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3 The Emergence of Nande: A Socio-political History About a thousand years ago, indigenous Congo pygmies first welcomed Bantuspeaking groups from the south searching for copper. Five hundred years ago, Arab traders from the east and Portuguese merchants from the West entered the Congo shopping for ivory and slaves. In the 1870s, Belgium’s King Leopold II laid claim to the Congo as though it were his personal estate. With the assistance of Anglo-American adventurer Henry Stanley, he negotiated trade rights for a range of goods, including diamonds, gold and rubber. It is generally accepted that Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz was modelled on Stanley. The Congo was at the centre of E. D. Morel’s campaign to eradicate King Leopold’s horrendous criminal gains. His campaign achieved wide global support and shamed Britain’s parliament into commissioning a report, which led to Leopold abdicating his personal fiefdom to the Belgium state.1 The Belgian-Congo was born from the ushers of the Congo Free State, which indeed had been a financial enterprise rather than a colonial state. Any attempt to understand the dynamics of the colonial enterprise in the Congo needs to be aware of the ways in which the local societies were transformed by European intervention. Prior to 1900, the region had been divided between multiplicities of structures. There were lesser and greater kingdoms. There were also smaller units of people, often organised around village structures, or united in loose federations of people bound together not by acknowledged leaders but by language or ethnicity. The class structure of the Congolese kingdoms involved a paramount chief, numerous chiefs at different levels, and village heads. Authority was a matter of transmitted precepts. Family ties were decentralised from the paramount chief or Mwami to minor chiefs and from these to regional heads, and from these to village heads. According to De Boeck (1996), about 70,000 people were ruled this way. During the Belgian-Congo period, ethnic authorities were the only direct relationship most Congolese had with the state, and the rural Business of Civil War: New Forms of Life in the Debris of the DRC 48 Congo was a giant federation of Bantustans (Mamdani 2001). The nature of colonial rule in the Congo militated against a united movement (Mamdani 2001). In this way, the colonialists in power constituted one minority among other minorities (local ‘Bantustans’) instead of being a minority in front of a majority of united indigenous Congolese. The Congo was left to the Congolese after about a century of brutal extraction of its resources by the Belgians.2 King Leopold’s Congo Free State (1885-1908) was a short but barbaric looting enterprise. Even the Belgian-Congo (19081960 ) was not so different. In the Belgian-Congo, profits from mining enterprises were transferred to the metropolis and a minimum tax was paid for the country’s education or modernisation. Mining companies needed just a little bit of native organisation to keep the companies running. They were helped by the Catholic Church and the colonial administration. However, the bulk of the profit was drained to the metropolis. One example of Belgian colonial looting during the colonial period is that the uranium used by the Americans to build the bomb they used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from Shinkolobwe mining in Katanga. The bill, however, was paid to Belgium through the cancellation of its war debts and not to the Congo as a colony. However, an industrial sector grew in the Congo after World War I, but it was what Justinian Rweyemamu called perverted industrialisation. It was perverted in that technical development decreased the freedom of the Congolese. It was structurally and unequally linked to the metropolitan economy (Amin 1996). Processing became imperative (palm oil, coffee, and indeed raw material processing). Railways were constructed for transportation, consumer goods were produced for the administrative class, these products were either too heavy (cement, beer) or too perishable (newspapers, soap, etc.). During World War I and the subsequent great depression, import substitute industrialisation developed inside Africa, including within the Congo. But it consisted simply of importing the component (beer, soap) and producing locally the finished product. It was also a perverse industrialisation because it was embedding and perpetuating a structure of dependency. Post-colony The Congo colony was maintained by Belgium from 1908 until independence was declared in 1960, when nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba came into power. That same year the Congolese army mutinied and declared Katanga, the large mineral-rich south-eastern...

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