Abstract
Congo is a physically imposing country nestled in the heart of Africa. It is the continent’s second largest country, rich in natural resources such as copper, cobalt, diamonds, and gold. It is also home to the Congo River and Inga dams, which could be meaningful sources of hydropower if they were properly utilized. Given its natural resource base and sheer size, Congo stands likely to be an engine of development for central Africa. Congo’s grandeur and potential for greatness, however, have been besmirched by a recent history of crisis. The contemporary crisis to which I allude is powerful because it has economic and social dimensions as well as political ones, leaving Congo in a bewildering—but not irreversible—situation.
Accompanying the many postcolonial regimes have been several name changes for the country once called the Belgian Congo. Following independence it was renamed the Republic of Congo. By 1964 it became known as the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 1971, under Mobutu, it was once again renamed, this time as Zaire. In 1997 Kabila chose to revert the name back to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
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Notes
Winsome J. Leslie, Zaire: Continuity and Political Change in an Oppressive State (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993). 5.
These three metaphors are powerful images of the development of the postcolonial state in Africa. For greater elucidation, see John Clark, “The Nature and Evolution of the State in Zaire,” Studies in Comparative International Development 32, no. 4 (1998): 3–23. Mahmood Mamdani and Robert Fatton also offer critical insights. See Fatton’s Preda- tory Rule in Africa (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner Press, 1992), and Mamdani’s, Citizen and Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 4. The second chapter in this volume, by Crawford Young, most perspicaciously captures this point.
For a superb overview of the whole remarkable period of European exploration and early colonization, written for a popular audience, see Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
Jan Vansina in his introduction to Daniel Vangoweghe, Du Sang sur les Lianes (Brussels: Didier Hatier, 1986), cited in Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, 233
Michael Schatzberg, Mobutu or Chaos? The US and Zaire, 1960–90 (Washington: University Press of America, 1991), 10.
Arthur House, The U.N. in the Congo: The Political and Civilian Efforts (Washington: University Press of America, 1978), 6–10.
Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1965).
House, The U.N. in the Congo, citing Jules Gérard-Libois and Benoit Verhagen, eds., Congo 1960, vol. 1 (Brussels: Centre de Reserche et d’Information Socio-Politque, 1961), 206–66. Congo 1960, vividly describes the events leading up to independence as a hasty and disjointed affair that the Congolese population had not fully understood. See House, The U.N. in the Congo, 256–66. For more detailed accounts in English, see Crawford Young, Politics in the Congo: Decolonization and Independence (Princeton. Princeton University Press, 1965), and René Lemarchand, Political Awakening in the Belgian Congo (Berkeley. University of California Press, 1964).
See Rajeshwar Dayal, Mission for Hammarskjold: The Congo Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 2, as well as Schatzberg, Mobutu or chaos? 11.
For a recent and thoroughly documented recent account that blames Belgian officials for this infamous assassination, see Ludo De Witte, The Assassination of Patrice Lumumba, trans Ann Wright and Renée Fenby (London. Verso, 2001).
Sean Kelly, America’s Tyrant: The CIA and Mobutu of Zaire (Washington D.C.. University Press of America, 1993). 193
For a surprisingly positive assessment of Mobutu’s early years by a deeply informed scholar who subsequently became a Mobutu critic, see Jean-Claude Willame, Patrimonialism and Political Change in the Congo (Stanford, CA. Stanford University Press, 1972); also see Crawford Young and Thomas Turner in The Rise and Decline of the Zairean State (Madison. University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); the Young and Turner volume is the definitive work on the Mobutu regime through the mid-1980s.
Guy Gran argues this point most convincingly in “An Introduction to Zaire’s Permanent Development Crisis,” in Gran, ed., Zaire: The Political Economy of Underdevelopment (New York: Praeger Press, 1979), 58.
See Ibid., 59 as well as Young and Turner, Rise and Decline, 281–306.
On this point, see Colette Braeckman, Le dinosaure: Le Zaire de Mobutu (Paris. Fayard, 1992), 191.
On this point, see particularly Thomas Callaghy, The State-Society Struggle: Zaire in Comparative Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984)
The definitive source on Mobutu’s mode of oppression is Michael G. Schatzberg, The Dialectics of Oppression in Zaire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988)
Jean Philippe Peemans and Jean-Marie Wautlet, Accumulation and Non-Development in Zaire 1960–80 (Louvain: University of Louvain Press, 1981), 227.
Banque du Zaire, Rapport annuel, cited in William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner Press, 1998): 154.
Ibid., 155.
My conversations with John Clark while writing this chapter prompted my adoption of the concept of the unraveling state. It is a state that is declining in its capacity for enforced order because the fabric of power and authority is unraveling, due to declines in public support and economic recession, among other things. For a discussion about when the “critical juncture” in the decline of the Zairian state was reached, see John F. Clark, “The Extractive State in Zaire,” in Leonardo Villalon, ed., Critical Juncture: The African State Between Disintegration and Reconfiguration (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1997), 112–15.
Kisangani Emizet, “Zaire after Mobutu: A Potential Case of Humanitarian Emergency” (paper from the World Institute for Development Economic Research Seminar, Helsinki 6–8 October, 1996), 6.
William Reno argues that “warlord politics” had become characteristic of failing African states; see the introduction to his Warlord Politics, 3–15.
Jean Francois Bayart, The State in Africa (London: Longman, 1993), conceptualizes the African state as a stage where ethnic rivalries are often played out. The state is the site and seat of power, domination, and accumulation.
On this episode, and on the evolution of ethno-regional identities and clashes in Congo in general, see John F. Clark, “Ethno-Regionalism in Zaire: Roots, Manifestations and Meaning,” Journal of African Policy Studies 1, no. 2 (1995): 23–45.
Edgar O’Ballance, The Congo -Zaire Experience 1960–98 (London: Macmillan Press, 2000), xviii–xix
Ibid., 50.
Filip Reyntjens, “The Second Congo War: More than a Remake,” African Affairs 98 (1999): 241.
Ibid., 242.
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McCalpin, J.O. (2002). Historicity of a Crisis. In: Clark, J.F. (eds) The African Stakes of the Congo War. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982445_3
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