Congo: The Biggest Tragedy You've Never Heard of: Part I

What do you know about the Democratic Republic of Congo?

Maybe you know of it from the casually racist Tintin in the Congo. It's possible that you have some knowledge of its history from reading Jospeh Conrad's best known novel, Heart of Darkness. Perhaps you may have heard of Mobutu Sese Seko or, in the context of CIA lunacy and incompetence, Patrice Lumumba. If you pay a lot of attention to foreign affairs you might even have heard of the civil wars of recent years and the elections last year. Maybe you can even tell the difference between it and the Republic of Congo.

If you know about all these things, congratulations. You know a lot more than most westerners. But don't be too proud. Tell me, without looking at that Wikipedia article, how large the DRC is. Tell me what its economy is based on. Tell me the languages they speak there. Tell me the approximate population. Tell me what the civil wars were about and who the major participants were.

I'm betting you can't. I certainly couldn't before I looked the answers this afternoon. In fact, one of the questions can't even be answered, except by a rough estimate.

For the record, these are the answers: The DRC is around the same size as Western Europe, making it the world's twelfth largest nation by area. It's economy, to the extent that it still exists, is primarily based upon agriculture, although mining is also important due to large quantities of copper, cobalt, tantalum, uranium and diamonds on its soil. The lingua franca is French, whilst the four other recognised languages are Swahili, Lingala, Tshiluba and Kongo/Kituba and over 200 other languages or dialects are spoken. The population is probably around 60 million, although this is the unanswerable one, as the last census was in 1984 and there's been far too much upheaval and killing since then for that number to be much more than a guess. As for my last question, that's going to take the rest of this article to answer.

Congo's borders aren't as full of straight lines as are those of some other African countries, such as Mali. But don't let that fool you into making you think that it's a natural territorial unit. It's far too large and its internal connections are far too weak for that to be the case. It's just as artificial as most African states, the only differences being size and the fact that the Congo Free State (as it was then called - the area has had almost as many names as Imelda Marcos has had shoes) was not just the product of the Berlin Conference, but one of the primary causes of such.

I'll spare you a detailed background here, both because I'm frankly too ignorant to pull it off and because we'd get appallingly sidetracked. All you really need to know for our purposes is that in 1885 the Congo Free State was established as the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium. Yes, you read that right. Personal property. An area of nearly a million square miles was made the personal property of one man, living thousands of miles away. Sadly I can neither remember nor find the quote from one of the British participants about the division being a wondrous thing, with the only problem being that none of the negotiators really knew where the areas they were arguing about were located, but it was never more appropriate than with this provision.

Leopold promptly set about instituting robber capitalism on an industrial scale. Under the principle of effectivity, he needed to make economic use of the area to maintain his claim and his claim was large enough that even he, one of Europe's richest men, could not afford to do that at a loss. Luckily for him, the Congo was rich not just in mineral deposits but in rubber, and he was an amoral shitfucker who, whether or not there is a God, is hopefully burning in a lake of eternal fire right now. Strong words, I know, but Leopold deserves them.

He divided the Congo Free State into two regions, the Free Trade Zone and the Private Zone. In the Free Trade Zone monopoly leases on export goods were sold to white entrepreneurs, whereas in the Private Zone Leopold claimed personal ownership of literally everything. These acts appear to have made him many tens of millions, vastly more than he could ever hope to spend, so his subsequent actions only strengthen the impression that Leopold was one of the most fundamentally unpleasant humans ever to walk this earth. If Mao or Stalin can be said to represent a leftist authoritarian mass-murderer and Hitler a nationalist mass-murderer, then Leopold is their ultra-capitalist equivalent.

Having murdered or co-opted the local rulers (themselves, it has to be said, fairly unsalubrious characters who often based their power on the slave trade), Leopold set about squeezing the region for every penny he could get. Colonial officials had their wages cut and a performance-related pay scheme instituted, forcing them to exploit their areas to the greatest extent possible. The local population was forbidden to trade with anyone but Leopold's officials, obliged to provide large quotas of rubber and ivory at a fixed price and forced into what was slavery in all but name.

The quotes were so high that they had a severe negative impact on the extent of the vines that provided the rubber, but this did not move Leopold to compassion. Rather, his security forces, the Force Publique, was called in to secure the necessary tribute. This they accomplished by a campaign of widespread terror. Perhaps most horrifying of all, this militia was accustomed to take human hands as trophies, because of the bureaucratic fear of their superiors that bullets might be wasted hunting wild animals. Many of the FP's members, who themselves were often little more than slaves, also mutilated the innocent, since delivery of a sufficiently numerous crop of hands could lead to an early discharge. This, I think, can very definitely be classed as a classic example of that 'banality of evil' that Hannah Arendt talked of.

Exactly how many people died for Leopold's bank accounts is unclear. Livingstone's exploration of the Congo Basin led him to suggest that region held around 30 million people, but some estimates have been significantly lower. No census was undertaken in what was by then the Belgian Congo until 1924. Casement's study suggested that three million people were killed in twelve years, whilst Adam Hochschild suggests the figure may have been closer to ten million and other estimates have been still higher.

For all this, it wasn't until the early twentieth century that the news began to leak out. It took four years from Casement's damning report before the Belgian Parliament finally removed the lunatic from the board of the asylum and nationalised the Congo Free State as the colony of the Belgian Congo, by which time a fall in rubber prices had already made the Free State a much less profitable enterprise. Leopold died the next year at the ripe old age of 74. Perhaps the only consolation is that he was hated to such a degree by his Belgian subjects that he was booed during his funeral parade.

It's frankly shocking that this kind of story isn't better known, and there are fewer better retorts than this instance to those morons who claim that colonialism was ultimately a beneficial thing. Yet what is even more shocking is that a slaughter on the same order of magnitude has happened within the past decade in the same region, and yet the largest death toll since the Second World War is as little known as Leopold's reign of terror.

Come back for part II: the last hundred years in the DRC