Tragedy in the Congo

• The Congo had been a colony of Belgium

• It was a treasure house of natural resources

• The exploitation of sources from the Congo enriched Belgians but increased the suffering of the Congolese

• But after clashes with nationalists, the Belgians arranged the first national election in 1960, and King Baudouin arrived to formally give territory freedom

• Yet Belgians, and European and American investors, expected to continue collecting profits from Congo’s diamonds, gold, uranium, and copper.

• Patrice Lumumba was the first democratically chosen leader of the Democratic Republic of Congo

• And he had given a speech that independence was not enough

• He had given a speech that Africans had to also benefit from the great wealth in their soil

• And then, Lumumba declared that he would turn to the Soviet Union after failing to get aid from U.S.A.

• He said this during the Cold War

• Shortly after Lumumba took office as prime minister, the C.I.A., with White House approval, ordered his assassination

• An undercover agent was dispatched with poison

• In addition, American and Belgian officials funneled cash and aid to rival politicians

• These rival politicians seized power and arrested Lumumba

• Fearful of revolt by Lumumba’s supporters, the new Congolese leaders ordered him flown to copper-rich Katanga region in the country’s south, whose secession Belgium had just helped orchestrate

• There, on January 17, 1961, after being beaten and tortured, Patrice Lumumba was shot

• The Western governments and corporations arrayed against Lumumba were too powerful and the resources in his control too few

• At independence, the Congo had fewer than three dozen university graduates among a black population of more than 15 million, and only three of some 5,000 senior positions in the civil service were filled by Congolese

• Four years after the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, one of Lumumba’s captors, an army officer named Joseph Mobutu, again with enthusiastic American support, staged a coup and began a disastrous, 32-year dictatorship

• Mobutu was showered with more than $1 billion in American aid and enthusiastically welcomed to the White House by a succession of presidents; George H. W. Bush called him “one of our most valued friends.”

• But Mobutu bled his country dry, amassed a fortune estimated at $4 billion, jetted the world by rented Concorde and bought himself an array of grand villas in Europe and multiple palaces and a yacht at home

• Mobutu also let public services shrivel to nothing and roads and railways be swallowed by the rain forest

• By 1997, when Mobutu was overthrown and died, his country was in a state of wreckage from which it has not yet recovered

• Since that time, the fatal combination of enormous natural riches and the dysfunctional government Mobutu left has ignited a long, multisided war that has killed huge numbers of Congolese or forced them from their homes

• And remember that while most African colonies were governed either by officials of a European country or by Africans working for European governments, King Leopold of Belgium controlled the Belgian Congo as his own personal territory

• His agents in the Congo used forced labor (slaves in all but name) to extract rubber, his single most profitable export

• By taking the women of Congolese villages as hostages, Leopold had turned the men into forced labourers, with a monthly quota of wild rubber to collect

• Many hostages starved to death and many forced labourers worked to death

• Demographers today estimate that the population of the Congo fell roughly by half over the 40-year period beginning in around 1880

• Finally, by 1908, in return for £3.8 million, Leopold handed over control of the Congo to the Belgian state

• It should also be noted that one of the methods used by the king’s police enforcers for the failure of Africans to pay taxes or produce sufficient rubber was the cutting off of African hands by the white colonizers

Quick List: Several Important African Nationalists

Kwame Nkrumah – Independence Leader of Gold Coast (Renamed Ghana) and proponent of Pan-Africanism

Jomo Kenyatta – Independence Leader of Kenya

Léopold Sédar Senghor – First President of Senegal and proponent of Negritude movement

Julius Kambarage Nyerere – First President of Tanzania and also the major force behind the Organization of African Unity