DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

Area: 905,568 square miles

Population: 58,317,930 (2004 estimate)

Capital: Kinshasa (population: 6,541,300 – 2003 estimate)

Literacy: 66% (2003 estimate)

Life Expectancy: 43 years

Export Crops: Coffee, cacao, palm oil, rubber, tea, cotton

Food Crops: Cassava, corn, rice, bananas

Equatorial Africa has been inhabited since at least the middle Stone Age (before 10,000 B.C.E). In a long series of migrations beginning around 1,000 B.C.E. and lasting well into the mid-first millennium C.E., Bantu-speaking peoples moved from the Nigeria-Cameroon area in West Africa into the Congo area. The Bantu-speakers transformed Central Africa through their development of trade in iron, copper, and salt and their absorption or displacement of the indigenous aboriginal Pygmies. Between the 12th and 13th centuries, Bantu-speaking peoples occupied virtually every part of the Congo forests where they developed flourishing societies. Out of one of these, the Kingdom of Kongo arose in the first decades of the 14th century. According to legend, a young outcast Bantu chieftain of towering, mythic authority, who may have been named Nimi a Lukeni, was the founder-king of the Kingdom of Kongo, the first ManiKongo. Over the next 150 years the Kingdom of Kongo grew in size and population to include roughly 200,000 square miles and 4000-5000 people. Its capital, the town of Mbanza Kongo (mbanza means "court"), was set high on a hilltop that was 10 days’ walk inland from the coast.

In 1482, a Portuguese naval captain named Diogo Cão stumbled on the mouth of an enormous river, larger than any European had ever seen, which the Bakongo people called nzere or nzadi - "the river that swallows all rivers" - and the Europeans named the Congo River. In 1491 a Portuguese-led mission arrived at the Kingdom of Kongo to establish diplomatic relations and an alliance of mutual aid between the two kingdoms. This was the first sustained encounter between a black African nation and Europeans and one in which both civilizations were roughly equal at the time. Shortly thereafter the ManiKongo, Nzinga Nkuwu, and his youngest son and successor converted to Roman Catholicism, the ManiKongo taking the Christian name John in honor of the King of Portugal and his son taking the name Affonso in honor of the Portuguese heir to the throne. During Affonso’s reign, which began in 1507, the Christianization of the Kongo took place along with spread of education, urban development, technology and trade. Unfortunately, the genuine partnership that existed between the Kongo and Portugal was doomed by the slave trade. Besides trading in gold and copper, Portuguese traders captured and kidnapped slaves whom they forced to labor on the sugar plantations on the island of São Tomé. With the colonization of the Americas, the demand for slaves escalated. By the 18th century, after much Portuguese slaving, the kingdom of Kongo declined.

From 1840 to 1872, the Scottish missionary, David Livingstone, engaged in a series of explorations that brought the Congo to the attention of the Western world. Henry Morton Stanley, a journalist, was commissioned by the New York Herald to conduct a search for Livingstone, who hadn’t been heard from for five years. Stanley trekked for more than eight months before he finally met Livingstone at Ujiji on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika in 1871 and uttered his famous "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" Three years later Stanley explored the Congo River from its upper reaches, completing his journey in 1877. His adventures brought the Congo to the attention of Belgium’s King Léopold II. Long fascinated by the glory and profit to be derived by a Belgian overseas empire, he enlisted Stanley’s help and founded the International Association of the Congo in 1878, which later became known at the Congo Free State. The Conference of Berlin, held in 1884-85 to partition Africa among thirteen European nations, formally recognized King Léopold’s claim to the Congo. Thus, the Congo area, 80 times the size of Belgium, became King Léopold’s personal fief which he transformed into a vast rubber plantation. In 1906 he allowed several wealthy Americans to buy into his Congo business, among them J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Thomas Fortune Ryan, and Daniel Guggenheim. Under King Léopold's reign, millions of Congolese people were forced to work on the rubber plantations and in the copper and diamond mines without compensation. Those who refused to work had their hands severed or were shot. Ten million Congolese lost their lives in this way. After an international outcry at these atrocities and human rights abuses - the first great human rights movement of the 20th century in which Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington, Anatole France, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and countless others participated - the Congo Free State was taken out of the King's control and annexed to Belgium in 1908. Under the rule of the Belgian parliament, the cutting off of human hands was discontinued, but not the practice of forced labor. Profits flowed out of the country into the vaults of Belgian, British, and American corporations with very little ever benefiting the Congolese people.

Congolese resistance to Belgian rule had a long history, traceable to the countless uprisings against the Congo Free State instigated by local chiefs. There were also various independent African religious movements that flourished in the 1920s and 1930s. The Kimbanguist Church, founded by Simon Kimbangu in 1921, attracted thousands of followers among the Bakongo and was perceived by the Belgians as a threat. A cultural and ethnic organization known as Abako, headed by Joseph Kasavubu, transformed itself into a vehicle of anticolonial protest and in 1956 demanded immediate independence from Belgium. Patrice Lumumba, who is now remembered as a prophet and symbol of the struggle for self-determination, was the left-leaning, fiery African nationalist leader of the Congolese National Movement (Mouvement National Congolais or MNC), the only non-ethnic political organization, which unexpectedly received the highest vote in the elections on May 29, 1960. Lumumba became the Prime Minister, while Joseph Kasavubu, the leader of the opposition, became the Head of State. In his Independence Day speech on July 1, 1960, Lumumba shocked the Belgian delegation, led by King Baudouin, by decrying the brutality and humiliation suffered by Africans at the hands of Europeans. Lumumba appointed a 29-year-old ally, Joseph Mobutu, as head of the militia, only to have Mobutu stage a military coup and form an alliance with Kasavubu on September 14, 1960. On November 27, 1960, Mobutu’s troops captured Lumumba, and on January 17, 1961, they flew him to Elizabethville in Katanga, where he was murdered with Belgian and C.I.A. complicity.

In November 1965 Mobutu staged a second military coup but this time with no intention of relinquishing power. He abolished party politics and over the next several years established his own uncontested authority. He ruled as an autocrat and continued the practices of his European predecessors, siphoning off the country's profits and foreign aid money into his own coffers, amassing a vast personal fortune which made him one of the world's wealthiest people and his country one of the world's poorest. During the Cold War when the Soviet Union and the Western powers were vying for spheres of strategic interest in Africa, the West courted Mobutu and helped prop him up. Mobutu’s aid in the effort to contain Soviet influence in Africa, and his country’s status as a repository of immense mineral wealth, earned him direct contacts – unmatched by any other leader of black Africa – with every American president from Dwight Eisenhower to George Bush I. In 1971 Mobutu renamed the nation Zaire, an old Portuguese corruption of the local name for the Congo River (nzere), and renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu waza Banga. Following the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of Communism in most of the world, Mobutu was stripped of any residual strategic importance. He was faced with a bankrupt country and political chaos. Under pressure in 1990, he lifted the ban on political parties. He was forced to appoint his chief rival, Etienne Tshisekedi, as prime minister. In 1994 the war in neighboring Rwanda spilled over into Zaire. The Tutsi militia allied themselves with the forces of the long-time Congo rebel, Laurent Kabila, who marched rapidly on major cities. In May 1997 Kabila entered Kinshasa to the welcome of its citizens. With Mobutu in exile and ill with prostate cancer, Kabila declared himself president and changed Zaire’s name back to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mobutu died in Morocco at the age of 66 in September 1997.

During Laurent Kabila’s four years in office, Congo became one of the biggest battlefields in Africa’s history, destabilizing all of Central Africa. Six outside states - Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe - fought inside Congo, some allied with rebel groups to oust President Laurent Kabila, others to protect him. In addition, nine rebel groups in Congo were fighting to overthrow governments in neighboring countries. On January 16, 2001 President Laurent Kabila was shot to death by one of his bodyguards. Joseph Kabila, Laurent Kabila’s young and inexperienced 29-year-old son, was sworn in as president on January 23, 2001. With Laurent Kabila removed as an obstacle to peace talks, new efforts to end the war in Congo appeared more hopeful. In February 2001, the UN Security Council approved a plan for the withdrawal of various fighting factions and the installation of UN peacekeepers throughout the country. Despite the peace agreement and the formation of a transitional government in 2003, the threat of civil war remains. By the end of 2004, the death toll from the conflict had reached 3.8 million.

The Congo is the third largest country in Africa, one-quarter the size of the United States, and may be the richest land of this planet. It is the world's largest producer of cobalt and the second largest producer of industrial diamonds. Its other important mineral product is copper, which accounts for 35 to 55% percent of the country's export earnings. With vast forests and plenty of rainfall, Zaire has huge agricultural, logging, and hydroelectric potential.

SOURCES:

"Congo, Democratic Republic," Lycos Network. www.infoplease.lycos.com/ipa/AO198161.html, 2005.

"Congo, Democratic Republic," The World Factbook 1999. www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/cg.html.

Curtin, Philip, et al. African History. New York: Longman, 1978.

Forbath, Peter. The River Congo. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.

Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.

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