Rusty & Aida's Africa Tour
 The Democratic Republic of Congo Regrettably, we had to delete the DRC from our tour plan because of a change in visa rules, but while we were still anticipating a visit I did some research…so I’ll post here a summary based on my notes. In a prior blog entry, I described Nigeria as the tragic “heart of Africa”, in reference to its role as the heartland of the African people, to which a majority of Africans can trace their ancestral origins. But Africa has another heart, a geographical heart whose story is more tragic still. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) forms the heart of “deepest Africa”, the most inaccessible and unfamiliar part of the continent, the last region to be “opened up” by European explorers. This mysterious expanse of remote territory, hundreds of miles inland from the ocean, clad in dense tropical jungle and further isolated by mountains and cataracts, has long attracted the curiosity and fascination of outsiders, enhanced by the riveting drama that played out here in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, beginning with the famous explorations of Livingstone and Stanley and continuing with the notorious and much publicized exploitation of the territory as the personal fiefdom of King Leopold of Belgium. The Congo went from being an example of the worst hostility of Nature during the period of exploration – a land of unforgiving climate and terrain, ferocious animals and rampant disease – to being an example of the worst brutality of Man during the period of colonization – a place where forced labour and violence directly killed many hundreds of thousands, to say nothing of millions of lives lost to indirect causes related to the social upheaval. As portrayed in Robert Conrad’s famous novel “Heart of Darkness”, the Congo came to be associated with all that is unfathomable, uncivilized and unwelcoming in this world. After raping the land and its people of resources (first ivory, then rubber) for a few decades, in 1908 Leopold was forced by popular outrage to turn over his “piece of the African pie” (as he described it) to the Belgian government, which operated a slightly more humane administration while continuing to exploit the Congo’s resources. In 1960, Congo was granted independence and the administration was turned over to a people who had been provided little education and no experience in running a government or exercising democratic rights. The arrogant Belgian authorities set the new state adrift with the expectation that it would fail and that they would be called back in to provide support and “guidance”. Instead, the affronted leadership in Congo expelled the Belgians and then descended into anarchy and civil war as competing ideological and tribal factions aligned themselves with opposing global powers, transforming the country into a front line for the Cold War. Following the CIA-sponsored assassination of Congo prime minister Patrice Lumumba, military strongman Joseph Mobutu was cultivated and finally installed into power with western support, upon which he promptly took over the ruthless exploitation of the country and its resources that had been previously carried out by the colonial masters. If Mobutu ever really held any plans for the development of his country and its people, this soon vanished and was replaced by a single-minded focus on self-enrichment and the retention of power at all costs. The story is the same one seen throughout Africa: ostentatiously flaunting his wealth as a sign of his personal power (to the extent of building several palaces at his home town in the jungle, complete with a dedicated hydroelectric power source and a runway capable of servicing Concorde jets), he fostered and exploited tribalism to divide and weaken his people, filled the army and bureaucracy with people connected to his own tribal group whom he controlled via an elaborate patronage network, gutted state institutions of any independent authority by installing conflicting parallel chains of command with himself at the top, and focused industrial development on the extraction of resources (copper, industrial diamonds, petroleum, cobalt, etc) that could generate revenue for the government, but that provided little benefit to the masses. Secured in power by the backing of western governments who welcomed his support in the Cold War, and by the country’s natural riches through which he bought off friends and enemies alike, Mobutu paid little mind to the economic and social decline of the Congo. When the Cold War ended, Mobutu’s western backers pulled away and his deliberately weakened state was incapable of defending itself against a Rwandan-backed rebel takeover in 1997. The rebellion was orchestrated by the Rwandans to facilitate Rwandan military action against Hutu genocidaires who had fled to the Congo following the infamous Rwandan Genocide in 1994, after the Tutsi-backed Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) seized power. Rwanda’s Congolese allies, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL), took power with Laurent Kabila assuming the presidency. However, despite popular support for the rebellion throughout Congo and Africa, and despite Kabila’s reported favouring of ideological motives over self-gain, Congo failed to emerge from the darkness. Concerned about Rwandan influence in the Congolese government, Kabila began to openly expel and persecute ethnic Tutsis within the administration, even those of Congolese origin, triggering a new round of conflict in which the Rwandans sponsored yet another rebellion – this time called the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD). The new conflict erupted in 1998 and saw nine African countries squaring off against one another using Congo as a battleground in what has come to be called “Africa’s World War”. The Rwandans were initially backed by Uganda, Burundi and Tanzania, while Kabila’s Congo government had the support of Chad, Angola, Zambia and Zimbabwe, but over the course of the conflict the dynamics would change. By 1999, Uganda and Rwanda were backing conflicting rebel factions, and fighting one another on the streets of Kisingani, and by 2000 both Zimbabwe and Angola were pressing Kabila to make peace. Throughout the conflict, the forces involved were at least as interested in exploiting and profiting from Congo’s mineral riches as they were in their military goals. Meanwhile, it was the civilian population who paid the price, with some five million being killed - mostly as a result of starvation and disease following the destruction of their crops and villages, but many thousands through direct violence including mass executions. In 2001, Laurent Kabila was assassinated and, with most of the country in rebel hands, his pragmatic son (now leader) Joseph Kabila sought terms with the rebels. Finally in 2003 the conflict was declared over with the withdrawal of foreign troops and the establishment of a transitional government incorporating rebel forces, but in the decade since then real peace and progress has remained elusive. Indeed, most foreign analysts conclude that Joseph Kabila has adopted the Mobutu style of government, keeping public institutions weak and beholden to him, suppressing political opposition and the press, and resorting to tribal divisions and patronage as tools for controlling the populace. While he has enjoyed some genuine popular backing by people who long for stability, he has recklessly fomented public animosity towards the Tutsi, Mobutists and other “enemies of the state” to further strengthen his support base, and critics say that he has resorted to fraud and intimidation to hold onto power in 2006 & 2011 presidential elections. All indications are that the Kabila regime is just the latest in the long line of Congolese tyrannies aimed at exploitation of the land and its people for its own preservation and enrichment. Meanwhile, in the eastern part of the country, numerous rebel factions – some nothing more than criminal gangs – continue to fight the government and each other when they are not busy brutalizing the population and stripping the land of its riches. In this manner the Democratic Republic of the Congo continues to drift further into oblivion, not far from being the world’s largest failed state. This despite (and indeed partly as a result of) being one of the most resource-rich countries on Earth. There are over 250 ethnic groups scattered across the vast expanse of the DRC. In the far north there are several Ubangi tribes related to the peoples in the Central African Republic, the largest being the Zande, and in the northeast near the Sudan border are a number of Nilo-Saharan groups, notably the Lendu, Mangbetu and Alur, but the great majority of the population of Congo consists of Bantu tribes. Some of the most significant are the Luba, Bangi-Ntomba, Kongo, Mongo, Shi-Havu, Songye, Tetela, Nandi & Chokwe. Unlike in many other African countries the population distribution is such that no one or two ethnic groups dominate. Unfortunately, this has not prevented tribalism from becoming important in politics – rather, political leaders have tended to leverage support from their own tribe as well as related groups from the same province or region (so, for example, Mobutu recruited …). On the plus side, religious strife is uncommon in Congo – the population is predominantly Christian (particularly Catholic), although often in combination with traditional animist beliefs. The French language of Congo’s Belgian colonizers remains the language of government, but other regional lingua francas are more popular on the street: Kituba (a Kongo-based creole related to Manukutuba from Congo-Brazzaville) in the west, including Kinshasa; Lingala in the north and east along the Congo River, Tshiluba in the centre and south of the country, and Swahili in the far east along the Great Lakes.
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Diary Photos
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