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Note: This document is from the archive of the Africa Policy E-Journal, published by the Africa Policy Information Center (APIC) from 1995 to 2001 and by Africa Action from 2001 to 2003. APIC was merged into Africa Action in 2001. Please note that many outdated links in this archived document may not work.


Central Africa: Nzongola-Ntalaja Speech, 1

Central Africa: Nzongola-Ntalaja Speech, 1 Date distributed (ymd): 981111
Document reposted by APIC

+++++++++++++++++++++Document Profile+++++++++++++++++++++

Region: Central Africa
Issue Areas: +political/rights+ +economy/development+ +security/peace+
Summary Contents:
This posting contains a slightly condensed version of a speech by Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja on the crisis in the Great Lakes region, with particular emphasis on the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Dr. Nzongola-Ntalaja is a professor emeritus at Howard University, a former president of the African Association of Political Science and of the African Studies Association, and presided over the political affairs sub-commission in Congo's Sovereign National Conference. The speech concentrates on the historical roots of conflict, but also comments on the current crisis. It is reposted here by permission of the author.

An earlier statement on the crisis in the Congo by Dr. Nzongola-Ntalaja appears in the October 1998 Special Bulletin of the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (ACAS). The Bulletin, which also contains articles on the crisis by M. Mamdami, Y. Bangura, E. Tshisekedi, I. Shivji, H. Campbell, T. Abdul-Raheem and additional documents is available from ACAS for $5. Order from ACAS, c/o Bill Martin, University of Illinois, 326 Lincoln Hall, 702 S. Wright St., Urbana, IL 61801. The table of contents is on the ACAS web site (http://www.prairienet.org/acas).

+++++++++++++++++end profile++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE CRISIS IN THE GREAT LAKES REGION

Speech prepared for delivery at the African Renaissance Conference, sponsored by Mafube Publishing, SABC 2 and the Deputy President, Mr. Thabo Mbeki, and held in Johannesburg, South Africa, from 28-29 September 1998

[for Thabo Mbeki's speech at the conference, see http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/mbeki/1998/tm0928.htm]

Only a year ago, hopes were raised across the continent, that the second independence, and resurrection, of the Congo was going to allow this region to play a major role in the African renaissance. Having taken a dim view of the organizational capacity of the Congolese leadership involved, I was among the skeptics on this point, on the ground that the whole process was based on a purely militaristic strategy of liberation subordinated to an externally determined dynamic.

This dynamic, whether it is based on the global interests of major world powers, the expansionist aims of external actors seeking economic and commercial advantage, or the security interests of neighboring states, is a function of the size, the strategic location and the resource endowment of the Congo. Thus, throughout its history as a modern state, this country has been subject to external interests and meddling consistent with its strategic importance geographically and economically, as well as its potential role as a regional power in Africa. The present crisis cannot be properly understood without reference to this fundamental reality.

The Strategic and Economic Importance of the Congo

The first two major factors of the Congo's strategic importance are its size and geographical location in Africa. A vast territory of 2,345,406 square kilometers (905,562 sq. mi.), the country shares borders with nine other states in Central, East and Southern Africa: Congo-Brazzaville, Central African Republic (CAR), Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Zambia and Angola. ...

Economically, the Congo has enormous wealth in natural resources. During the early phase of colonial penetration, a Belgian prospector was so awed by the wide range of mineral resources that he was led to conclude that the Congo was a geological scandal.

The real scandal, however, is that the country's wealth has not been used to benefit the vast majority of its inhabitants. During the colonial period, this wealth was extracted basically to spur the economic development of Belgium. Since independence, it has been used mostly to enrich the state bourgeoisie that emerged during the Mobutu regime, together with their foreign associates, Lebanese for the most part. In both periods, the strategic minerals were targeted for use by the United States and its Western allies. According to the experts, the most important strategic materials needed for the 21st century are found in three countries of the world: China, Russia and the Congo, particularly in the two Kivu provinces in the Great Lakes Region. Therein lies the deeper significance of the present crisis.

Known primarily as a minerals producing economy, the country has such an ecological diversity that it is also rich in non-mineral resources. Approximately one third of the total area is made up of the tropical rain forest, in a country that is nearly twice the size of South Africa, three times the size of Nigeria, five times the size of France, and over 80 times the size of little Belgium, its former colonial power. The whole area is dominated by the Congo River basin, and includes seven great and medium lakes, plus hundreds of rivers and small lakes. ... Part of this potential has already been harnessed through the Inga Dam to provide electricity to the Congo and some of its neighbors, including Zambia and Zimbabwe in Southern Africa. This hydroelectric complex has the potential of lighting up the whole continent of Africa, from Cairo to Cape Town.

With 12 months of rainfall in much of the rainforest and plenty of rain in the two savanna zones on each side of the Equator, the Congo can also feed the entire continent. Today, it is estimated that less than 3 percent of its arable land is under cultivation. It is this basic aspect of a bountiful natural resource endowment that explains why massive starvation has not occurred, in spite of all the violent crises and the collapse of the formal economy. A major consequence of this collapse is that this country of over 40 million people is today exporting a large number of highly skilled people to other countries in Africa and abroad. South Africa alone is said to have over 350 Congolese medical doctors.

It is this strategic and economic importance of the country that underlines the Congo's centrality to the African revolution and the African renaissance. Frantz Fanon once remarked that if Africa as a whole were a revolver, the Congo would be its trigger. Those who did not wish to see our country play this emancipatory role with respect to the liberation of Africa did their best to destabilize the country and to place it under the control of reactionary elements like Moise Tshombe and Mobutu Sese Seko. G. Mennen Williams, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, wrote in an August 1965 article in Africa Report that since whoever controls the Congo is likely to have enormous influence over the whole continent of Africa, it was in Uncle Sam's interest to make sure that the country's rulers were America's friends. Jacques Foccart, the eminence grise of Gaullist African policy and the virtual proconsul of Francophone Africa until his death last year, has this to say in his memoirs about French involvement in the Congo:

You asked me what was France's interest. On this matter, there is no ambiguity. Congo-Leopoldville, Zaire today, is the largest country in Francophone Africa. It has considerable natural resources. It has the means of being a regional power. The long-term interest of France and its African allies is evident.*

What is evident to Congolese patriots is that France, like other Western powers, does not wish to see the Congo become a regional power. For Paris, this may threaten French hegemony in a region in which it has considerable interests in the resource rich countries of Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, Cameroon and the CAR. Until the demise of the apartheid system, this was also the position of its backers here and abroad. For the West and its colonial-settler allies in South Africa, a Congo in disarray under the Mobutu kleptocracy was preferable to a strong and well organized state under the control of patriotic and Pan-African elements. For the latter would have played a critical role in the liberation of Southern Africa. The assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the support of the Katanga secession by Belgium, France, Britain and white settlers from the Congo to South Africa, and Mobutu's involvement in Angola's wars on the side of reactionary forces, were all part of this strategy.

The long-standing interest of major Western countries in the Congo thus relates primarily to the strategic importance of the country geographically and economically. For Washington, the catalyst for this interest was the strategic value of Congo's uranium, with which the United States manufactured the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, the world's ever first atomic weapons. As a result, the U.S. found for itself a vital national interest in the then Belgian Congo, as well as a wider Western stake in preventing the Soviet Union and its allies from gaining influence in post-independence Congo.

Today, although the policy emphasis has shifted from the fight against communism to coping with transnational threats such as terrorism, narco-trafficking and humanitarian disasters, the strategic goal of privileged access to critically needed resources and strong influence over the governments controlling that access remains unchanged. This is what both the United States and France are pursuing in the Great Lakes Region, in a historical context in which the people of Africa are clamoring for regimes that show greater respect for human rights, including those to live in freedom, to earn a decent livelihood and to ensure a better future for their children. What is ironic in this instance is that so-called new breed leaders and champions of the African renaissance in this region happen to work in close partnership with U.S. imperialism.

The Historical Context: The Legacy of Authoritarianism

Popular aspirations for freedom and development in the face of authoritarian regimes and exclusionist policies constitute the backdrop to the present conflict in the Great Lakes Region. Although the major arena of the politics of exclusion is the zero-sum game, or life and death struggle, between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi, the Congo could not escape being a party to the conflict because of the numerous historical ties between the three countries. These include the fact that there are ethnic Tutsi and Hutu who are Congolese citizens, a common experience of Belgian colonialism from World War I to 1960, and postcolonial political alliances between Mobutu and Rwandan leaders. Given the fact that the war is being fought in the Congo, my talk is going to deal principally with the Congolese aspects of the conflict, while references will be made as needed to the situation in Rwanda.

The legacy of authoritarianism in the Congo today can be traced back to the Leopoldian system, under which the country was run as a private possession of Leopold II, King of the Belgians, from 1885 to 1908. ... In 1885, the country entered colonial history as a theoretically independent state, the Congo Free State (CFS), but one under the personal rule of the Belgian monarch who, for all intents and purposes, treated it like a going concern. ...

To make it profitable, the King hired an international cast of adventurers and mercenaries led by Henry Morton Stanley to plunder the country of its resources. CFS agents used so much terror and violence to extract wealth through quasi-slave labor that they committed crimes against humanity. According to the best demographic analyses now available, the human toll of the repression, together with the diseases associated with European penetration like syphilis, amounted to the death of nearly 10 million people.

Christian missionaries like the Rev. William Sheppard, an African-American Presbyterian from Virginia, and humanitarian organizations such as Edmond Morel's Congo Reform Association (CRA), launched an international human rights campaign against the Leopoldian system. With celebrities like the African-American leader Booker T. Washington and the writer Mark Twain leading the American branch of the CRA, the U.S. government was compelled to join Britain and other major powers in obtaining King Leopold's ouster as Congo's ruler and the transformation of the presumably independent state into a Belgian colony. Belgium inherited not only a country but also a legacy. Given the economic motives of the colonial system, Belgian colonialism did not, and could not, free itself from the legacy of the Free State. The basic features of economic exploitation, political repression and cultural oppression remained essentially the same, albeit less brutal.

Whatever efforts the Belgians deployed in attempting to make the Congo a model colony, where natives have happy smiles, resistance to colonial rule remained a reality, particularly in those areas where prophetic religious movements and peasant opposition to colonial economic exploitation were strongest. This was the case in Lower Congo, the central region of the pre-colonial Kongo Kingdom, now split between Angola, Congo-Brazzaville and Congo-Kinshasa.

In 1921, a Baptist catechist and palm oil company worker in Kinshasa began a prophetic ministry that went on to influence the course of events leading to independence nearly 40 years later. The man was Simon Kimbangu, founder of what his sons and followers would later call the Church of Jesus Christ on Earth by the Prophet Simon Kimbangu (Eglise de Jesus Christ sur la Terre par le Prophete Simon Kimbangu, EJCSK). According to Kimbangu's own testimony, God had appeared to him in a vision and asked him to leave his work for the white man, fight against sorcery and other negative customs, and lead his people to liberation from while rule.

Back in his village, which he renamed Nkamba-Jerusalem, Kimbangu started his ministry with this radical message, in addition to performing miracles and speaking in strange tongues. As a result, thousands of workers abandoned their jobs in government agencies, private companies and white households, to see and hear the new prophet at Nkamba-Jerusalem talk about racial pride, liberation, self-reliance and all other familiar themes associated with the concept of the African renaissance. As one would expect, the colonial trinity of the state, the Catholic Church and major private companies reacted quickly and vigorously. Kimbangu was arrested, tried and condemned to death for treason. By royal decree, the sentence was reduced to life imprisonment, which the prophet served at the infamous Kasapa Prison at Lubumbashi until his death in 1951. Inasmuch as we admire President Nelson Mandela for having endured with courage 27 years of detention, we Congolese are proud of the fact that the martyr of our struggle for freedom spent three more years in jail than Madiba. And I am not aware of any other political prisoner anywhere in the world who has broken Kimbangu's record of 30 years in prison.

I have spent so much time on Kimbangu to underline the point that the idea of an African renaissance is not a new one. There is some evidence that Kimbangu was influenced by what he learned in Kinshasa from a small circle of people with a reading knowledge of English about articles in Marcus Garvey's paper, The Negro World. The Back-to-Africa idea caught the imagination of people like Kimbangu, who held popular notions of mputu or the white world (Europe and America) as the place where African people like the Bakongo go when they die. Now the people who had been taken from Africa as slaves had become powerful relatives who were about to return home to help free their people from white rule. For Kimbangu and his followers, the realization of the Pan-Africanist ideal of Africa for the Africans was God's will, indeed.

One of the little known facts of Belgian colonial rule in Africa is its extensive record of crimes against humanity committed against the followers of Prophet Kimbangu between 1921 and 1959, when Belgian authorities ended the persecution of Kimbanguists and granted legal recognition to their church, which became a member of the Geneva-based World Council of Churches in 1969. Until 1959, thousands of Kimbanguists languished in relegation camps, built in the remotest areas of the country. Ironically, these detention centers served as relay stations for spreading the messianic message of liberation to all political prisoners and to other people with whom the faithful came into contact.

In 1956, a popular movement for democracy was born with the launching of the struggle for independence. This was a great national awakening, with people from all walks of life ready to shed fear to manifest their permanent aspiration for freedom and their desire for a better life materially and a more secure future for their children. In Central Africa, this struggle was inspired by the fight against racism and oppression in South Africa and in the African diaspora of North America and the Caribbean, home of the intellectual pioneers of pan-Africanism (H. Sylvester Williams, W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey). A major leader of the struggle in the Belgian Congo was Joseph Kasa-Vubu, a Kongo intellectual who was perceived by many of his people as the successor to the Prophet Kimbangu.

As part of the self-determination drive of the postwar era in Asia and Africa, the 1950s were greatly marked by a reawakening of the African spirit through intellectual movements such as Negritude. ... In the Belgian Congo, these radical currents of reclaiming history as both independent actor and authentic story teller were best reflected in the political life and thought of Patrice Lumumba, the leader who best incarnated the aspirations of an entire nation as the standard bearer of genuine independence, economic development and Pan-African unity.

(continued in part 2)

*Jacques Foccart and Philippe Gaillard, Foccart parle: Entretiens avec Philippe Gaillard, vol. 1 (Fayard/Jeune Afrique, Paris, 1995), p. 310. My own translation.


This material is being reposted for wider distribution by the Africa Policy Information Center (APIC). APIC's primary objective is to widen the policy debate in the United States around African issues and the U.S. role in Africa, by concentrating on providing accessible policy-relevant information and analysis usable by a wide range of groups and individuals.


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