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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).
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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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