“In those days, When civilization kicked us in the face, When holy water slapped our cringing brows, The vultures built in the shadow of their talons, The bloodstained monument of tutelage.” – From the poem, THE VULTURES BY David Diop (1927- 1960) The President of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) Joseph Kabila this week, got his country’s general elections, slated for November 28, 2016, postponed to July, 2018. His tenure after two terms and a fifteen-year rule was to end this December.
Now he has extended it by over 19 months; that is if he ever hands over power willingly. The lame excuses given were that the electoral register was not ready, and that the country has no funds to conduct elections! So a man presides over a country for fifteen years, and he cannot produce a voters register! The previous month, citizens who accused him of trying to perpetuate himself in power, took to the streets, and fifty of them were shot dead. But Kabila is merely a continuation of the centuries old rape of the DRC by African dictators and European mass murders; by greedy and inhuman white-men and horrible and insatiable black-men; by American assassins and African leaders.
The country is the victim of its enormous riches which has attracted men and women from all parts of the world since the Portuguese arrived there in the 1480s. Almost all the valuable natural resource known to humanity, can be found in the DRC. It has large deposits of diamond, gold, cobalt, copper, tantalum, tin and oil. It has large timber reserves, and was the world’s primary supplier of rubber. It has the world’s largest reservoir of coltan used to manufacture electronic devises like the cell phone. The uranium used by the United States (US) to manufacture the atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were taken from the mines of the DRC. It has the second largest river in the world, the Congo River which can produce uninterrupted hydropower for the whole continent.
THE DRC IS THE NECTAR FROM WHICH VARIOUS EUROPEAN AND THE AFRICAN SUCCESSORS SUCK; IT IS THE AFRICAN SUGAR THAT ATTRACTED GREEDY ANTS ACROSS THE WORLD MAKING IT A PERPETUALLY LAWLESS AND UNDERDEVELOPED COUNTRY WITH AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE. It is estimated that despite the enormous wealth the world has looted from her in the past four centuries, the country still has $24 trillion untapped mineral deposits! When the Europeans gathered at their Berlin Conference in 1884 and parceled out Africa as colonies, it committed greater injustice by handing over DRC to the ceremonial king of Belgium, Leopold II as his personal estate to do as he wished, provided he allowed other Europeans assess to the territory’s riches as a Free Trade Zone. King Leopold II had for long dreamt about owning countries as his personal property.
He had wanted to buy parts of Argentina, rent the Philippines from Spain, colonize parts of Japan, China and Vietnam, and seize Senegal and Mozambique, he failed. He devised a way of seizing the Congo by calling an international Conference on Geography. From that conference, he established the so called International African Association with him as the sole shareholder ostensibly to send humanitarian aid. With that and the assistance of the explorer, Henry Morton Stanley, he ravaged the Congo. With Europe giving him an initial 2,350,000 square miles called the Congo Free State, he sized the peoples forests and lands and with other European companies like the Anglo-Belgian Indian Rubber Company, carried out some of the most monstrous atrocities ever perpetuated against humanity.
The people were enslaved and subjected to forced labour. Those who protested had their hands cut off or summarily executed. Whole villages were razed for refusing to do forced labour while family or community members were held as hostages to ensure that their members worked free. With executions, amputation, flogging, malnutrition and diseases, Leopold’s men wiped out over ten million Congolese within twenty years. This horrendous cleansing is still not classified as genocide until this day. Joseph Conrad’s HEART OF DARKNESS (1899) is based on real life sadists in the Congo. Stanley, Leopold’s co-conspirator had claimed that the mission of the white-man in Congo was to “pour the civilization of Europe into the barbarism of Africa” But what the people witnessed was barbarism never known in the Congo. The first known graduate in the DRC after 400 years of ‘civilization’ was in 1956. Four years later, Patrice Lumumba led the country to independence as its democratically elected Prime Minister.
He wanted true independence with the Congolese controlling their resources. He had only three months of peace before the old colonialists raised militias and turncoats, plunging the country into crises in which it is still mired. American President Dwight Eisenhower claiming Lumumba was tilting towards the then Soviet Union ordered the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to kill him. That task fell on then CIA Station Chief in DRC, Mr. Lawrence Devlin who linked up with Belgian Intelligence, and the head of the British M16 in Kinshasha, Daphne Park (Later Baroness Park of Monmouth) to execute the plot. The Lumumba case, exposed the United Nations (UN) as a tool of the powerful and enslavers. As part of the plot, pretentious peacekeepers put the legitimate and legally elected Prime Minister, under house arrest to allow the country’s seizure by lackeys, soulless politicians and separatists. It was in pursuit of this duplicity presented as diplomacy, that Dag Hammarskjold, the Second Secretary of the UN, died in a plane crash on September 18, 1961 in Ndola, Zambia. Lumumba was seized and handed over to Katangese separatists who with a Belgian squad, executed him.
While Belgium has apologized for the murder, the US and Britain have refused. The Americans and Europeans handed over power to former Corporal Joseph Mobutu who later styled himself a Field Marshall and directly ran the country for 32 years before he was removed in a revolt led by Laurent Kabila on May 17, 1997. The DRC never settled down before Kabila was gunned down in controversial circumstances within the Presidential Palace on January 16, 2001.
Eight days later, his son, Joseph, replaced him. The DRC remains a war zone. From August 1998 to July 18, 2003, nine African countries including Uganda, Rwanda, Chad, Namibia and Zimbabwe, and nineteen militia groups fought in the DRC resulting in 5.4 million deaths. The main cause was Uganda and Rwanda who having assisted in the removal of Mobutu, felt entitled to run the DRC and its resources. Of course they had other reasons like routing out Hutu rebels and The Lord’s Resistance Army. The African Union needs to muster enough will to rescue the country; as long as DRC bleeds, so shall Africa.
Written by Owei Lakemfa.
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