Belgian colonialism's influence on the Democratic Republic of Congo

Congo and African Studies

Those who are conquered always want to imitate the conqueror in his main characteristics-in his clothing, his crafts, and in all his distinctive traits and characteristics." -Ibn Khaldun

This assertion, from the fourteenth century, is most definitely not an inarguable one. Many conquered peoples undoubtedly harbor hate and resentment for their conquerors, especially those who were defeated in a vicious manner. A more insidious phenomenon, though, is the tendency of a conquered people to become like their conquerors once they are themselves again victorious. By "conquered," it should be noted that a violent battle is not the primary significance of the word-conquered may refer to economic defeat, business takeovers and cultural evolution ("cultural imperialism" is one term bantered around in this realm) as well as to violent physical oppression.

The conquered people may not adopt the behaviors of their conquerors consciously; they might even try to avoid endeavors and systems installed by their one-time rulers. Similar to the phenomenon in sociology that has proven individuals who suffer abuse during childhood are more likely to become abusers themselves, nations who were mistreated as colonies have difficulty transitioning to self-rule without repeating the mistakes of their "parent" countries.

A modern example of this behavior is that of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DROC), a Belgian colony until 1960. The colonial history of Congo includes genocide, forced labor, exploitation of the country's natural resources, and impoverishment of the peasantry. Upon gaining independence, no one can doubt the Congolese people's desire to move away from these tragic events. Unfortunately, the recent history of the DROC is littered with political strife, assassinations, economic instability and impoverishment, and genocide. How much of this may be attributed to the Belgian colonization has not yet been determined and may never be a quantifiable figure; however, there is a strong case that the Belgian colonial influence is a significant factor in the climate of the present-day DROC.

A plan to demonstrate the hypothesis that Belgian colonialism heavily influences the current Democratic Republic of the Congo in this essay. First, I will present a brief history of oppressive actions perpetrated against the people of the DROC by their colonial government from 1890-1960, the Belgians.

In the next section of the essay, I will examine specific behaviors of the post-colonial Congolese (both positive and negative) which mirror the behaviors or characteristics of the Belgian rulers, and explore how these similarities came to exist. I will also investigate alternate reasons for these similarities, other than my own hypothesis. In the final part of this essay, I will weigh all of these factors in considering if my above statement has been justified by this examination of influences.

ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL AFFAIRS OF THE DROC

The current situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is one that has garnered international humanitarian attention for its oppression. A 2005 Human Rights Watch report spoke of civilians being attacked by the army, sexual assaults on civilian women by soldiers, and the persecution and murder of human rights activists.

The citizens of the DROC live in fear of the ethnic and racial strife of the region spilling over into their village. In addition to this tension between villages and between soldiers and civilians, political strife is also common. As recently as 2001, the president of the nation, Laurent Kabila, was assassinated, throwing the nation into even more turmoil. Kabila was assuredly not a bastion of political freedom himself; upon being sworn in as president in 1997, he outlawed political competition and most likely supported the genocide of Rwandan Hutu refugees to the DROC. During this time, the bloodshed and atrocities were so severe that the United Nations, for a short while, sent peacekeeping troops to the DROC in order to restore order.

Prior to Kabila's tenure as president, the DROC had only one other leader-Mobutu Sese Seiko, a colonel in the army during the colonial period-who had served since 1960. Mobutu, during his thirty-year era as prime minister and then president, heavily influenced the current situation in the DROC. His political and economic practices shaped the country for years after he died, from his encouragement of foreign investment in the Congo's plentiful natural resources to the nationalization of these firms in an unsuccessful attempt to increase employment in the nation. These exploitations-first of the DROC's mineral and other natural resources, and then of Congolese workers, followed the intent, if not the letter, of previous exploitations of the nation and its citizens by the Belgian colonial power.

All stated intentions aside, Mobutu's behavior as well as that of Kabila during the late 90s did not make much more "progress," in terms of creating an egalitarian society with a profitable, stable economy than the Belgian colonials had done. Mobutu, in fact, so devastated the Congolese economy that in 1993, he issued a new batch of currency that was declared as having no monetary value and inspired a rampage by the army which killed fifty civilians when they were paid with the new currency.

The destruction of the DROC's natural resources continues in the era of self-governance unabated from the era of colonial exploitation of minerals, precious metals, and animal products (i.e ivory). Some observers postulated that the exploitation of the Congo's resources actually got worse under self-governance due to increased demand and an increased need for income. One Congolese journalist noted that the DROC was "too vast, too rich, and too poorly developed; Congo possesses too much mineral wealth for its own good, and this incites lust in the hearts of foreign governments." For example, the DROC exported 19,000 carats of diamonds in July 1998, while Rwanda, a nation of similar diamond mining capabilities, only exported 1,500 carats.

There are fabulous riches being pulled out from underneath us, but the population does not benefit at all. Instead, we suffer," said one Congolese resident about the situation. This current mood of instability and exploitation makes the residents of the Democratic Republic of the Congo at least as fearful of the government and as impoverished and persecuted as they were under Belgian rule; the injustice is likely harder to bear now, when it comes at the hands of countrymen instead of foreign rulers. As these incidents and recent history show, the current governance situation in the DROC is one that is similar in its failures to the Belgian governance of the first half of the twentieth century.

This governance, from King Leopold II's late 19th-century, semi-secret endeavor to create a colony in the Congo through the nation's 1960 independence from Belgian rule, exploited the region's natural resources for profit, abused the labor force in mining and harvesting rubber, and, under Leopold, committed genocidal acts against the Congolese without redress or retribution. The history of Belgian governance is permanently tainted by Leopold's egregious abuses of power, his implicit endorsement of genocide by the army, and his avaricious usage of natural resources. The exploitive effects of Belgian rule can still be seen in the DROC, as I will demonstrate in the following section.

OTHER FACTORS INFLUENCING DROC TODAY

In spite of all the empirical and implied evidence regarding the detrimental effects of colonialism, to assign blame for all of the Democratic Republic of the Congo's modern ills to Belgian colonization would be unfair. There are factors other than the lasting effects of colonialism that contribute to the current situation in the DROC. These factors include the fact that agricultural production is almost impossible, since only 3% of the land is arable, regional tensions that are not a result of colonialism that result in an unstable environment militarily and in terms of genocide and other human rights violations, and finally because of the refugee situation from the Rwandan genocide during the late 1990s. All of these factors bear heavily on the conditions in the DROC today, and prevent colonialism from being the only affecting phenomenon of the nation.

CONCLUSIONS

The effects of Belgian colonialism on the Democratic Republic of the Congo are a significant obstacle, both in the psychological sense of dealing with atrocities and genocide as well as in the physical sense of depleted resources and lessened self-sufficiency. Despite small positive implementations of colonialism, like infrastructure, the disadvantages as evidenced in the genocide and other atrocities, the economic difficulties, and the ravaging of natural resources far outweigh the benefits obtained from the colonial occupation.

International opinion is divided on the best way to heal the wounds in west Africa; that is a subject for another paper (or perhaps more appropriately, for several volumes of work!). What can be ascertained here, however, is the fact that Belgian colonialism was far more damaging to the Democratic Republic of the Congo than it was helpful, and that the damage lingers today and affects life decades after the Congolese were declared "independent" of Belgium. Foreign influences shaped DROC life during the time of colonialism and they continue to do so now.

Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold's Ghost. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998, p. 304

Congo, Democratic Republic of the," Columbia Encyclopedia, online edition in Academic Search Premiere at 2005.

Democratic Republic of Congo, Civilians Attacked in North Kivu," published online 07/13/05 by Human Rights Watch at http://hrw.org/reports/2005/drc0705/4.htm#_Toc107835223and "DR Congo: Prominent Human Rights Leader Assassinated," published 08/01/05 by Human Rights Watch at http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/08/01/congo11549.htm

Columbia, 2005, "DROC: Rebellion and Civil War," at Scherrer, Christian, Genocide and Crisis in Central Africa: Conflict Roots, Mass Violence, and Regional War. Westport: Praeger, 2002. For a first-person account of this period of UN peacekeeping, see Hoyt, Michael, Captive in the Congo. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2000.

Tender into Tinder," Time, 02/08/93.

Mundala, Bienvenu "Looting Congo's Natural Resources," published 10/14/99 on Namibian, posted online at http://www.namibian.com.na/Netstories/Econ10-99/natural.html

Ibid., quoting Kwame Kimpele.

O'Reilly, Finbarr "Rush for Natural Resources Still Fuels War In Congo" in Global Policy Forum, 08/09/04, published online at http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/natres/minerals/2004/0809rush.htm

Slade, Ruth. King Leopold's Congo. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1962.

Discussion of the urban potential of the DROC and neighboring countries can be found in the introduction to Tarver, James, Urbanization in Africa. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994, pp. xxi-xxxii.

Hochschild, Adam. "Leopold's Congo: A Holocaust we have yet to Comprehend," in Chronicle of Higher Education, 05/12/2000, 46(36), p. B4. Another scholar who has acknowledged the genocide in the Belgian Congo as a holocaust is Richard Hamilton, who did so in the article, "A Neglected Holocaust," in Human Rights Review, 1(3), p. 119.

Human Rights Watch, "DR Congo: Gold Fuels Massive Human Rights Atrocities," 06/02/05 online at Hochschild, 1998, p. 159-162.

Gann, L.H. And Duignan, Peter. The Rulers of Belgian Africa, 1884-1914. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979, p. 122.

Weeks, John, "Economic Aspects of Rural-Urban Migration," in Tarver, James, Urbanization in Africa. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994, pp. 388-407. For a list of raw goods commonly mined and harvested in the DROC, see the Columbia encyclopedia article, "Congo, Democratic Republic of the, Economy," online at Hochschild, 1998, p. 151, 190

Gann, p. 141.

Columbia, 2005. "Congo, Democratic Republic of the," online at The Regional Crisis and Human Rights Abuses in West Africa," published by Human Rights Watch, 06/20/03, online at http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/africa/wafrica/wafrica-humanrights.htm

Columbia, 2005. "Congo, Democratic Republic of the," online at