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