David Moore
A SECOND LOOK
As we speed our way to the end of this century one might pause to reflect on the part the Congo played at the close of the last one. Then, as now, the globe was becoming integrated financially, productively and culturally at a frenetic pace. Then, as now, the heart of Africa was the seat of tumultuous transformations that appeared at first glance to have little to do with the more developed world. Yet, in many ways, the various crises in the Congo were like canaries in the world’s mineshaft.
Adam Hochschild’s brilliant history, King Leopold’s Ghost, goes a long way to redressing our innocent ignorance. He reminds us that the Congo was the source of some of the finest and most opprobrious of the 19th century’s political, literary and humanitarian figures who would do much to define the next century and its consciousness. Joseph Conrad is, of course, the most notable name that comes to mind. Belgium’s King Leopold, who colonised the Congo as his own personal company and whose twisted version of the “civilising mission” may well have been responsible for the death of more than 10-million Africans, ranks among the worst of the merchant politicians of the era. It may bear reflecting on the possibility, too, that his part in the scramble for Africa helped instigate the imperialist competition that contributed to World War I.
Edmund Morel, the single-minded shipping clerk who did much to awaken the world to Leopold’s travesty of the white man’s burden, is among the best. Nor was he alone. His consciousness raising was preceded by George Washington Williams, an Afro-American missionary who was quick to dispel Henry Stanley’s propaganda for Leopold, but died before he raised much publicity. Along with Roger Casement, Williams and Morel were instrumental in the first wave of Western humanitarian responses to the ravages of global capitalism in Africa and the rest of the world: precursors, perhaps, to bodies like today’s Amnesty International and Medicins sans Frontiers.
If the end of the 19th century marked a pinnacle of global “free trade” integration much the same as today’s, the middle of the 20th century may have marked the height of managed capitalism’s “golden age” in the West – as well as the beginning of the Cold War. Then, the Congo also played a crucial role as a site of one of that war’s warmer moments. It marked how the United States ruled the informal empire it inherited from the decolonising Europeans. Patrice Lumumba’s death, in which the CIA played no small role, signalled the end of any unconstrained efforts at independent nation building on the continent.
The United Nations’s first extensive effort to keep peace and construct state capacity in the wake of colonialism’s biggest tragedy disintegrated as it fell prey to the US’s distrust of neutrality and fear of a new African leader trying to play the superpowers equally off each other.
As we enter the new millennium the Congo is at the centre once more. Today, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s war – in the wake of the historically unparalleled Rwandan genocide and Laurent Kabila’s consequential and almost coincidental coming to power – marks a turning point of consequence similar to King Leopold’s in that area’s history.
As a war threatening to permanently alter Africa’s political geography and regional economy continues in spite of the Lusaka accords, the Congo could be chirping canary-like again. Yet it does not seem to be making much of an impact on Western consciousness. Perhaps if we saw the Congo as a chronicle of a death foretold for us all, some more sincere efforts would be made towards the rectification of its crises.
Given the US’s complicity in much of the Congo’s past, something new could have arisen out of the US House of Representatives subcommittee on Africa’s September 28 hearings thereon; an atonement for past sins if nothing else. But they have chosen to pass the buck. The belligerents are somehow supposed to set up a joint military command to enforce their own peace and expel the genocidal interahamwe back into the jaws of Rwandan – or Arusha-based international – justice. Just 90 UN military officials will help the process along.
Perhaps it is right: after all, one cannot suppose that the sole superpower would or should intervene on behalf of its choice of “good guys.” Nor can one assume multilateral intervention – even without US domination – is without faults. But what was revealing was the early admission by the chair of the subcommittee on Africa, Edward R Boyce, that yes, the US should be “engaged”. That means “using the power we have, including the World Bank and International Monetary Fund [IMF] leverage” and being “willing to point the finger at unco-operative parties”.
Boyce has confirmed that these supposedly neutral international financial organisations are actually instruments of US foreign policy. Globalisation American style – that is, neo-liberal “free” market- or-be-damned policies – are now the order of the day, and are to be served up as carrots and sticks in conflict resolution strategies.
There are very good arguments suggesting that the warlord politics of Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Great Lakes, Somalia and the rest are causally linked to the continued debt burdens and policies of “structural adjustment” imposed on Africa by the World Bank and the IMF. In spite of much rhetoric about “capacity building” these policies deny the necessary resources to construct stable states, so the contenders for power and wealth resort to more brutal modes of plunder and accumulation outside of already fragile state institutions. Their international supports are mercenaries and pirate merchants, not multilateral institutions.
On a more universal level, though, Boyce’s statement indicates the way in which the politicians of the current era have abdicated their role to the global economic managers with their one-policy- fits-all ideology. It could be argued that was the case about 100 years ago too, when the Congo was bearing the brunt of unprecedented market expansion, personified in the first multinational-corporation-king and his ostensibly “free state”.
Beyond Leopold’s and the Congo’s unhappy fate, though, remember what happened when the global bubble in which so many similarly inclined souls prospered started to burst: the “long depression” and war from 1913 for a long time thereafter. The fate of the Democratic Republic of Congo could be worth watching a little bit more closely this time.
David Moore teaches in the Economic History and Development Studies Programme at the University of Natal (Durban)