The dismal beginnings of the Congo state

Few countries had such a tragic past — nor are things much better today

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 internationalized, 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-westernizing 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.