The Continuing Process of Decolonization in the Congo: Fifty Years Later

Introduction

While independence negotiations in the Congo were succinct, decolonization was a long and tortuous process. Indeed, in some respects it continues today, at least in the eyes of many people in eastern Congo, who feel that the formal demands of the colonial state are reflected in the informal impositions of the current state—and of neighboring states. Certainly many Congolese today feel that they have no adequate state structure to address their collective needs as a people, or to represent them on an international stage, or even to protect them from invasion, extraction, and occupation. Lacking effective state structures to protect their interests is not new: the colonial state in the Congo was marked by its intrusive presence in mobilizing labor, requiring crop production, and imposing taxes, among many other demands. But the character of life in the Congo today does not reflect anyone’s vision of what independence would bring. At best, the last fifty years can be seen as a process of an aborted decolonization, and in some ways the violence now present in the Congo can be seen as the result of the unfulfilled aspirations of decolonization—or as the deferred violence of a decolonization gone awry (see Newbury 2009).

Within this extended, but still unresolved, process of decolonization I see four distinct but overlapping phases.¹ The first phase—a period of hope, quickly dashed—consisted of twenty-eight weeks in the immediate aftermath of independence, from June 30, 1960, to January 17, 1961, the date of the assassination of Lumumba.² The second phase—a period of multiple local-level struggles—consisted of the search for a “Second Independence,” as the people of Kwilu referred to it.³ That period lasted from September 1960 (with the arrest of Lumumba and the subsequent flight of his cabinet ministers to Kisangani) to November 24, 1965 (the date of Mobutu’s second coup). The third phase consisted of thirty-two years of autocracy under Mobutu’s rule. During this time the power of the state—actively supported at various times by outside capital, arms, and occasionally military force—moved Zaireans further and further from their goals of economic and cultural security, all under the veil of Mobutu’s vaunted but invented trope of authenticité.⁴ The fourth phase—a time of occupation and violence on a horrendous scale—was initiated on October 29, 1996, the date of the first Rwandan invasion. Originally this targeted Bukavu, Goma, and the refugee camps in Kivu. But by January 1997 the Rwandan forces had teamed up with local dissidents, opportunists, and plain dissimulators to establish a Congolese “Front,” which embarked on an epic seven-month, fifteen-hundred-kilometer march across the country, a campaign that resulted in the murder of some two to three hundred thousand Rwandans in Zaire (see Kisangani 2000). In May 1997 Kinshasa was occupied and Laurent Kabila installed as president. But having been rejected by their new client fourteen months later, Rwanda began a more extended occupation of the eastern areas on August 2, 1998.⁵

So these phases included a moment of hope, a time of intense struggle, a long period of repression, and the ordeal of occupation. The outcome has been that, despite their courage and resilience over the past fifty years, the people of the Congo have been denied sovereignty, security, legitimacy, and the chance to address their own problems.

Phase 1

To return to the first phase—those twenty-eight fateful weeks from June 30, 1960: Frederick Cooper phrased it well when he noted that decolonization was a “drama of competing visions” (2008:176).⁶ Within that drama, the power of the departing colonial state was just sufficient to be able to shut down those competing visions but insufficient to dictate a clear resolution. Indeed, the departing colonial state had an agenda of its own, but one that was so manifestly opposed to the immediate well-being of the people that it was rejected by them. Similarly, the people had sufficient organization to reject colonial agendas but insufficient political coherence to resolve the challenges on their...