Why is Congo So Unstable?
An archive of news stories on any country will be mixed—some happy, some sad. Congo, or the Democratic Republic of Congo to give the country its full name, might be the exception. Despite its extraordinary natural resources, including large deposits of diamonds, copper, uranium, and coltan, and enough hydro-electric potential to power all the countries of Africa South of its borders, the news out of Congo has been reliably tragic for more than a hundred years. If you replace “Despite” with “Because of” at the start of the previous sentence, you’ll have the main reason why Congo has been a mess for so long. What follows is the story of how Congo’s natural resources have been a curse, not a blessing.
The Portuguese knew they had found something big even before they set eyes on Congo. Miles from shore, the ocean was brown with silt dumped by an awe-inspiring river. When they landed, the sailors found the kingdom of Kongo, with its hundreds of villages and powerful ruler. The Portuguese brought Christianity and traded linen for ivory and other local products.
Over time, however, what the Portuguese and other European traders wanted was not produce but people. By 1700, thousands of slaves—often abducted or orphaned children—left the Kongo coast each year. Eventually, four million people from a strip of coastline 250 km long would cross the Atlantic—a third of all the African slaves taken to the Americas. Europeans provided all sorts of goods in exchange, especially textiles. However, Kongo unraveled. The Europeans cared little: they got what they wanted while the people of Kongo suffered. This would become a familiar story.
When in the 1800’s Britain and France started to colonize Africa in earnest, they had little interest in Congo. The rainforests that covered the area made railways and therefore business difficult. So the area was left until King Leopold of Belgium decided to see if he could make the vast lands of the Congo river basin turn a profit.
For years, he failed. However, at the end of the 1800’s a new invention quickly made Congo very lucrative: bicycles. Riding them was the new trend in Europe, and all those bikes needed rubber tires. Leopold’s Congo had some of the largest rubber forests in the world.
How to get the rubber, though? The trees grew wild, not on plantations, and harvesting the rubber was hard, messy, and painful. Leopold’s solution was effective but barbaric. He made people pay their taxes in rubber, to be collected by junior officials paid based on how much rubber they extracted from the local population. They terrorized the villages, maiming and killing thousands. People desperate to harvest rubber neglected their fields. Malnourishment spread. Epidemics set in. Millions died. Back in Belgium, there was a wave of beautiful new architecture, financed by the profits from Congo’s rubber.
Some colonial powers did a decent job of training local people for administrative and other senior positions. Not Belgium. In 1955, there wasn’t a single person from Congo with a degree. This became a tragedy when, in 1960, Belgium decided it was leaving by the end of the year. It did not feel it could control a rising tide of unrest and opposition: Africans in British and French colonies were winning their fights for national independence so the Congolese were calling for theirs. But they had almost no experience in the business of government. The country didn’t have a single lawyer, engineer, doctor, or economist.
When Congo became independent, civil war followed. Diamond-rich and copper-rich provinces tried to break away. Order was restored in 1965 after a US-backed coup by General Mobutu, who renamed the country Zaire and (mis)ruled it for the next three decades. He worked with mining companies to dig wealth out of the ground, but then used his share of the profits for palaces and jets, not education, health care, and infrastructure. In a country the size of Western Europe, there are still less than 1,000 km of asphalt roads.
An army backed by Rwanda ousted Mobutu in 1997. Since then, civil war has ravaged the country, as militia groups have fought over gold, diamond, copper, and coltan mines. Somewhere between 1 and 5 million have been killed. The central government is a disaster. The justice system is broken. Embezzlement is expected.
Recent legislation in the United States requires companies to declare the source of the minerals they use. However, there is still plenty of demand for Congo’s riches. And for the past 400 years having a weak central government has suited foreigners very well—it has made it easier for them to get what they want, cheap. Congo could be one of the wealthiest countries in Africa. Instead, it is one of the poorest. There is little reason to hope this will change.
