Featuring a wealth of first-hand interviews and secondary sources, the narrative travels from war-torn villages in the country's east to the chaotic, pulsing capital of Kinshasa in order to bring us the voices of the Congolese - from impoverished gold prospectors and market women to government officials - as it explores the complicated political, ethnic and economic geography of this tattered land. A must-read for anyone interested in contemporary Africa, The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between, Hope and Despair sheds new light on this sprawling and often misunderstood country that has become iconic both for its great potential and dashed hopes.
Featuring a wealth of first-hand interviews and secondary sources, the narrative travels from war-torn villages in the country's east to the chaotic, pulsing capital of Kinshasa in order to bring us the voices of the Congolese - from impoverished gold prospectors and market women to government officials - as it explores the complicated political, ethnic and economic geography of this tattered land. A must-read for anyone interested in contemporary Africa, The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between, Hope and Despair sheds new light on this sprawling and often misunderstood country that has become iconic both for its great potential and dashed hopes.
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Overview
Featuring a wealth of first-hand interviews and secondary sources, the narrative travels from war-torn villages in the country's east to the chaotic, pulsing capital of Kinshasa in order to bring us the voices of the Congolese - from impoverished gold prospectors and market women to government officials - as it explores the complicated political, ethnic and economic geography of this tattered land. A must-read for anyone interested in contemporary Africa, The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between, Hope and Despair sheds new light on this sprawling and often misunderstood country that has become iconic both for its great potential and dashed hopes.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781780323480 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 09/12/2013 |
| Series: | African Arguments |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Democratic Republic of Congo
Between Hope And Despair
By Michael Deibert
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2013 Michael DeibertAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78032-348-0
CHAPTER 1
KINGDOM OF KONGO TO FIRST CONGO REPUBLIC
Despite its present image as a place of endless war, the people occupying the area that today comprises the nation of Congo were members of a myriad state-like entities that governed their various realms, sometimes for centuries, with varying degrees of sophistication and competence. These empires and statelets extended over 2.3 million square miles, of which some 60 per cent consisted of jungle cover. The mighty Congo River cut through the expanse, flowing 2,700 miles (4,344 kilometres) from its headwaters to the estuary, and spanning some 7 miles across at its widest point. Buffalo, cheetahs, elephants, leopards, lions, rhinoceros and zebras roamed its savannahs and mountain gorillas clung to the slopes of its densely forested mountains.
Spreading eastward from the Atlantic Ocean and encompassing parts of present-day Angola, Congo-Brazzaville and Gabon as well as Congo itself, the Kingdom of Kongo was the dominant coastal kingdom in central Africa from roughly 1482 until 1550. Its political structure was centred around M'banza-Kongo, where the king (Mwene Kongo or 'Lord of Congo') resided and around which the gravitational pull of central power revolved for the surrounding provinces. Kongo had an extraordinarily strong central state, with provinces ruled by governors appointed by the king, and a shield-bearing infantry supported by thousands of lightly armed troops.
At some point in 1482 or 1483, the Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão came ashore from the Atlantic near the mouth of the Congo River, initiating the first recorded contact between Europeans and the Bakongo people, several of whom Cão promptly seized as hostages and took back to Portugal. He returned to Africa again in 1485, bringing these hostages with him, and initiated further contact with the local people that resulted in his leaving some of his party behind in Africa as he returned to Europe with still more locals, including several Kongo nobles. After a third visit in 1487, Kongo's king, Nzinga Nkuwu, sent the kingdom's spiritual leader and several other high-ranking officials back to Portugal. In 1491, Ruy de Sousa led the first official Portuguese diplomatic mission to the kingdom.
Nzinga Nkuwu would rule until 1506, even going so far as to accept Christian baptism as João I before lapsing back into traditional religion. Upon Nzinga's death, his Catholic son, Afonso, won a battle to succeed his father and Kongo's links with Lisbon deepened.Under Afonso's own son, Diogo I Nkumbi a Mpudi, who assumed the throne in 1545, tensions with the Portuguese flared up and relations alternated between war and collaboration for much of the rest of the century.
By the 1530s, more than 5,000 slaves per year were being sent across the Atlantic from Kongo; by the 1600s, that number was 15,000. From 1561 until 1576, Kongo experienced lawlessness and revolt amid invasions from the east by the mysterious Jaga. Cannibalistic, palm wine-drinking and cattle-killing, the Jaga invaded Kongo in 1568 and succeeded in destroying M'banza-Kongo before being beaten back with Portuguese assistance. With dissension rife within the monarchy, Kongo experienced civil war throughout much of the 1700s, and by the late 1770s armies loyal to royal pretenders dotted Kongo territory.
It was during this time that the messianic strain within the spiritual/political life of the Bakongo first came to prominence, as exemplified by Dona Beatriz, a woman born of noble Kongo parentage under the name Kimpa Vita in what is today Angola. Given to receiving visions of a spiritual and religious nature, she ventured forth in the early 1700s at a time when the kingdom was in the grip of seemingly endless civil war. Claiming to be possessed by the spirit of Saint Anthony in what was by then one of the most heavily Catholicised regions of Africa, Beatriz preached in favour of the unification of Kongo under one ruler. She developed her own, idiosyncratic brand of religion, which she sought to take to the territory's far corners before being captured and burned as a heretic in 1706.
Immediately to the east of Kongo, in an area encompassing much of the present-day state of Kasai and bordered by the Kasai, Lulua and Sankuru rivers, the Kuba kingdom subsumed several local ethnic groups and flourished due to its control of the ivory trade.The Kuba formed a multilingual, multi-ethnic kingdom with the king based in Nsheng, from where he governed in tandem with various consultative royal councils over a political system that fanned out through thousands of (some quite diminutive) villages. During the late 1800s, cessionary struggles among the monarchy somewhat diminished the coherence of the state structure, but the aged Kuba king, Kwet a Mbewky, still felt sufficiently in charge to levy a sentence of death on anyone who showed a foreigner the path to his royal court.
South of the dense rainforests, on the savannah, the Luba empire existed in what was historically a sparsely populated region. The empire, 'a homogenous religious culture',stretched across north-central Katanga province to the border of Kasai. The Luba had a complex, episodic genesis myth full of courtly and familial intrigue and characters such as Nkongolo Mwamba Muiya Nkololo ('Nkongolo Mwamba who dances with the nkololo knife'). Like the deity of the Old Testament, the creation myth of Nkongolo displays a marked sadism, with Nkongolo frequently killing those who displease him. While the Luba's 'sacred villages' spread outward from Lake Boya in a manner linked to Luba cosmology, and although there was a strong Luba state in what today is the province of Katanga by the sixteenth century, slavery of the Luba was still practised by the Kuba well into the 1890s. The system of government was a melding of balopwe (sacred kingship) and rule by consultative council. Via migration, the Luba would eventually introduce their language to central Kasai. By the 1860s, the Luba and Bemba were solid allies of Arab slavers operating in the region.
Although its greatest king, Ilunga Tshibinda, was a Luba, the Lunda empire was a distinct kingdom stretching over much of what is now Katanga, despite being far less a military force than Kongo to the west. By the late 1700s, the Lunda empire was huge, and by the 1800s the kingdom was warring (with little effect) against Kongo.
Things began to change significantly during the second half of the nineteenth century, with the driving catalyst the British-born explorer Henry Morton Stanley. Born John Rowlands in Denbigh, Wales and reared in a workhouse of Dickensian grimness before fleeing to the United States at 18, he arrived in New Orleans, took the name of a merchant he met there and subsequently ended up fighting in both the Confederate and Union armies during the American Civil War. After the war, Stanley carved out a new career as a journalist, and in this guise he first travelled to Africa at the head of an expedition to locate the Scottish explorer David Livingstone, who had disappeared while travelling there. Against all odds, Stanley succeeded. Returning to Africa in an attempt to map the Congo River underwritten by his contacts in the newspaper business – an endeavour that would take nearly three years and during which more than half of his expedition would die – Stanley traversed nearly the entire waist of Africa. Setting the template for other foreign invading powers in years to come, Stanley's expeditions through the heart of the continent have been described as:
small armies ... [that] cut through Africa with mean efficiency, blasting away at troublesome native settlements, flogging porters to death, leaving his expeditions' sick and lame to die on the trail and the deserters hanging in the trees.
About the time Stanley's Civil War exploits were coming to an end, King Leopold II (Léopold-Louis-Philippe-Marie-Victor) was crowned in Belgium. The product of an ice-cold relationship with his mother and father, Leopold's attitude towards the country he presided over as a constitutional monarch was one of barely concealed contempt, as a famous comment he once made – petit pays, petit gens (small country, small people) – illustrated.
Driven by visions of empire and an obsession with maps, surrounded by a Europe in the throes of the Industrial Revolution and hungry for raw materials, Leopold cast about for suitable colonial holdings before finally convening a conference in Brussels in September 1876 that focused on central Africa. During the conference he expounded upon the supposedly civilising mission behind his interest in Congo, and convinced the attendees – explorers, geographers, scientists and others – to endorse a chain of 'bases' to be set up in 'unclaimed' central Africa. The conference resulted in the founding of the Association Internationale Africaine (International African Association). Leopold would go on to form a succession of similarly named, quasi-scientific 'societies' whose main aim seemed to be to aid him in camouflaging the true nature of his interest.
A year after Leopold's Brussels conference, Stanley emerged from the African brush. To Stanley, death was the only suitable response to any form of insult or 'mocking' from those he encountered en route, and those within his party were treated little better. Leopold recognised Stanley's brutal effectiveness and summoned the explorer to a meeting in Brussels. Leopold wanted Stanley to lead his project in Congo, a task for whose public aims Stanley could hardly have been more ill-suited. Both men, however, understood what the other wanted. Stanley accepted.
Upon returning to Africa in 1883, Stanley set furiously to work building the foundations of Leopold's empire along the Congo River, signing 'treaties' with local chiefs that most could neither read nor understand. It was decided that the colonial capital would be in Boma, a somnolent town of rough-hewn Portuguese traders and local Africans some 50 miles inland from the Atlantic coast. The American businessman and diplomat Henry Shelton Sanford, who had acted as the initial liaison between Leopold and Stanley, then persuaded US President Chester A. Arthur to recognise Leopold's claim to Congo in early 1884, and the Berlin Conference in November of that year entrusted an expanse the size of Western Europe to the whims of a king who had never set foot there. The next year the État Indépendant du Congo (Congo Free State) was born.
The 1885 to 1908 existence of the Congo Free State was and remains one of history's great crimes, but at the time the rape and pillage of the prostrate land continued with much approbation from the world at large. Leopold was even elected president of the (British) Aborigines' Protection Society.
Leopold's Congo was connected through a series of riverboat stations along its mighty aquatic arteries, but how was the commerce that flowed outward from its interior accomplished? To keep recalcitrant locals in line as his agents searched for ivory and rubber, Leopold formed the Force Publique in 1886. Largely made up of white officers and African foot soldiers, often press-ganged into service, the Force Publique would become an object of terror for the Congolese. Barely disciplined troops harassed civilians with abandon and the chicotte – a razorsharp leather whip – was the favoured tool for chastising those who fell foul of the authorities, often resulting in permanent injuries. The amputation of limbs became the norm as a means to instil fear among local people, while slaves latched together by chains around their necks and forced to work for the colonial authorities became a regular sight in the so-called 'Free State'.
The Congo had become a vast gulag of slave labour. Leopold formed the Anglo-Belgian India-Rubber Company (Abir) in August 1892 in collaboration with British businessman John Thomas North, and the Compagnie du Kasai was formed in 1901. Gold was discovered in Ituri in 1903, and Katanga was viewed as sufficiently rich to be administered separately by the Comité Spécial du Katanga from 1894 until 1910. In a fairly typical mission, in April 1899 a Belgian commander led a band of looters to sack Nsheng, which the Belgians attacked again in July of the following year, spelling the effective end of the Kuba empire. From 1891 until 1892, the Canadian officer Captain William Stairs led a military campaign on Leopold's behalf in Katanga which succeeded in crushing the Yeke kingdom and killing its leader, the king Msiri.
Most of the meetings between whites and Africans were tragic during this period, and none more so than that of Ota Benga, an Mbuti pygmy whose entire immediate family was slain by the Force Publique while he was away on a hunting expedition. 'Discovered' by the American missionary Samuel Phillips Verner, Benga was shipped along with several other Congolese to the 1904 St Louis World's Fair, where he was displayed as a curiosity to gaping crowds. Returning to Congo after the fair, Benga felt out of place and subsequently returned with Verner to the United States where he lived as a kind of human exhibit at the Museum of Natural History and then at the Bronx Zoo in New York. Unable to return home, in March 1916, after building a ceremonial fire, Benga shot himself in the heart with a stolen revolver in Virginia.
By July 1890, the American missionary George Washington Williams, who had travelled throughout the country, authored an open letter to Leopold in which he accused the king of appalling brutality and Stanley of tyrannical megalomania and called for the international community to investigate the atrocities. Another visitor, the African-American minister William Henry Sheppard, spent significant time among the Kuba in Kasai, one of the areas of Congo most violated by Leopold's thirst for rubber. Sheppard was among the first outsiders to witness and report the policy of dismemberment practised by Leopold's forces. The Polish author Joseph Conrad was sufficiently disturbed by his experiences in Leopold's Congo in 1890–91 that he was inspired to write Heart of Darkness, which would become his most famous work, nearly a decade later. Despite justified criticism of its portrayal of Africans, the book remains perhaps the most searing portrait of Leopold's conquest and rape of Congo and those who facilitated it.
In 1891, E. D. Morel began working as a shipping clerk for the Liverpool-based Elder Dempster Lines, which was contracted for shipping between Antwerp and Boma on behalf of the Congo Free State. What he saw at the docks in Antwerp disturbed him. In exchange for the rubber and ivory flowing into Belgium, only firearms, ammunition and chains were flowing back to Congo. Morel's logic was clear, his conclusion terrifying: 'How then, was the rubber and ivory being acquired? Certainly not by commercial dealing. Nothing was going in to pay for what was coming out.'
Given the publicity generated about the horrors taking place in Congo, in 1903 the great Irish patriot and statesman Roger Casement, then the British consul in Boma, was commissioned by the British government to look into the allegations of abuse in the Congo Free State. Casement, a brilliant intellect who had in fact met Leopold in Brussels in 1900, travelled throughout the territory and his report, published the following year, caused a sensation. It makes for unrelentingly grim reading even today.
Casement encounters towns devoid of goats, sheep and fowl, which have been stolen by the authorities, where the grindingly poor inhabitants flee in terror at the approach of his steamer. He observes the aftermath of a punitive expedition by the authorities against locals in Chumbiri who have been lax in remitting goats and fowl, which has resulted in the 'disappearance' of 17 people. At Ifomi, he sees 15 local women – five nursing children and three pregnant – imprisoned because their husbands have failed to deliver the requisite amount of rubber, and tied together 'neck to neck or ankle to ankle' when they try to sleep at night. Casement also finds that military operations – often using 'local' (i.e. Congolese) soldiers under white Belgian command – have been conducted during which 'there had been much loss of life, accompanied ... by a somewhat general mutilation of the dead'. By mutilation of the dead, Casement meant the cutting off of hands and feet, practised upon the living as well as the dead, children as well as adults, in places such as Bikoro.
Casement's private diary is even more disturbing. On 13 August he records '5 people from Bikoro with hands cut off', and the following day at Banzaka notes that 'all [the] villages destroyed for rubber'. On 22 August the expedition 'passed deserted site of Bokutea ... people were all taken away by force'. At Bongandanga on 29 August he finds 'nothing but guns ... 242 men with rubber all guarded like convicts'. The following day at Abir there are '16 men women & children tied up'.
Morel and Casement would help found the Congo Reform Association, a body that would eventually come to include such luminaries as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain. In 1905, a Belgian parliamentary committee confirmed the details of Casement's report, and in November 1908 the Congo Free State was annexed by the Belgian government. Leopold was gone, but the colonial creation he envisioned would continue for another 52 years under the name Congo Belge or the Belgian Congo.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Democratic Republic of Congo by Michael Deibert. Copyright © 2013 Michael Deibert. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Prologue: the killing fields1. Kingdom of Kongo to first Congo Republic
2. Fire in his wake
3. The great Congo wars
4. Enter his father's house
5. One hundred per cent Congolese
6. Glittering demons
7. Threats from within and without
8. A false peace
9. Elections, encore
10. Rebellion after rebellion
Epilogue