” (p. 27)

[20] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “The Congo has a wide array of minerals, including copper, cobalt, tin, zinc, gold, diamonds, iron ore, silver, cadmium, uranium, europium, niobium (or columbite), tantalum and thorium. Some of these minerals are of great strategic value. Uranium, for example, has been used to manufacture nuclear weapons, while rare metals such as niobium and tantalum are greatly needed for space aeronautics in the twenty-first century. According to experts, Africa contains 15 per cent of the world’s niobium reserves and 80 per cent of its tantalum deposits. Of these African reserves, the Congo alone has 60 per cent of the niobium and 80 per cent of the tantalum.65 These metals, together with other highly valued resources such as methane gas from Lake Kivu, are concentrated in the northeastern region of the country, which also possesses large quantities of gold, diamonds, coffee, tea and timber. Although it is not a major oil producer, the Congo exploits some crude oil offshore, in its territorial waters along the 40-km strip of the Atlantic Ocean.” (p. 28)

[21] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “The fourth and most important mission of the Compagnie du Katanga in 1892 laid the foundation for mineral exploitation, thanks to the excellent prospecting work done by a young Belgian geologist, René Jules Cornet. His revelations of the immense mineral reserves of Katanga earned for the country as a whole its international notoriety as a ‘veritable geological scandal’.66 The real scandal, however, is that in 110 years of mineral extraction, the wealth of the country has not been used to the benefit of the great majority of its people. Since the days of King Leopold, it has gone to serve the interests of the country’s rulers and those of their political allies and business partners in the international community. This is why public control of the country’s resources and their utilization for the development needs of the people are two of the major demands of the national and democratic movement. They are part and parcel of the struggle for national liberation and democratic governance. Economic exploitation in the Belgian Congo was built on the legacy of the Free State, according to which the Congo served as a major source of capital accumulation for Belgium. Having provided the revenue for the construction of public buildings, highways and other public projects dear to King Leopold, the colony rescued the metropolitan power out of financial troubles during and after both world wars. An eloquent testimony in this regard is provided by the following statement on the Congo’s vital support for the moribund Belgian state during the Second World War by Robert Godding, the Belgian colonial affairs minister in 1945–46: During the war, the Congo was able to finance all the expenditures of the Belgian government in London, including the diplomatic service as well as the cost of our armed forces in Europe and Africa, a total of some 40 million pounds. In fact, thanks to the resources of the Congo, the Belgian government in London had not to borrow a shilling or a dollar, and the Belgian gold reserve could be left intact” (p. 28-29)

[22] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “For more than fifty years, the production and export of copper had dominated the country’s economy, producing huge wealth for the foreign companies that controlled it, and leading to the rise of a new economic mining ‘sector’. In 1960, one enterprise alone, the giant Union Minière du Haut Katanga, a Belgian copper-mining company operating in Katanga, generated 32 per cent of Zaïre’s entire exports. Copper was a major source of foreign-exchange earnings, together with coffee. In 1965, the ‘industrial sector’ contributed some  per cent of the Congo’s GDP, most of it from mining. Mineral deposits, not just of copper, cobalt and diamonds, but also of zinc, gold, cassiterite, manganese, cadmium, germanium, silver, wolframite and coltan, were known to be vast. Copper, cobalt, zinc and germanium were found mainly in the south-eastern Shaba province (formerly Katanga) adjoining the Zambian copper belt; diamonds were located mainly in Kasai province, particularly around the towns of MbujiMayi and Tshikapa, although some mining activity was conducted in Bandundu and Orientale province (formerly Haut-Zaïre) regions. Cassiterite, wolframite, gold and coltan were exploited from the Kivu region in the east. The independent Congo inherited an unparalleled legacy of mineral wealth.” (p. 120-121)

[23] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “Having acquired this vast and rich real estate, over 80 times the size of his Belgian kingdom, Leopold was resolved to make it a profitable enterprise. Since he had invested a lot of money in pursuing his prize – the high cost of expeditions, including steamboats and armaments; expenses for lobbying and public relations – he needed money to repay loans and to invest in the economic development of Belgium. According to the Belgian historian Jean Stengers, Leopold owned the Congo just as John Rockefeller owned Standard Oil.31 As a good capitalist, the king had to judge the success of his colonial enterprise in strictly business terms, that is, in terms of whether or not it was profitable. Given the low level of the development of productive forces in the Congo, the king and his agents, who included quite a lot of Italians and Scandinavians (Danes, Norwegians and Swedes), had to resort to primitive accumulation. This meant the use of torture, murder and other inhumane methods to compel the Congolese to abandon their way of life to produce or do whatever the colonial state required of them.” (p. 20)

[24] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “Contrary to the free trade provisions of the Berlin Act, King Leopold proceeded to establish an economy controlled by the royal family and a few powerful trusts, including the Société générale de Belgique (SGB) and the Baron Empain banking group.35 Although his preference was for Belgian capital, the emerging globalization of capitalist exploitation and the king’s own interest in maintaining good relations with the major powers did provide an entry to the vast riches of the Congo for the bourgeoisies of other imperialist countries. Given the time it takes to build railroads, harbours and mining facilities, the economic role of most trusts yielded dividends only in the post-Leopoldian era. During his tenure, the king derived much of his wealth from the collection of rubber and ivory through forced labour.” (p. 21)

[25] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “The invention of the pneumatic or inflatable rubber tyre by the Scottish veterinary surgeon John B. Dunlop in 1887–88 and Edouard Michelin’s patent of the tyre in 1891 resulted in the mass production of bicycles and the much-needed supply of a major component for the motor vehicle. These two developments created a large market for rubber tyres in the world economy.36 King Leopold sought to capitalize on the abundance of rubber trees in the Congo to reap the rewards of the high demand for rubber on the world market. The king used his powers of eminent domain to create large land holdings from which he could derive huge profits. Paying no attention to indigenous land tenure systems, he created the fiction of ‘vacant lands’ by declaring the land previously used for shifting cultivation and hunting as vacant and therefore part of the public domain. Much of the country became either ‘Crown domain’ or the ‘private domain of the state’. As landowners, the king and the state were major beneficiaries of the revenues derived from the collection of rubber and ivory on these supposedly vacant lands. Beginning in 1891, the Congolese were required by law to supply labour, rubber and ivory to Leopold’s agents. The killing of elephants for their tusks, whose ivory was greatly in demand abroad for piano keys and other goods, was carried out on a very large scale. More than the ivory, however, it was the collection of wild rubber that resulted in the depopulation of entire villages and the perpetration of heinous crimes against humanity in the Congo.37 Villages unwilling or unable to meet the assigned daily quotas of production were subject to rape, arson, bodily mutilation and murder. Although this violence did not meet the definition of genocide in international law as ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group’,38 it resulted in a death toll of holocaust proportions that is estimated to be as high as 10 million people. Adam Hochschild has shown, persuasively, that this death toll was caused by three interrelated causes: (1) murder; (2) starvation, exhaustion, and exposure; and (3) disease.39 A fourth cause of population decline in areas ravaged by the rubber campaign was a plummeting birth rate.40 A population that was estimated to be between 20 and 30 million people at the beginning of the colonial era, was reduced to 8.5 million in 1911 and 10 million in 1924, according to official census data.41 In addition to the Leopoldian state, a few private companies were involved in this cruel and inhumane enterprise. These are companies to which the king had leased land as a concession on which they had exclusive rights of exploitation of all natural and human resources. In the rubber trade, two of the most notorious concession companies were the Anglo-Belgian India-Rubber Company (ABIR) and the Compagnie du Kasaï. As private companies that had to share their loot with the state, these rubber companies used extreme force to maximize their output. European company agents and their African overseers or kapita were ruthless in their regimental control of African work gangs. They frequently used the chicotte, a whip made from raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide, to administer punishment to people who resisted orders or did not accomplish the required tasks on time. The total subjugation of the inhabitants to the state and the concession companies made the CFS an ‘independent state’ of a peculiar type. Here was a state where the inhabitants were not citizens with democratic rights, but enslaved subjects of a sovereign they never saw. During his entire 23-year tenure as the Congo’s king-sovereign, Leopold never put his feet on Congolese soil.” (p. 21-23)

[26] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “As a colony, the Belgian Congo was strongly marked by the Leopoldian legacy as a system of economic exploitation, political repression and cultural oppression. When Belgium took over the running of the Congo in 1908, the Belgian government had to operate on the basis of what had already been established economically and administratively since 1885.” (p. 26)

[27] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “Anstey shows that the legacy of the Leopoldian regime was crucial in determining not only ‘the early lines of Belgian conduct in the Congo’, but also the subsequent trends in Belgian colonial rule. He writes that ‘there was no major departure from the broad lines of the original Belgian comportment in the Congo which the legacy had done so much to determine, though certainly there was refinement of that comportment’.63 The first step towards this refinement, and one that was partially meant to mollify public opinion in Europe and North America, was the adoption of a colonial constitution, the ‘charte coloniale’, which was drafted by men presumably committed to ‘grey-haired orthodoxy’ in colonial affairs, some of whom were major shareholders in Belgian companies with interests in the colony. With a Catholic party in power in Brussels and major companies represented in the colonial policy process, it was evident that the second Belgian regime in the Congo would rely on the alliance of the state with the Catholic Church and large corporations to continue the triple mission of economic exploitation, political repression and cultural oppression in Central Africa. More clearly than elsewhere, it was in the Belgian Congo – the ‘model colony’ of imperialist propaganda during the 1950s – that a perfect fit obtained between the ‘colonial trinity’ and these three features of the colonial system under imperialism.” (p. 27)

[28] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “During the war, this period of forced labour was extended to 120 days, and included some of the most hated tasks dating back to the CFS, such as porterage and the collection of wild rubber. The economic and social consequences for the people were devastating. Hunger, starvation and death were once again destroying entire families, as people were constantly harassed by the security forces and unable to find time and energy for food cultivation. Those who were old enough to suffer through these hard times remember the Second World War as a particularly painful episode in their lives, although they never understood what their suffering and the white man’s war itself were all about. Congolese soil and labour also contributed to the war effort of the anti-fascist alliance at the global level, by supplying the uranium that Americans used to make the first atomic weapons, the bombs they dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A major consequence of this development was that the United States found for itself a vital national interest in the strategic minerals of the Belgian Congo, including uranium, copper, cobalt and industrial diamonds. This strategic interest expanded in the postwar period to imply a Western stake in preventing the Soviet Union and its allies from gaining influence in Central Africa. The uranium came from the Shinkolobwe mine of the Union minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK), the giant mining company and the single most important business enterprise in the Congo’s economy. Established on 18 October 1906 under King Leopold’s rule and with direct ties to the royal family, the UMHK was a modern capitalist corporation built by a group of interlocking Belgian trusts under the leadership of the SGB and foreign interests. The oldest of the colonial companies created by this partnership was the Compagnie du Congo pour le commerce et l’industrie (CCCI), the dean of Congo trusts, established in 1887. A major holding, its control passed on to the SGB after 1928. Created to promote industry, commerce, agriculture, finance and public works, the CCCI had as its first priority the construction of the Lower Congo railroad. For this purpose, a subsidiary company, the Compagnie du chemin de fer du Congo (CFC) was created in 1890 with 60 per cent of the initial capital subscribed by Belgian, British and German private groups, and 40 per cent by the Belgian state.68 Built at the cost of thousands of lives, including those of labourers imported from West Africa, Barbados and China, the railroad was completed in 1898. Other major corporations established shortly before the transfer of power from the king to Belgium included the Compagnie des chemins de fer du Congo supérieur aux Grands Lacs (CFL), a major concession company for the Great Lakes region; the Société internationale forestière et minière (Forminière), which became involved in mineral and timber exploitation in Kasai; and the Compagnie du chemin de fer du BasCongo au Katanga (BCK), a railroad company with extensive land and mineral rights. The BCK was the second largest and most important company after the UMHK in Katanga, the most economically important region of the Belgian Congo. As a corporation, its economic and historical significance was twofold. First, the BCK Railroad provided a much-needed connection between the Katanga mining industry and the international ports of Matadi in the Congo, Lobito and Benguela in Angola, and Beira in Mozambique. This was done by way of river transportation on the Kasai from Ilebo to the Kinshasa–Matadi railroad; through the Benguela Railway from Dilolo; and through the Rhodesian and Portuguese rail systems from Sakania. Second, the BCK Railroad transformed the landscape along the line of rail and contributed immensely to the development of commercial and administrative towns along the entire length of the network, or 1,820 kilometres from Ilebo to Sakania, and 520 kilometres from Tenke to Dilolo.” (p. 29-30)

[29] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “As for its impact, colonial exploitation brought about the plunder of human and natural resources, and transformed African societies by subjecting them to capitalist relations of production. Peasant production was progressively subordinated to the export requirements of monopoly capital for agricultural raw materials. The traditional ruling class, formerly the chief beneficiary of rural surplus labour, was incorporated into the authority structure of the colonial state to facilitate its extractive and repressive tasks, including tax collection, labour recruitment, conscription and order maintenance. Artisanal or simple commodity production lost much of its indigenous character, becoming an appendage to the capitalist commodity market and service sector, with the bulk of its activities located in the so-called informal sector of the economy. Whatever chances African merchants who were active in the precolonial trading frontiers had of developing into a comprador bourgeoisie were eventually destroyed both by the trading monopoly granted to concession companies and the discriminatory policies favouring European and Asian merchants and protecting them from African competition.” (p. 32-33)

[30] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “During the early period of Belgian colonialism, the state’s authority was established through company rule in large parts of the country, which were ceded to concession companies. Contrary to what historians such as Stengers have suggested, company rule did continue beyond 1908. A good example in this regard is the situation that the Reverend Sheppard and other Presbyterian missionaries witnessed among the Kuba, where rule by the Compagnie du Kasaï lasted from 1905 to 1910. According to Jan Vansina, this period of company rule in the Kuba kingdom was a period of atrocities.79 The company held a monopoly over trade, and it was the only buyer to whom people could sell rubber in order to pay their taxes. These were collected for the company by King Kot aPe, who played the role of company agent in order to maintain his throne. In 1908, the company itself employed about 285 kapita or auxiliaries, who acted as armed rubber buyers and collectors, with one kapita per village. These African mercenaries were quick to use the gun to oppress villagers and to force them to produce more rubber. During the same year, there was food shortage and widespread hunger throughout the area. In addition to using African chiefs and kapita as auxiliary agents, concession companies employed European contractors to recruit labour for them, a task for which they obtained the assistance of the state and some Christian missionaries. Before railroad construction was completed in the late 1920s and early 1930s, all Africans so recruited for work in the mining and related industries from areas as distant as Maniema and Kasai, went to Katanga on foot.80 Europeans, on the other hand, were carried in hammocks and continued to be so well treated long after porterage was officially outlawed in 1926. Estimates are still needed for the number of people who died during all these long marches and in the construction of railroads. People who were adolescents in the 1910s and 1920s have told horror tales concerning the kidnapping of villagers for slave labour, the brutality of labour-recruiting agents and work gang foremen, and the manner in which people living along the lines of rail were coerced into feeding those who worked on the railroads. State rule, when it was finally established at the local level, did not differ significantly from company rule.” (p. 34)

[31] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “In line with this new policy, a series of decrees on local colonial administration in 1906, 1910 and 1933 succeeded in progressively transforming the chiefs into subaltern functionaries of the colonial administration. Their major task was to ensure that their administrative units adequately met what was known in colonial discourse as their ‘collective obligations to the state’. These included compulsory cultivation of certain export crops, conscription, forced labour on public projects, labour recruitment and taxes. Fulfilling these obligations in a satisfactory manner meant hardships for ordinary people but political and economic rewards for the chiefs. It succeeded in setting the chiefs against their own people. The chiefs and other customary officials were part of a political system that answered perfectly to definitions of the colonial state by James S. Coleman and Ruth First as a ‘pure bureaucratic state’. In the face of a distant political supervision by the Belgian parliament and colonial affairs ministers in Brussels, the colonial bureaucracy constituted the state and held the effective power of governance. However, it ruled in alliance with other representatives of the Belgian bourgeoisie who served as managers of large enterprises and in the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Representatives of these two groups, along with a few others from the liberal professions, sat in important advisory bodies such as the Conseil colonial, the Conseil de gouvernement and the Conseil provincial, the last two established in 1914” (p. 35-36)

[32] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “The governor-general of the colony, in Boma since the Free State days and in Kinshasa from 1929 to 1960, held nearly despotic powers under a strong prefectorial system of French inspiration.85 He had both executive and legislative powers. Until the administrative reform of 1933, he was assisted by a vice-governor-general in Katanga, appointed by the CSK due to the special status of this province, and by vicegovernors in the other provinces. A second vice-governor-general was appointed for Rwanda and Burundi, as these two territories were annexed to the Congo in 1925 as a unit of a single administrative entity known as ‘Le Congo belge et le Ruanda-Urundi’. Having conquered with Congolese troops these two territories of German East Africa during the First World War, Belgium formally took over their administration as a mandatory power under the League of Nations in 1921. In 1945, it became the administrative authority under the United Nations trusteeship system. As the last major change in the colonial administrative system before the decolonization period, the 1933 reform established the basic structures of prefectorialism in the Congo for the rest of the century. The division of the country into provinces, districts, and territoires (or subdistricts), with the administrative head at each level appointed by the central authority, has remained relatively stable. The only exception to this was the period from 1960 to 1966, during which provincial autonomy under both the Loi fondamentale, the independence constitution, and the Luluabourg Constitution of 1964 had given rise to useful experiments in decentralization. In the Belgian Congo, provincial governors, district commissioners and territorial administrators (administrateurs de territoire) were permanent representatives and incarnations of the state in their respective areas of jurisdiction. They were veritable proconsuls who exercised despotism and total control.” (p. 36)

[33] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “The fear of popular revolts and the need to maintain a healthy and tranquil political atmosphere were such that the Belgians had put in place three types of operation by the colonial army or Force publique to deal with anticolonial resistance. The three were military occupation, military operation and police operation. As the terms themselves indicate, military occupation involved the deployment of troops in a troubled area and requiring the inhabitants to feed them and to do whatever the troops required of them. Military and police operations, on the other hand, involved putting down a rebellion and intimidating the population in order to keep it on its best behaviour, respectively. One kind of police operation involving a very muscular show of force was known as the promenade militaire. This meant not a leisurely stroll by the military in the countryside, but a veritable walkover by the Force publique, to repress and intimidate a defenceless population.” (p. 37)

[34] Sherrer, C. P. (2005). Ethnicity. In D. L. Shelton (Ed.), Encyclopedia of genocide and crimes against humanity (Vol. 1, pp. 306–309). Macmillan Reference USA. “One of the most devastating was committed by the Belgian colonizers in the Congo Free State, the later Belgian Congo, from the 1870s to the 1920s against the indigenous African peoples of the Great Congo Basin (taking 12 to 18 million victims), as well as the smaller but almost total genocide by the German colonialists against the Herero and Nama in Namibia (that time German Southwest Africa) from 1904 to 1907.” (p. 306)

[35] Hochschild, A. (2005). King Leopold II and the Congo. In D. L. Shelton (Ed.), Encyclopedia of genocide and crimes against humanity (Vol. 1, pp. 617–622). “Between the time that Leopold started to assume control of the Congo (around 1880) and when the forced labor system became less severe (after 1920), what happened could not, by strict definition, be called genocide, for there was no deliberate attempt to wipe out all members of one particular ethnic group. But the slashing of the territory’s population—through a combination of disease, famine, slave labor, suppression of rebellions, and diminished birthrate—indisputably occurred on a genocidal scale.” (p. 620)

[36] Friends of the Congo. (n.d.). D.R. Congo Primer. Friends of the Congo. Retrieved June 28, 2024, from https://friendsofthecongo.org/primer/. “In the 1950s the people of Congo started to mobilize in a national movement that sought autonomy and independence from Belgium. Although the struggle was consolidated and partially appropriated by the évolués’ political campaigns, the movement was heavily driven by the acts of civil disobedience of the peasantry and the exploited working classes. One of the pivotal moments of this protest wave was the 1959 Léopoldville riots. It was due to these riots that Belgium was forced to the negotiation table, leading to independence on June 30th 1960.”

[37] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “Like elsewhere in Europe, the immediate post-war years were a time of intense political turmoil in Belgium. Before , political conflict was a three-way struggle between Socialists, Christian Socialists and Communists. Even after 1949, the centre of political gravity, on all issues save the empire, remained far to the left. In, a referendum was held to discuss whether the royal family would be allowed to return. King Léopold III was believed to have worked too closely with the Germans. His return was only narrowly passed. After Léopold took up residence in the Laeken Palace, he was met with such a wave of protests that he was forced to abdicate in favour of his son Baudouin. A left-wing coalition came to power in, and began to rethink Belgium’s commitment to maintaining its overseas territories…A  decree provided that Africans of the appropriate ‘state of civilisation’ should be judged as being subject not to tribal but to civil law. From 1953, Africans were allowed to own private land; in 1950 they were authorised to buy alcohol. From the early 1950s, they were even granted limited rights to vote for their own candidates in elections to control local administration. Already, however, there were those who could envisage more radical change. Tshilemalema Mukenge recalls a song performed for the first time in 1955: ‘Sooner or later the white man will be overthrown/ Sooner or later the world will be purified/ Sooner or later the world will be turned upside down.’ Yet the spread of national consciousness was uneven. Even where people began to feel a sense of common interest, they still lacked any sort of confidence to take on their Belgian masters. Another incident from 1955 conveys the enormous sense of psychological domination that the Belgians still continued to exert in the Congo.” (p. 70-71)

[38] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “The outstanding representative of this generation was Patrice Lumumba, later the first president of the Congo. Lumumba was born on 2 July 1925 in the Sankuru district of Kasai province…Between 1943 and 1945, he trained as a nurse, one of the most ‘advanced’ courses then open to Congolese. He then worked in Kivu as a clerk to a mine. Next employed as a postman, Lumumba taught himself the skills of a writer. His early journalism emphasised social problems, while also arguing for a continuation of foreign rule. Patrice Lumumba joined clubs for his fellow intellectuals and established a Liberal association in Élisabethville. In 1956, he was accused of embezzling funds from the post office where he worked as a clerk and was sent to prison. On release from jail, he played a prominent role in a series of student, liberal and friendship networks, including one Christian Democratic Study Group, which also accounted for such future leaders as Joseph Ileo. Patrice Lumumba’s world was dominated by the educated and the trained, people who sensed in themselves the skills to lead, but who were still held back by the dead hand of Belgian rule.” (p. 72-73)

[39] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “In October 195, Patrice Lumumba declared the foundation of a ‘national movement’ dedicated to the goal of national liberation. Six weeks later, an AllAfrican People’s Conference was held in Accra, hosted by Kwame Nkrumah. The moderate Congolese nationalist Joseph Kasavubu was invited to attend and put the case for Congolese autonomy, but the Belgians refused permission for him to attend. In his absence, Lumumba filled the gap. His militancy became the public face of the campaign for independence.60 Lumumba and his ‘class’ were becoming radicalised. He was also rapidly becoming better known.” (p. 74)

[40] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “Faced with a modest public meeting, called by Abako, the police intervened to disperse a crowd. This action led to fighting between the police and large numbers of rioters, who attacked the symbols of Western occupation: missions, schools and social centres. The army was sent in. While the Belgians satisfied themselves with proving that their troops had killed less than  people, most Congolese estimated the actual number to be closer to . The white residents began to militate for a military takeover of the civilian government. Yet rather than prepare for a long period of military rule, the Belgian government in Brussels drew the conclusion that their regime now lacked all popular legitimacy. The civil servants prepared to leave…The story is revealing. All political legitimacy rests on an alliance between national and local power. The individual ruler cannot be present everywhere. Their authority must manifest itself in a series of relationships. If their people cannot dominate locally, they cannot dominate nationally. For the first time since King Léopold, the Belgians were being challenged for control of the Congo.” (p. 75)

[41] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “Lumumba was arrested for a second time in November 1959 , and charged with making seditious statements. He was sentenced to six months in jail, but was released when his fellow members of the MNC insisted that they would not negotiate without their leader. His release coincided with an upturn in the struggle. A ‘round table’ conference in Brussels decided in February 1960 that the Belgian Congo would become fully independent from 30 June of that year. Once the Belgians had agreed to independence they refused to budge on the date for the handover of power. ‘Decolonisation’ was now a matter of months away. The round-table negotiations were a farce. They were supposed to discuss the nature and timetable of the transition, but did nothing of the sort. The decision had already been made. Although two of the principal leaders of the opposition, Lumumba and Kasavubu, were anxious not to be seen publicly to want to prolong colonisation, both men approached the Belgian authorities and suggested an ‘interim provisional government’ before full independence. They were turned down. When independence finally came to the Congo it arrived abruptly, there was no transitional stage.” (p. 75-76)

[42] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “Lumumba was not just naive in arguing that colonialism had been of human value; he was repeating instead the common sense of his generation. It took the experience of many personal defeats, the constant lies of the colonial foremen and masters, to teach Lumumba the need for a much more militant critique. In December 1959, the victim of one period of imprisonment, and a second public trial, Lumumba interrupted his campaign for independence to attend the Accra Conference of African States. His speech there demonstrated a hardening of his position: ‘This conference … makes one thing clear to us: despite the frontiers which separate us, despite our ethnic differences, we have the same consciousness, the same soul, which is steeped, night and day, in anguish, the same earnest wish to make this Continent of Africa a free and happy continent, a continent set free from anxiety, from fear and from colonialist domination. Down with colonialism and tribalism! Long live the Congolese nation!’ Lumumba campaigned for independence through a party, the MNC, and with a newspaper, Uhuru. The paper reported on the progress of liberation struggles throughout Africa. It argued for a conception of Congolese independence that was based not on race, nor on tribal loyalties, but on secular conceptions of universal rights to independence, democracy and freedom.” (p. 77)

[43] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “Through May and June, the remaining Belgian authorities insisted on supervising the elections themselves, directing the press to warn against the ‘Communist’ Lumumba, financing rival parties, doing everything they could to guarantee that relationships between the two countries remained those of the master and slave. With notable exceptions, such as the MNC and PSA, those parties that organised on the basis of region or ethnicity received direct Belgian government funding. They were useful to Brussels because their power structures reflected the links of ethnicity and ‘tribal’ loyalty that the European power had been strengthening for nearly a century. They represented the best hope for the continuation after 1960 of the previous, dependent relationships. But the MNC won a majority. With  seats taken by allies out of a total of 137 members in the new National Assembly, Lumumba was the obvious choice to head the government. The Belgians attempted to stall his appointment, but failed. Lumumba’s first real battle had been won. The second victory also went to Lumumba. The events of the independence ceremony helped to propel the Congo and its prime minster [sic] into every living room around the world. The day started according to the official timetable, and the handover was due to take place in the parliament building. There, before members of the Belgian ruling class, including King Baudouin, delegates of the new, independent Congolese government, foreign dignitaries and reporters, an amicable separation was to be announced. ” (p. 79-80)

[44] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “The transfer of power, presented by the Belgians as a sort of gift or loan, was recast into something quite different, a real declaration of independence. The speech was transmitted live across the Congo. When Lumumba finally finished the speech, to ‘loud and long’ applause, and returned to his chair, the king threatened to cancel further engagements and return to Belgian. The programme was interrupted for an hour as the king and members of his entourage threatened to leave. The king, as the personification of Belgian power, had correctly taken the speech as a personal insult.70 This was an offence that he never forgave, and one that still generated a visceral hatred of Lumumba among members of the Belgian ruling class many years later. The effect of the speech was explosive around the world but particularly in Belgium. The press called for Lumumba’s head. Never had the king or the dignity and pride of the Belgium state been so insulted, and by a black man. One academic study notes that ‘Lumumba’s eloquent denunciation of colonialistion in the Independence Day speech … caused such consternation in Belgian conservative circles and earned him their undying hatred.’71 Among opponents of colonialism, opinions were rather different. In New York, Malcolm X told his followers that Lumumba’s was the ‘greatest speech’, and that it had been made by the ‘greatest black man who ever walked the African continent’.72 Belgium was humiliated, and the Congo’s freedom properly won.” (p. 82)

[45] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “On  June , the Congo finally gained independence from Belgium. Patrice Lumumba became the first prime minister of the country. His party, the Mouvement National Congolais, was committed to unitary national politics, a multi-ethnic state, and policies of redistribution to the rural and urban poor. The MNC’s objective was to secure the emancipation of the Congo while encouraging among its supporters ‘a consciousness of their national unity and responsibilities’. ” (p. 83)

[46] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “Lumumba knew that independence would not be sufficient to free Africa from its colonial past; the continent must also cease to be an economic colony of Europe. An independent Congo should not be compelled to obey Belgium; it should seek its own path of development. He held that the Congolese people could overcome all obstacles and create some sort of just society. He had the ability to articulate the grievances of the majority and the charisma to inspire them. He was undoubtedly the outstanding political figure of his generation. Lumumba wanted a strong centre rather than a diffuse federation, but powerful forces were aligned against him from the start…It is not entirely fanciful to see the possibility of a similar danger weighing on the mind of Patrice Lumumba, even during his moment of triumph on 30 June 1960. The economic situation was dismal: On the eve of its independence the Government was faced with large current deficits (£ 40million on current account for 1960 alone). The flight of capital and the loss of international confidence, because of the events of 1959, meant the new Government would come to power with no liquid assets at all.4 The new government would inevitably be faced with problems of resources, expectation and ability. When Lumumba spoke of ‘a fight waged each and every day’, he was schooling his people for the period of conflict ahead, the real war for independence.” (p. 85)

[47] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “By the time independence was achieved, the national and democratic movement responsible for it was deeply rent by internal contradictions owing to its own weaknesses and the destablilizing actions of the Belgians. The évolués and other petty bourgeois elements displayed both their opportunism by jumping on the independence bandwagon without a clear understanding of where it was leading them to, and their inexperience in neglecting to deal with the economic aspects of the transfer of power. Whereas all major leaders attended the Political Roundtable Conference in January– February, Moïse Tshombe of Conakat was the only prominent politician who bothered to show up at the Economic Roundtable Conference, which met in Brussels between 26 April and 16 May 1960. Yet it was in this latter forum that the Belgians sealed the fate of the country. Negotiating with university students and other politically insignificant delegates relying on Belgian experts to make sense of the complex issues at stake, the Belgians laid the groundwork for transferring much of the enormous state portfolios in colonial companies to Belgium, through privatization, while leaving virtually all the public debt to the new state.66 The Congolese leaders were evidently true believers in the Nkrumahist gospel of first seeking the political kingdom. While they neglected to protect the country’s economic assets, the newly elected leaders were more concerned with enjoying the material benefits that colonialism and the colour bar had denied them than with a radical transformation of the inherited system for purposes of meeting the people’s expectations of independence. At the conclusion of the May elections, hundreds of petty bourgeois leaders went to Kinshasa, and to provincial capitals, as the representatives of the people. Their first official act, after they had fought each other for the important positions of leadership, was to accept not only the privileges that had been enjoyed by the Europeans before them, but also some new privileges of their own creation. Parliamentarians, for example, voted to raise their remuneration from 100,000 to 500,000 francs a year (US$2,000 to 10,000), in a country where the annual per capita monetary income for Africans was below US$50. The other social classes, well aware of this development, asked for their fair share of the fruits of independence. Given the growing unrest of the emerging class struggle, the new rulers thought that they could count on the Force publique to keep the situation under control.” (p. 88-89)

[48] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “The alliance formed by the four classes of Congolese society against colonial rule was being broken in the birth of a new ruling class made up of former clerks, medical assistants and other petty bourgeois elements. The petty bourgeois élite had simply wished to de-Europeanize the existing system, without ever understanding, or willing to understand, that the other classes wanted fundamental change. If the end of colonial rule was a revolution in the sense that white rule disappeared to be replaced by black rule, this was ‘rather a partial, merely political revolution which leaves the pillars of the building standing’.68 Given its precipitous nature, the mass discontent with it, the international context in which it took place, and the crisis it brought about, the independence of the Congo was also a very fragile political revolution.” (p. 89)

[49] Friends of the Congo. (n.d.). D.R. Congo Primer. Friends of the Congo. Retrieved June 28, 2024, from https://friendsofthecongo.org/primer/. “Many people fighting against colonialism, in and outside of Congo, saw Patrice Lumumba, the leader of the Congolese National Movement (MNC), as a representative for their progressive, nationalist interests. When Congo finally gained independence Lumumba became the country’s first democratically elected prime minister. In his short time in office, he kept advocating for the selfdetermination and freedom of the Congolese, until he was captured and murdered in 1961, in an assassination orchestrated by US and Belgian secret services.”

[50] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “Fresh from the Accra meeting and his triumphant public rally of 28  December 1958 in Kinshasa, Lumumba went to Brussels in early 1959 to make himself known to different political circles in Belgium. Mobutu was eager to welcome him to Brussels and to show him the town and its nightlife. Lumumba was so impressed by Mobutu, five years his junior, that he named him the Brussels representative of the MNC. A close bond developed between the two men. To Lumumba, Mobutu was more than just someone who carried his briefcase (porteur de mallette), as Mobutu’s detractors would have us believe. Lumumba’s trust in a man he came to consider a younger brother was such that he had no hesitation naming him one of his top assistants, as a junior minister in the prime minister’s office, and as chief of staff of the armed forces. Rejecting information that Mobutu was connected to Western intelligence as baseless rumours, Lumumba thought that by appointing Mobutu to the number two position in the ANC, he had the right man with whom to control the military politically. This was Lumumba’s second major political blunder, less than three weeks after his fateful choice in the fratricidal war in Kasai. As it turned out, Mobutu played a critical role in every step leading to Lumumba’s assassination. As ANC chief of staff, he had overall operational control of the military campaign in South Kasai, whose atrocities were blamed on Lumumba by Kasa-Vubu and his backers in the international community. It was he who accomplished what the Cordier–Kasa-Vubu coup of 5 September 1960 had failed to achieve, namely, the effective removal of Lumumba from power. He did so by the coup of 14 September, Lumumba’s arrest on 1 December, and his incarceration at the élite military garrison of Mbanza-Ngungu. And Mobutu was among the top Congolese leaders involved in acquiescing to the Belgian plan of sending Lumumba to his death in Katanga, including President Kasa-Vubu, interim Prime Minister Ileo and the Binza Group.” (p. 144)

[51] Prott, L. V. (2005). Ethnicity. In D. L. Shelton (Ed.), Encyclopedia of genocide and crimes against humanity (Vol. 1, pp. 309–314). “Another reaction to threatened or actual genocide, including ethnocide, has historically been armed intervention (e.g., the UN’s intervention in the Belgian Congo from 1960 to 1964 following the violence after that country gained its independence). However, interventions by individual states have very often been associated with other motives, such as the protection of economic interests or the pursuit of political ends. And such interventions have also generally been regarded as perilous; especially after the loss of eighteen U.S. soldiers in Somalia in 1993, states remained reluctant to intervene in Rwanda in 1994, despite the clear threat and later evidence of genocide. Subsequent interventions, such as that in Kosovo, have shown the limited success of such efforts once violence has broken out. Many of these efforts have been made without sufficient force—the example of Srebrenica being the most obvious—and the preservation of culture has been abandoned in favor of rescuing human lives. What peacekeepers can do to save endangered heritage is therefore limited, and in the current international context ethnocide is unlikely to be substantially deterred by the threat of intervention by force.” (p. 314)

[52] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “Congo remained divided, formally and in reality. As the UN forces left, civil war started again. The Adoula government was first reconstituted and then replaced by a new administration, under Tshombe, who returned from Europe as the United Nations departed. He tried to form a broad coalition but Gizenga, whom he had released from prison, formed a new opposition party.38 A new constitution came into effect on 1 August 1964, establishing presidential government and a federalist structure. The country was renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).” (p. 105)

[53] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “After only four short years of independence, the Congo was divided and awash with foreign troops. The United States was desperate to defeat what seemed to them to be a left-wing insurgency, part of a Communist threat that they saw spreading across the continent after the successful ‘takeover’ of Zanzibar. The renewal of the struggle in the Congo, however, also frightened American politicians nervous of being embroiled in the conflict in Vietnam. The Cuban leader Che Guevara summarised the farce of the so-called ‘independent’ Congo when he addressed the United Nations in December 1964: ‘Belgian paratroopers transported by United States aircraft, took off from British bases … Free men throughout the world must prepare to avenge the Congo crime.’ Not relying on words alone, Guevara attempted to bring Cuba to intervene in the military campaign.” (p. 106)

[54] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “Through the months after the UN forces had left, it became clear that the Congo was heading into a second period of turmoil. In April 1965, Che Guevara attempted to export rebellion into the country. His allies were the forces of the Simba (Lion) rebellion. The leaders of this second insurrection saw themselves as Lumumba’s heirs. Several writers have agreed, portraying Pierre Mulele, leader of the rebels in Kwilu region, in particular as a heroic personality, the man who could have saved the Congo. A leader of the Parti Solidaire Africain, which had its strongest base of support in the west of the Congo, Mulele was indeed a striking figure. ‘State employees, teachers, students and the unemployed urban youth’, writes, Nzongolo-Natalaja, ‘joined peasants in what became a profoundly popular and rural insurrection.” (p. 107)

[55] Friends of the Congo. (n.d.). D.R. Congo Primer. Friends of the Congo. Retrieved June 28, 2024, from https://friendsofthecongo.org/primer/. “In subsequent years, the country was once again afflicted by grave violence. From 1960 to 1965, the Congo Crisis unfolded, which was a series of power struggles and civil wars, fuelled by the power vacuum in the newly independent nation. The conflict culminated in the Western-backed coup d’état that brought Mobutu Sese Sekou into power. Mobutu established a highly oppressive autocracy, that allowed him to amass immense personal wealth. During his rule, which lasted from 1965 to 1997, the state continued to decay institutionally and infrastructurally. His kleptocratic regime could only sustain itself for as long as it did, because it enjoyed the support from powerful allies, like the United States, Belgium, France and Israel1. In exchange for their support, Mobutu ensured foreign actors continued access to Congolese resources.”

[56] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “In 1965, as another clash broke out between prime minister and president, Mobutu staged a second coup. In November, the army, in the person of General Mobutu, stepped in, dismissed the president and established military rule. Once again he received the backing of the United States. This time, Mobutu assumed the presidency himself, rather than hiding behind the scenes. For over thirty years he maintained a highly personalised system of control. After , Mobutu had on his side several advantages. He had the support of the old colonial power, Belgium, and of its regional successor, the United States. He had the guns and the organised force of the Congolese army. His supporters could point to the failures of an entire generation of rivals.” (p.114)

[57] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “President Mobutu was Congo’s head of state from 24 November 1965 until 17 May 1997. For a quarter of a century, between 1965 and 1990, he was the undisputed master of the country. In the very imaginative but apt description by V. S. Naipaul, author of A Bend in the River, Mobutu was the big man, a new king for the Congo, and the true successor to King Leopold as the owner of the country and its resources.1 As though to prove that he considered the Congo a personal possession, he unilaterally changed the country’s name to ‘Zaire’ in 1971, and took great pleasure in privatizing the state and its assets for the benefit of his relatives, cronies and clients.” (p. 141)

[58] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “As an externally backed autocracy, the Mobutu regime was a pure product of the Cold War. It originated in the cold strategic calculation of Western powers that leaders with no social or political base were preferable to those with strong national constituencies, to which they were accountable. Since the latter reflected the militant nationalism and anti-imperialist positions of their supporters, they had to be discredited in the eyes of world public opinion. Eric Rouleau, a distinguished journalist and a former French diplomat, explains that the tactic consisted in imputing madness or erratic personality to leaders such as Fidel Castro of Cuba, Mohamed Mossadegh of Iran, Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, among others. They were judged ‘unreasonable for defying the logic of homo occidentalis, in doing things outside the established norms and, above all, in harming the ‘vital interests of the free world’’. To protect and promote these interests in the turbulent countries of the Third World, policymakers in Washington and other Western capitals could trust only a ‘strongman’ as the ideal ruler. As described by Rouleau, the strongman is supposed to be intelligent, cunning, and independent of any uncontrollable coalition or popular consensus ‘that would prevent him from being understanding towards external protectors’. Accordingly, he ‘is singularly ambitious and stops at nothing to attain his objectives’. During the first Congo crisis, Mobutu was deemed to possess all of these prized qualities, and his Western protectors groomed him as the perfect candidate for the role of Congo’s strongman. He played this role so well and so faithfully that he became extremely bitter for being publicly shunned by his former mentors, friends and allies between 1990 and 1997, until he was left to die on the run like a wandering dog.” (p. 142-143)

[59] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “Born in 1930 of a very young woman, who was either unmarried or abandoned by her spouse, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu grew up in the Equator province with the reputation of being an unruly youth. His turbulence was such that he was kicked out of secondary school by Catholic missionaries and conscripted in the Force publique. Since he had not completed two years of secondary education, he had to do seven years of military service, between 1950 and 1956.6 With his intellectual abilities, he rose to the rank of quartermaster sergeant, and served in this capacity at one of the major military bases in the Belgian Congo, at Kananga in the Kasai province.” (p.143)

[60] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “In the meanwhile, Mobutu consolidated his position at home and abroad. He repaired relations with Belgium, which he visited in , concluding financial and technical agreements, and played host to King Baudouin in Kinshasa. He restored law and order, albeit through repression and control, and embarked on an ambitious programme of national economic development. In 1970 he stood in a sham election for president. He was the only candidate and the voting tickets were green for hope and red for chaos. He was ‘elected’ on the green ticket with a majority of 99.999 per cent – and became president for a term of seven years. Further US military aid helped Mobutu repel several attempts to overthrow him. Some of his political enemies he ordered tortured and killed; some he co-opted into his ruling circles; others he forced into exile. Mobutu was to impose his mark indelibly on the country he renamed Zaïre.” (p. 115)

[61] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “The years between 1968 and 1974 were a period of significant economic growth for the Congo, powered by the high prices for copper on the international market. In the early 1970s, with copper output hovering at between 400,000 and 470,000 tonnes a year, and production of the far more valuable cobalt at between 10,000 and 18,000 tonnes, Gécamines alone could be counted on to produce annual revenues of between $700 million and $900 million. It was the dominant producer in Zaïre, accounting for more than  per cent of the copper output, and all production of cobalt, zinc and coal. It was the mainstay of the economy and accounted for up to  per cent of export receipts. During the 1970s, Gécamines became the world’s sixth largest mining company. Informed commentators did not think that Mobutu’s ‘plan USA’, to reach the level of economic development of the West by 1980, was wholly far-fetched. On the contrary, as Ingrid Samset writes, ‘From  1967 to 1974, the Democratic Republic of the Congo was one of Africa’s main economic powers.’” (p. 121-122)

[62] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “The collapse of copper prices was at the centre of this decline. From  copper production began its inexorable tumble from a high of , tonnes to , tonnes in , a  per cent decline.22 The slump in world commodity prices coincided with a growing tendency on the part of Mobutu and his cronies to ‘bleed off’ a significant proportion of Gécamines’ earnings. Sozacom, the state-owned subsidiary set up to market minerals abroad, would redirect a share of the foreign exchange earned from the sale of cobalt, zinc and copper on the international markets to numbered presidential accounts held abroad, a practice referred to by the World Bank and IMF as ‘uncompensated sales’ or ‘leakages’. Other devices were also used to siphon off funds into presidential accounts. In , an IMF official discovered that the governor of the central bank had simply ordered Gécamines to deposit all its earnings directly into a presidential account. It has been estimated that $ million a year was stolen from Gécamines by President Mobutu and others.23 The implosion in the late s of the copper-producing giant Gécamines, once the country’s economic powerhouse, undermined the economy’s hitherto largely positive trajectory. There was now rampant corruption, and the distinction between the public and the private economy was ill defined in many sectors. Mobutu and his family became extraordinarily rich. The programme of ‘Zaïreanisation’ put substantial new sources of wealth directly into the hands of the new Zaïrean elite.” (p. 124-125)

[63] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “By 1975 the regime did not even know how much it owed or to whom; it stopped paying any interest on its commercial bank debt, which amounted to around $700–800 million. This prompted the first of a succession of interventions by the World Bank and the UN. The first task was to assess the scale of the debt. By 1976, the total debt was already more than a third of Zaïre’s total expenditure and  per cent of its GDP. In 1977 the total debt was estimated at over $4 billion. Debt-service payments were now the equivalent of  43 per cent of export earnings and almost half of total state revenue. Despite its enormous wealth in natural resources and potential, the Zaïrean economy was bankrupt. While the ruling elite fed off the ailing economy, for the mass of the people survival became more difficult. At this time life for most Zaïreans ended at 40. Economic and social conditions were to worsen rather than improve during Mobutu’s second decade in power.” (p. 125-126)

[64] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “By 1978, the output of copper was 17 per cent below 1974 levels and imports had dropped 50 per cent in the same period. Manufacturing was now functioning at 40 per cent of capacity and wages were approximately a quarter of their 1970 rate. Foreign debt had risen to $5 billion. The answer, provided by the emerging conventional wisdom of the period, later to be known as the Washington Consensus, and the international financial institutions, was ‘structural adjustment’. This process was to prove devastating for the people of Zaïre. The government attempted to manage the crisis in the late s by launching the ‘Mobutu Plan’, which promoted the ‘structural adjustment’ of the economy and encouraged the employment of expatriates in a reversal of the policies of the previous decade. This ‘new’ stance was welcomed by the international institutions and by foreign capital, which still saw Zaïre as a potential powerhouse were ‘liberalisation’ to be effectively implemented, and by the major imperial powers, which saw Mobutu as a crucial source of stability in the ‘heart of Africa’, a continent which appeared to be increasingly fragile.” (p. 132-133)

[65] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “Again, Zaïre was by no means unique in its change of policy. The World Bank and the IMF now advocated liberalisation stridently. As the World Bank declared, ‘Africa needs not just less government, [but] government that concentrates its efforts less on direct intervention and more on enabling others to be productive.’ Such Washington policies meant the stripping of the state, privatisation and poverty. By 1980, Zaïre’s outstanding debt already amounted to 30 per cent of GDP. Faced with this economic deterioration and with no local remedies available, Mobutu became, in 1982, one of the first African leaders to submit his country formally to an IMF-prescribed austerity programme. Initially, the government’s apparent enthusiasm to fulfil IMF performance targets was favourably received by the creditors. The early s saw the liberalisation of the Zaïrean economy promoted by successive IMF packages…The first significant stage of these reforms came in 1981, which saw the selective liberalisation of prices for agricultural products and the legalisation of informal or artisanal mining of diamonds. Artisanal traders could now sell diamonds at legal counters that had opened in Kinshasa. These measures were followed by further price deregulation the following year. One stated aim of the liberalisation measures was to undermine the informal market and the extensive smuggling of minerals across borders, through the establishment of authorised counters. Although initially these measures achieved some success they did little to stem the tide of smuggled goods across borders. A key effect of these early measures was to promote the gradual transformation of the Zaïrean economy away from its earlier reliance on copper production and exports under state control in favour of private and informal diamond mining, trading and smuggling. The IMF and World Bank seemed to regard the growth in the informal economy as a potential engine of free-market development in the developing world.” (p. 133-134)

[66] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “By 1983, the Zaïrean debt stood at around $5 billion, which was roughly equal to President Mobutu’s own personal wealth in Swiss bank holdings at the time. An agreement with the IMF and the World Bank resulted in a massive 77.5 per cent devaluation of the zaire (the fifth since the mid-1970s). This package sent the prices of staple foods soaring upwards by something like 200 to 300 per cent. Wages were restrained and thousands of workers in the public sector were fired. Barratt Brown notes that ‘in Zaïre, as early as 1983, in the public services, salaries in real terms represented less than one-fifth of the 1975 level.’ In 1984, the National Institute of Statistics estimated that an average monthly food budget in Kinshasa for a family of six would be over 3,000 zaire, while the salary for a medium-level civil servant was 750 zaire. The majority of people were obliged to increase their real incomes in various ways, through moonlighting or by various corrupt practices.” (p. 137)

[67] Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A people’s history. Zed Books. “As a system of absolute power, dictatorship and personal rule, the Mobutu regime ended in 1990, with the official demise of the Second Republic and its party-state system, and the beginning of the transition to multiparty democracy. But the wily dictator was still hanging on to the helm of his sinking ship of state seven years later, when Laurent Kabila and his Rwandan backers dispatched him into exile on 17 May 1997. By the time the CNS voted to establish the political institutions of the transition on 4 August 1992, the ruling clique around Mobutu had been reduced to its bare essentials as a band of bloodthirsty thieves who survived by looting and thuggery. For regime diehards, all that seemed to matter was reliance on a few élite units of the military to maintain control over the mining and other revenue-generating parastatals, the central bank, the customs office and the central tax office. Mobutu, the band’s chief, was now afraid to set foot in the capital city, preferring instead to live in his Versailles-type palace at Gbadolite in the far north, on the border between the Congo and the Central African Republic. His was a government that could no longer govern, for lack of legitimacy at home and support abroad, and an administration that could no longer administer, given its lack of essential resources and the disenchantment of civil servants.” (p.142)

[97] Responsible Minerals Initiative. (n.d.). Cobalt. Retrieved November 7, 2025, from https://www.responsiblemineralsinitiative.org/minerals-due-diligence/cobalt/. “The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is the world’s largest producer of cobalt and holds more than 50 percent of the global cobalt reserves. Cobalt is used in lithium-ion batteries that form an integral part of electric automobiles, mobile phones and laptop computers. Demand for cobalt is expected to rise significantly over the coming years. Cobalt is extracted in mechanized and artisanal mining operations. Multiple reports have highlighted concerns over social and environmental impacts of cobalt extraction, including child labor and unsafe working conditions in artisanal cobalt mining.”

21st Century Imperialism

[68] Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Centre Culturel Andrée Blouin, Centre for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa, & Likambo Ya Mabele. (2024, June). The Congolese fight for their own wealth (Dossier No. 77). “Cobalt, lithium, and coltan: these are the minerals needed to advance the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) accounts for around 71% of the total production of cobalt in the world and 35% of its coltan.1 As long as these minerals exist in the Congo, there will be forces seeking to destabilise the country. But the minerals are not the source of the problem: capitalism is. What is the difference between Norway, for instance – a resource-rich country with lucrative oil reserves – and the DRC? The DRC has been placed low down on the capitalist chain of production, its resources exploited while violence is allowed to continue unfettered. While the DRC is one of the richest countries in the world in terms of its resources, it has one of the poorest populations. The UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) estimates that the DRC has untapped mineral reserves worth US$24 trillion as well as half of Africa’s water resources, half of Africa’s forest cover, and 80 million hectares of arable land that have the capacity to feed the entire continent.2 In 2022, two metals – copper and cobalt – were exported for a combined total of US$25 billion, equal to over a third of the Congo’s GDP that year.3 Despite this enormous natural resource wealth, the people of the DRC struggle to survive. In the same year, the World Bank found that around 74.6% of the DRC’s population lives on less than US$2.15 a day, and about one in six Congolese live in extreme poverty.4 The gap between the country’s national wealth and the extreme poverty experienced by the majority is stunning.” (p. 5)

[69] Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Centre Culturel Andrée Blouin, Centre for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa, & Likambo Ya Mabele. (2024, June). The Congolese fight for their own wealth (Dossier No. 77). “By 2018, the DRC produced 71% of the cobalt used in cell phones, computers, and electric cars across the globe. There are approximately 6.5 grammes of cobalt in every cell phone, three pounds in every computer, and thirty pounds in every electric car battery. As more mechanical devices are powered by electric batteries, from kitchen blenders to snow blowers, the world will become more dependent on Congolese cobalt and labour. Since electric batteries that contain more cobalt than lithium are less inclined to explode or catch fire, and since electric battery-powered vehicles are being marketed as a ‘green’ alternative, multinationals in the industry are increasingly narrowing in on cobalt as a strategic resource for increasing future profits.” (p. 19-20)

[70] Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Centre Culturel Andrée Blouin, Centre for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa, & Likambo Ya Mabele. (2024, June). The Congolese fight for their own wealth (Dossier No. 77). “Chinese interests therefore lie in keeping mineral and metal processing within the DRC and building an industrial base for the country. This is a policy that diverges from the IMF-driven agenda for the DRC. Angered by the deepening ties between the DRC and China, the United States government used its influence over the IMF to sabotage the DRC’s attempt to renegotiate a deal with Sicomines, which is a joint venture between the China Railway Group and Power Construction Corporation of China, (PowerChina) as the principal shareholders as well as Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt (with a 1% stake) and the DRC’s state mining company Gécamines (with a 32% stake).” (p. 25)

[71] Ray, E. (2000, June). U.S. military and corporate recolonization of the Congo. CovertAction Quarterly. http://www.covertaction.org/full_text_69_01.htm “The United States’ involvement in Congo since before independence from Belgium in June 1960 has been steady, sinister, and penetrating. Most notable was the CIA’s role in the overthrow (September 1960) and later assassination (January 1961) of Congo’s first Prime Minister, the charismatic (and socialist) Patrice Lumumba. The full extent of U.S. machinations was not known for years,1 but the failure at the time of the United Nations to protect Lumumba was patent. And questions continue to linger over the mysterious plane crash in September 1961 that killed U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold as he was flying to the border town of Ndola to meet with Moise Tshombe, president of the breakaway Katanga Province. The plane fell from the sky, killing all aboard.2 Is it any wonder that in Congo today there is little trust of Washington or respect for the United Nations?” (p. 1)

[72] Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Centre Culturel Andrée Blouin, Centre for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa, & Likambo Ya Mabele. (2024, June). The Congolese fight for their own wealth (Dossier No. 77). “During the last decade of Mobutu’s reign, a period in which the global industrial working class was increasing, the military intervention and political expansion by neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda plunged the Great Lakes region into war. This climate increased the pillaging of resources by transnational companies, which was further exacerbated by the level of state decay under Mobutu, the migration prompted by the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and, in turn, the rampant looting of the Congo’s wealth-fuelled violent conflicts. The Congolese attempt to establish the sovereignty of their new state and fight for their dignity by transforming the colonial society that shaped their lives was thwarted by the West’s re-conquest. This neocolonial structure remained in place through the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko (1965–1997) and then the post-dictatorship governments – despite their different political orientations – of Laurent-Désiré Kabila (1997–2001), Joseph Kabila (2001–2019), and Félix Tshisekedi (2018–present). The names of the political parties of the last three Congolese presidents notwithstanding – Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo/Zaire, People’s Party for Reconstruction and Democracy, and Union of Democracy and Social Progress – the DRC has seen little genuine democracy, reconstruction, or social progress.” (p. 18-19)

[73] Renton, D., Seddon, D., & Zeilig, L. (2007). The Congo: Plunder and resistance. Zed Books. “On 23 September 1991, the 31st brigade of the Zaïrean Air Forces mutinied. Tired of miserable pay, high inflation and the slow progress of democratic transition, they led a riot across Kinshasa. Baptised the ‘people’s army’, they marched into the city centre, encouraging the city to join in. Soon thousands of men, women and children from the city’s poorest neighbourhoods were marching. Shops and warehouses were gutted. Locks were blown off cold-storage units and banks with machine-gun fire. The houses of wealthy businessmen and members of Mobutu’s inner circle were targeted. The houses of expatriates were also attacked. The former headquarters of the Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution (MPR) was ransacked, with the rioters scribbling on the ruins of the building ‘All’s bad that end’s bad.’ René Devisch described a ‘carnival-like ambience’.1 Looted goods were passed from soldier to civilian. The riot went on for days. For more than four years afterwards, the protest movement blossomed. Students were joined by the masses of the urban poor, workers, informal traders, the unemployed and the army. When Mobutu agreed to accept political changes in April 1990, he had no idea of the extent of the rebellion that he was about to unleash. The dictator looked as though he might be consumed by the popular revolt. Riots, general strikes,  religious marches and political meetings punctuated the Congo’s second and frustrated revolution. The changes that were taking place were not exclusive to Zaïre. Reform was now sweeping across many parts of the continent, a second ‘wind of change’ comparable to the earlier mood of euphoria which had accompanied decolonisation. From 1989, protests broke out across sub-Saharan Africa. In 1991 alone, eighty-six major protests took place in thirty countries. By 1992  many governments were forced to introduce reforms; in 1993 fourteen countries held elections. In a four-year period, from the start of the protests in 1990, thirty-five regimes were swept away by street demonstrations, mass strikes and other forms of protest, and by elections that were often the first held for a generation. For more than ten years, many Africa states had been forced by the IMF and World Bank to implement ‘reforms’ and cuts in the public sector, including reductions in health and education budgets, as a condition for new loans. Zaïre experienced these pressures, forcing the government to reduce expenditure on health, education and research.” (p. 147-148)

[74] Friends of the Congo. (n.d.). D.R. Congo Primer. Friends of the Congo. Retrieved June 28, 2024, from https://friendsofthecongo.org/primer/. “In 1994, when Mobutu’s hold on power was already faltering, the neighbouring Rwanda was shaken by an ethnic genocide. An estimated one million Tutsis were killed at the hands of the ethnic majority Hutus. In the aftermath, around 1.4 million Hutus fearing prosecution fled into Congo’s Eastern provinces, prompting Rwandan troops to invade the region in 1996, to root out remaining extremists responsible for the genocide. This led to the First Congo War. In 1997 the Rwandan army was joined by Ugandan forces, forming a coalition that defeated Mobutu to install their own president, Laurent Désiré Kabila. In 1998, Kabila called on the Southern African Development Community to assist him in extricating Congo from the clutches of Rwanda and Uganda. Eventually, nine different African countries were engaged in combat on Congolese ground, lending this conflict the names Great African War and Second Congo War. An estimated 5.4 million Congolese perished – half of whom were children under the age of five – as a result of the conflict and conflict related causes.”

[75] Panzi Foundation. (n.d.). Understanding the genocide in the Congo War. Retrieved in 2024 from https://panzifoundation.org/war-in-congo/. “1996Laurent-Désiré Kabila, backed by Rwanda and Uganda (forming the AFDL), leads a rebellion to overthrow Mobutu Sese Seko, ending his 32-year dictatorship.”

[76] Panzi Foundation. (n.d.). Understanding the genocide in the Congo War. Retrieved in 2024 from https://panzifoundation.org/war-in-congo/. “1999In July 1999, the Lusaka Peace Agreement is signed, leading to the withdrawal of foreign troops and a framework for a power-sharing government. Major rebel groups, including the Rwandan-backed RCD (Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie) and the Ugandan-backed MLC (Mouvement de Libération du Congo), are granted representation alongside the existing Congolese leadership and political opposition.”

[77] Panzi Foundation. (n.d.). Understanding the genocide in the Congo War. Retrieved in 2024 from https://panzifoundation.org/war-in-congo/. “2001Event: President Laurent-Désiré Kabila is assassinated by one of his bodyguards. His son, Joseph Kabila, assumes power amid the ongoing conflict.”

[78] Panzi Foundation. (n.d.). Understanding the genocide in the Congo War. Retrieved in 2024 from https://panzifoundation.org/war-in-congo/. “In April 2002, the Sun City Agreement is signed in South Africa, establishing a transitional government that includes President Joseph Kabila, representatives from rebel factions, political opposition, and civil society.”

[79] Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Centre Culturel Andrée Blouin, Centre for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa, & Likambo Ya Mabele. (2024, June). The Congolese fight for their own wealth (Dossier No. 77). “Less than a decade after the Congolese government nationalised all mining and mineral rights (in 1966) and then Union Minière (in 1967), countries across the Global South came under pressure from international finance to privatise their nationalised mining sectors as neoliberalism spread across the globe during the 1970s. In the DRC, pressure from the IMF and World Bank led to the beginnings of privatisation in the 1980s, though it was not until later, with the mining code of 2002, that this trend began to devastate the economy, largely because of the political turmoil and period of war that defined the country from 1996 to 2003. The weakness of the state due to this war, the callousness of the new political leadership in Kinshasa, and the advice of the World Bank pushed the DRC to offer deals that were advantageous to multinational mining companies at the expense of their population. In 2002, a new mining code in the DRC provided foreign companies – all from the US and Europe – with favourable taxation, incentives for exploration, an open door to expatriate profits, and the right to circumvent labour and environmental regulations. The code forbade amendments for ten years and contained a clause that any changes to the fiscal regime could not come into effect until 2022. The Lutundula Commission of 2005 later revealed that then President Joseph Kabila and other officials secretly colluded with corporations to receive small personal gains, which paled in comparison to the massive advantages given to foreign companies. At an African Development Bank meeting in December 2008, then President of Botswana Festus Mogae said that tax and royalty exemptions given to multinational mining companies prevented African states from retaining a fair share of profits from the extraction of resources, which is why, he continued, ‘it is necessary to renegotiate some of them’. In 2011, the DRC tried to revise the mining code, but that attempt only provided more benefits for foreign firms.” (p. 23-24)

[80] Panzi Foundation. (n.d.). Understanding the genocide in the Congo War. Retrieved in 2024 from https://panzifoundation.org/war-in-congo/. “2006Joseph Kabila wins the first democratic election in 40 years. The international community hails it as a step toward stability…Despite the elections, violence and human rights abuses persist in eastern Congo. Armed groups still control mineral-rich areas, and child soldier recruitment remains rampant.”

[81] Panzi Foundation. (n.d.). Understanding the genocide in the Congo War. Retrieved in 2024 from https://panzifoundation.org/war-in-congo/. “2008After Laurent Nkunda’s CNDP faction is integrated into the Congolese army, dissatisfaction leads to the creation of M23, backed by Rwanda…M23 displaces tens of thousands of civilians and commits atrocities, including mass rapes and forced recruitment. Civilians in Goma, the provincial capital, endure widespread violence. ”

[82] Panzi Foundation. (n.d.). Understanding the genocide in the Congo War. Retrieved in 2024 from https://panzifoundation.org/war-in-congo/. “Event: In November 2012, the M23 rebel group seized the city of Goma, displacing approximately 140,000 people (totaling more than 500,000 since the conflict began in April 2012). M23 held the city for about two weeks, during which time they controlled key strategic locations and continued to disrupt humanitarian aid efforts. The United Nations and Congolese forces, with support from the UN’s Intervention Brigade, launched a coordinated military response to drive M23 out of the city. By late November 2012, M23 was forced to retreat and ultimately went into exile in Rwanda and Uganda…Civilians endure looting, displacement, and extrajudicial killings. Humanitarian access is blocked, exacerbating the existing crisis in eastern Congo.”

[83] Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Centre Culturel Andrée Blouin, Centre for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa, & Likambo Ya Mabele. (2024, June). The Congolese fight for their own wealth (Dossier No. 77). “The entry of the Chinese state and private Chinese companies into Africa over the past two decades has provided competition against the Global North countries and their mining companies. This was the first time that these multinational corporations faced direct competition, a shift that provided the space for the Congolese government to amend the mining code in 2018 on more beneficial terms. This new code stripped the ‘stability clause’ that guaranteed mining companies ten-year protection, and it increased the Congolese state’s royalty rates for non-ferrous and base metals (such as cobalt and copper) from 2% to 3.5% and allowed royalty rates to be raised to 10% for ‘strategic substances’ such as coltan and lithium.47 Furthermore, the Chinese state entered the African market with a development agenda that was very different from the pressure campaigns waged by Global North governments, as we shall see.” (p. 24)

[84] Panzi Foundation. (n.d.). Understanding the genocide in the Congo War. Retrieved in 2024 from https://panzifoundation.org/war-in-congo/. “2021M23 resurges, capturing key towns in North Kivu. Reports allege that the group receives military support, including weapons and training, from Rwanda, exacerbating regional tensions…Tens of thousands are displaced, with civilians enduring killings, sexual violence, and forced recruitment. Food insecurity worsens as farming activities are disrupted, and humanitarian access is restricted.”

[85] Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Centre Culturel Andrée Blouin, Centre for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa, & Likambo Ya Mabele. (2024, June). The Congolese fight for their own wealth (Dossier No. 77). “Glencore posted market-adjusted earnings of US$3.5 billion for 2023 (before interest and taxes).10 It is the ‘subsidy’ of suppressed wages (partly facilitated by coerced and forced labour) and lowered state revenue that provide this company with such high earnings. Without the blood, sweat, and misery of the Congolese portion of the ‘bottom billion’ and the raw materials they produce, companies in the Global North would not be able to extract such high profits.” (p. 8)

[86] Panzi Foundation. (n.d.). Understanding the genocide in the Congo War. Retrieved in 2024 from https://panzifoundation.org/war-in-congo/. “2024M23 consolidates its hold on strategic territories in eastern DRC despite international condemnation. Reports confirm the group’s continued access to arms and cross-border support, undermining peace efforts. The UN Group of Experts reports that M23’s control over Goma and surrounding areas provides them access to significant mineral wealth, including coltan and cassiterite mines. The exploitation and smuggling of these “conflict minerals” fund the rebel group’s activities and exacerbate regional instability…The prolonged conflict leads to mass displacement, worsening malnutrition rates, and strained healthcare services in affected areas. Refugee camps face outbreaks of cholera and other diseases due to overcrowding and poor sanitation.”

[88] Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Centre Culturel Andrée Blouin, Centre for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa, & Likambo Ya Mabele. (2024, June). The Congolese fight for their own wealth (Dossier No. 77). “ On 20 January 2024, the DRC finalised the renegotiation of their minerals-forinfrastructure contract with China, which provided $7 billion in financing. The agreement is rooted in a joint venture for copper and cobalt mining between Gécamines (the DRC’s state mining company) and Sicomines. According to Bloomberg, as part of the deal, Gécamines will receive a 1.2% royalty on Sicomines’ proceeds and the right to market 32% of its production.53 In addition, the 2024 renegotiated agreement updated the financing to focus primarily on the construction of national roads. This is key not only for the mining sector to function, but also for the well-being of the Congolese people, as the DRC has fewer all-weather paved roads than any 26 other country of its size in Africa (for comparison, Saudi Arabia, whose land area is roughly the same size but is inhabited by less than half the DRC’s population, has twenty times more paved roads). The agreement also secured the DRC a 40% stake in the Busanga hydropower plant, a joint project between the two countries that was built by Chinese companies.” (p. 26-27)

[89] Panzi Foundation. (n.d.). Understanding the genocide in the Congo War. Retrieved in 2024 from https://panzifoundation.org/war-in-congo/. “2025M23 rebels, reportedly backed by up to 4,000 Rwandan troops, seize Goma and Bukavu, the largest cities in eastern DRC, marking a significant escalation in the conflict. Following the capture of Bukavu, M23 forces advanced south towards Uvira…The capture of Goma and Bukavu triggers a mass exodus, with thousands fleeing to neighboring countries. The humanitarian crisis intensifies, with overcrowded camps, food shortages, and increased gender-based violence. Refugee camps face worsening conditions, with disease outbreaks due to overcrowding and poor sanitation.”

[90] Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Centre Culturel Andrée Blouin, Centre for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa, & Likambo Ya Mabele. (2024, June). The Congolese fight for their own wealth (Dossier No. 77). “The DRC continues to be dominated by exploitation and oppression at the hands of a powerful Congolese oligarchy and multinational corporations that operate with the permission of the former. Furthermore, the country suffers, on one hand, from wars of aggression by its neighbours Rwanda and Uganda, aided by proxy militia groups, and, on the other, from multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and IMF that enforce neoliberal policies as a requirement for receiving loans. Several of the most important components of modern global infrastructure rely on minerals and metals mined in the DRC, such as coltan, cobalt, copper, diamonds, gold, tungsten, and uranium. For instance, the building blocks of the digitised global economy are extracted from places like the DRC at very low costs. Militia groups secure labour power through force, resulting in no or low wages for miners and other workers in industrial mining areas. Due to these working conditions, the rate of exploitation of workers who produce the iPhone – a ubiquitous symbol of the end product of mineral ore – is twenty-five times higher than the rate of exploitation of textile workers in nineteenth century England.” (p. 7)

Consequences/On-going Struggles

[91] Friends of the Congo. (n.d.). D.R. Congo Primer. Friends of the Congo. Retrieved June 28, 2024, from https://friendsofthecongo.org/primer/.“ From the start of this conflict in the 90s to today, over 6 million Congolese people have died and another 7 million internally displaced, 25 million face starvation, meanwhile 70 million of Congo’s 100 million inhabitants live in extreme poverty on less than $2.15 a day.”

[92] Panzi Foundation. (n.d.). Understanding the genocide in the Congo War. Retrieved in 2024 from https://panzifoundation.org/war-in-congo/. “The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has endured one of the deadliest conflicts since World War II, with over 6 million lives lost and millions more displaced. Often driven by the struggle over its vast mineral wealth, the ongoing conflict has caused untold suffering, particularly for women and children. Sexual violence has been a weapon of war, with mass atrocities committed by rebel groups and foreignbacked militias. Since the influx of refugees following the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the eastern regions of the DRC have been caught in cycles of violence. While the First and Second Congo Wars formally ended in 1997 and 2003, armed groups like the M23 continue to destabilize the region. Despite various peace agreements, the underlying causes (poverty, resource exploitation, and weak governance) have yet to be resolved, leaving eastern Congo in a state of chronic insecurity.”

[93] Friends of the Congo. (n.d.). D.R. Congo Primer. Friends of the Congo. Retrieved June 28, 2024, from https://friendsofthecongo.org/primer/. “In the past two years the conflict has exacerbated, due to the resurgence of the Rwanda-backed rebel group M23 that launched a string of offenses, killing and displacing thousands.”

[94] United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. (n.d.). Democratic Republic of the Congo. “The crisis in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) continues to deteriorate rapidly, with escalating armed conflict driving mass displacement and exacerbating humanitarian needs. The M23 armed group now controls Goma following intense clashes with the Congolese army, that forced hundreds of thousands of civilians to Eee. Across the country, more than 21 million people already required humanitarian aid before the latest escalation of the crisis, one of the highest figures worldwide. Approximately one million have sought refuge in neighbouring countries, while escalating violence in the east threatens to deepen the crisis. Since early January, escalating conflict and intensified M23 attacks in North and South Kivu, has displaced hundreds of thousands, worsening the humanitarian crisis and straining already scarce resources. The violence has killed hundreds and injured thousands, while road closures and insecurity further restrict humanitarian access. The situation in and around North Kivu’s capital Goma – where 700,000 people were already displaced – remains very fluid. M23’s advances into South Kivu is creating a dangerous security vacuum, forcing displaced people to Eee once again as their camps are destroyed. Summary executions and cases of sexual and gender-based violence are being reported. The Goma airport remains closed. Most of the roads connecting the city to the rest of the country are inaccessible and lake transportation is not a viable option due to restrictions imposed by M23. Approximately 2.7 million people were already facing severe food insecurity in North Kivu, South Kivu and Ituri. Humanitarian infrastructure and warehouses have been looted, severely compromising the humanitarian response. Large quantities of food, medicine, and essential medical supplies have been lost in targeted attacks on UN agencies and humanitarian non-governmental organizations.” 

[95] Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Centre Culturel Andrée Blouin, Centre for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa, & Likambo Ya Mabele. (2024, June). The Congolese fight for their own wealth (Dossier No. 77). “However, this mineral – and the ‘green’ alternative it is often alleged to represent – is tinged with the sweat and blood of the nearly half a million Congolese men, women, and children who mine it. Whether direct employees of corporations or ‘artisanal’ miners, they work in open-face mines and dangerous pits that run at least sixty-five feet deep and are highly subject to eboulements (cave-ins), glissements de terrain (landslides), and the sudden loss of oxygen caused by the fire that workers use to heat up ore. Most direct employees are equipped with some – though insufficient – safety gear and machinery, while most of the artisanal miners are left with nothing but the strength of their hands to dig out this precious metal. Though the labour of artisanal miners is integral to the output of the multinationals, these companies barely compensate miners for contributing to their revenue. To take one example of many, over the past decade Glencore has encouraged artisanal miners to work on its leased concessions in order to increase its cobalt production. During this period, the price paid to miners collapsed from $40 a pound to $13.50 a pound. The real wage for all cobalt miners, whether they work independently or are on a company’s payroll, is not much more than the bottom billion wage of US$1 or US$2 a day.” (p. 20)

[96] Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Centre Culturel Andrée Blouin, Centre for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa, & Likambo Ya Mabele. (2024, June). The Congolese fight for their own wealth (Dossier No. 77). “According to UNICEF’s 2014 estimates, forty thousand of these artisanal miners are children as young as eight years old, though figures from the Congolese government and mining companies suggest that this dramatically underrepresents reality. These children have little choice but to work since their parents have no formal employment and often cannot afford to buy food or pay school fees. Alongside women miners, they are the most vulnerable segment of the workforce and face a greater chance of being maimed or killed. Furthermore, many children who work in the mines drink and smoke heavily and are paid in nothing more than food and a place to sleep...There was a culture of rape and violence. Girls often fell victim to rape, which, as children, we were powerless to prevent. Sometimes lives were lost for a few francs’.” (p. 22)

[97] Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Centre Culturel Andrée Blouin, Centre for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa, & Likambo Ya Mabele. (2024, June). The Congolese fight for their own wealth (Dossier No. 77). “Land. Congolese land must be protected and used with the best interests of the Congolese people in mind. Securing Congolese livelihoods, food sovereignty, and human security must be a greater priority than extractivism. Demilitarising the land is key to ending both widespread violence and human displacement. For this to happen, the capitalist view of the land as a commodity for sale must first be deconstructed and replaced with an emphasis on the ancestral value of land that centres the well-being of all its inhabitants. Developing economic autonomy. Congolese resources must be controlled by the Congolese people with the aim of strengthening society and resisting the pressure of international financial institutions. Profits from the country’s natural wealth must be reinvested to develop local manufacturing industries and encourage national autonomy and self-sufficiency in areas such as agro-industry and technology. We must plan boldly for longer-term and larger economic projects that can drive widescale transformation to benefit the country. Society. Let us begin to reinvent social relations by proposing solutions to rebuild the social contract that binds us together. We must reintroduce a culture of respect for human rights by upholding traditional ubuntu principles of equality. State justice. Just governance must be promoted within national institutions such as the presidency, the national assembly, and the courts. Leaders must apply the law fairly, in accordance with the constitution and the legitimate expectations of the people. Dignity. We must reclaim and heal our hearts and minds, organise ourselves responsibly, and embrace self-sacrifice to further community aims. Our movement must improve our confidence in our ability, as the Congolese people – in particular the Congolese youth – to change the DRC for better. Critical thinking. It is important to build our collective intelligence in order to respond to the challenges that face us with clear ideas. Our education system must teach comprehensive knowledge systems based on scientific thinking that includes valuable contributions from African societies, past and present. The production and dissemination of Congolese patriotic culture. We must illustrate the vision of the Congo and the world we want to live in through the arts, culture, sports, and all the activities in which we engage, which must be made available in our local 34 languages. Through collective leadership, we must develop common values based on inclusive decision-making to reform our culture. Organising citizenship collectives. The code of conduct we create must be implemented within the Congo and in diaspora communities through citizens’ collectives. Wherever we are, we must create places to meet, debate, and collaborate.” (p. 33-35)

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