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The Congo watershed
holds a history of government abuses and armed revolts. The Kingdom of
Kongo, among others, fed European slavers with a sinister stream of
human beings. In an act of self-proclaimed magnanimity, King Leopold II
took an interest in the land. He relied on several European explorers to
help establish his Association Internationale Africaine and map out his
claim to over two million square kilometres, which he then secured with
humanitarian and philanthropic promises at the Berlin Conference of
1884-85. His reward was absolute sovereignty over the Congo River basin
on the conditions that he attained the above objectives, but also under
permitted free trade upriver to the signatories. In short order,
Leopold’s officials established the Congo Free State, a bloody, ruthless
colonial administration that subjected its inhabitants to forced labour
collecting “red” rubber, ivory and other raw resources by mutilating and
terrorizing those who resisted.
In Europe, Edmund Morel led a campaign to expose Leopold as the
so-called “philanthropic monarch,” who in fact had legalised plunder to
enrich himself at the expense of his subject peoples in the Congo. The
ruthless practices of Belgian officers were often emulated by their
local subordinates in the Force Publique. The armed force introduced new
atrocities to the region: people’s hands were cut off, women and
children were kidnapped and sexually abused, and even cannibalism was
recorded. The human cost of King Leopold’s enterprise is still unclear,
but convergent figures of 10 million lives havhistorians such as Isidor
Ndaywel è Nziem and Adam Hochschild.
An international campaign against Leopold's rule helped push the Belgian
parliament to annex the Congo Free State in 1908. While the old
administration’s predatory exploitation lessened, it did not cease and
little changed for ordinary Congolese. Most worked in conditions that
amounted to forced labour and life expectancy hovered at 40 years. The
Belgian administrators limited education of Congolese to religion and
basic literacy. After a half-century of rule, the évolués, educated
local elites, consisted of a handful of lower-level administrators
(Lumumba, for example, worked as a postal clerk). It was this tiny group
that took over the colonial institutions when the Belgians withdrew en
masse before the first elections.
The general election in 1960 brought the Congo its first elected
leaders: President Kasa- Vubu and Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Yet
Mobutu Sese Seko’s undid the promise of democratic rule and instead
perpetuated colonial patterns of violent natural resource exploitation.
Mobutu’s increasingly chaotic and kleptocratic rule collapsed nearly
three decades later amidst renewed threats of secession that he had
first used to justify his coup. In 2006, the transitional government
held a referendum on a new democratic constitution, and then legislative
and presidential elections for a new political order charged with
rehabilitating the country. The elections built upon a transitional
military and political power sharing agreement and referendum that
sought to end the so-called ‘Second Congo War’. Nearly a decade of civil
wars from 1998 to 2007 had a devastating human cost of 5.4 million dead.
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