By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
Some nine decades ago, at the height of
European imperialism in Africa, one colony, though ostensibly
a “free state,” was so brutally managed that a European
government had to wrest control from its ruler, who treated it
as a personal possession.
The country known as the Congo Free State,
until it became the Belgian Congo in 1908, emerged out of a
treaty promulgated by the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885,
attended by 14 countries.
Now known as the Democratic Republic of
Congo, it gained its independence in 1960, but few countries
in the world have had such a tragic past – nor are things much
better today.
In 1876 King Leopold II of Belgium had
hired the American explorer Henry Morton Stanley to explore
and colonize the Congo River basin of equatorial Africa.
His claims to the Congo, which emerged out
of the scientific and philanthropic activities of the Association
Internationale du Congo, would lead to a
“scramble for Africa” especially amongst France, Germany,
Great Britain and Portugal, among those represented at the
conference.
By the mid-19th century, European nations
such as Great Britain, France, and Germany had begun looking
to Africa for natural resources for their growing industrial
sectors as well as a potential market for the goods these
factories produced.
Neither the Berlin Conference itself nor
the framework for future negotiations provided any say for the
peoples of Africa over the partitioning of their homelands. It
was a conference purporting to determine the future of Africa
in which no Africans were involved.
At this major gathering to create an
orderly division of European spheres of influence in Africa,
King Leopold would convince the delegates that common trade in
Africa was in the best interests of them all.
Though the centre of Africa was supposed to
be internationalised, it eventually became Belgian, as the
conference decisions would lead to the recognition of King
Leopold’s fledgling Congo Free State, with dire consequences
for its population.
It was not a colony as such, as there was
no metropolitan power to which it was responsible; nor was it
a state formed, like Liberia, as a consequence of settlement.
It retained the form of a private “philanthropic” initiative
ostensibly advancing the common interests of the peoples of
Africa and Europe.
Leopold had cultivated the notion that he
wished to sponsor a self-westernising native confederation.
His so-called Free State would become a convenient device
which would allow the European powers to preserve access to
the area without undertaking financial or political
obligations – Leopold would take care of those – while
persuading themselves that they were advancing the well-being
of Africans.
In reality, he instituted one of Africa’s most brutal and exploitative colonial regimes,
marked by violence, slavery and mass murder, as its
inhabitants were literally worked to death, with perhaps as
many as 10 million killed.
Forced
labour was used to gather wild rubber, palm oil, and ivory.
Resistance elicited swift and harsh responses from Leopold’s
private army, the Force Publique, who were also known for
cutting off the hands of the Congolese.
In 1890, the author Joseph Conrad traveled
on one of the first steamboats on the Congo River. He saw a
colonial regime of appalling greed, violence and hypocrisy. In
1899, he transformed his notes about the journey into his
novel Heart of Darkness.
Such public outcries finally forced the
Belgian government to take the Congo over in 1908.
The
Berlin Conference remapped Africa without considering
cultural or linguistic borders, dividing the continent into
some 50 different colonies.
This new map was superimposed over the more
than one thousand indigenous cultures and regions of Africa,
including dozens in the Congo itself.
It is by any measure one of the world’s
most dysfunctional states. Since 1997, various civil wars have
resulted in some five million deaths.
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