The Congo: Plunder and Resistance

by David Renton, David Seddon, Leo Zeilig

This book traces the story of the Congo from the unleashing of King Leopard's fury across the region in the 19th century, to the Western sponsored murder of Patrice Lumumba in 1961 to the war that has ravaged the country since 1997. It is an immensely readable and radical introduction to the Congo that pays attention to the importance of economic production for social organization throughout the country's recent history. It also argues that the nature of global capitalism, far from always leading to modernization, can in fact mean the expansion of private capital accompanied by social collapse. As for the future, the hope is that another politics will emerge from the resistance of ordinary Congolese to imperialist slaughter and the post-independence Mobutu dictatorship.

Genres: Africa, History, Nonfiction, Democratic Republic Of The Congo

256 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2006

About the author

David "Dave" Renton is a British academic historian and barrister.

He was born in London in 1972. His great aunt was the marxist historian, Dona Torr. His grandfather was the shoe designer Kurt Geiger. One uncle was an activist in Equity, the actors' trade union, while another was the Conservative MP Tim Renton, Baron Renton of Mount Harry. He was educated at all-boys private boarding school Eton College where he became a member of the Labour Party. He then studied history at St John's College, University of Oxford.

Renton received his PhD from the University of Sheffield for a thesis on fascism and anti-fascism in Britain after the Second World War ( The attempted revival of British Fascism: Fascism and Anti-Fascism, 1945-51 ) that was turned into the book Fascism, Anti-Fascism and the 1940s . He also became an academic historian and sociologist, teaching at universities including Nottingham Trent, Edge Hill and Rhodes University and Johannesburg University in South Africa.

Since 2009 Renton has practised as a barrister at Garden Court Chambers in London and has represented clients in a number of high-profile cases, especially concerning trade union rights and the protection of free speech.

He was for twenty-two years (1991-2013) a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and he has published over twenty books on fascism, anti-fascism, and the politics of the left.

Reviews

[D · Rating 5 out of 5]

"One observer, Staelens, was reported in the Belgian newspaper La Relève as saying, Independence was never intended to be anything but ‘purely fictitious and nominal’. Financial circles believed, our political circles were more naïve than anything, that it would be enough to give a few Congolese leaders the title of ‘Mister’ or ‘Deputy’ with decorations, luxury motor-cars, big salaries and splendid houses in the European quarter, in order to put a definite stop to the emancipation movement which threatened the financial interests concerned.


My beloved companion, I write you these words not knowing whether you will receive them, when you will receive them, and whether I will still be alive when you read them … They have corrupted some of our countrymen; they have bought others; they have done their part to distort the truth and defile our independence. What else can I say? That whether dead or alive, free or in prison by order of the colonialists, it is not my person that is important. What is important is the Congo, our poor people whose independence has turned us into a cage, with a people looking at us from outside the bars, sometimes in charitable compassion, sometimes with glee and delight. But my faith will remain unshakable. I know and feel in my very heart of hearts that sooner or later my people will rid themselves of all their enemies, foreign and domestic, that they will rise up and say no to the shame and degradation of colonialism and regain their dignity.… We are not alone. Africa, Asia and the free and liberated people from every corner of the world will always be found at the side of the Congolese. They will not abandon the light until the day comes when there are no more colonisers and their mercenaries in our country. To my children whom I leave and whom perhaps I will see no more, I wish that they be told that the future of the Congo is beautiful and that … without dignity there is no liberty, without justice there is no dignity, and without independence there are no free men. No brutality, mistreatment, or torture has ever forced me to ask for grace, for I prefer to die with my head high, my faith steadfast.… History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations will teach, but that which they will teach in the countries emancipated from colonialism and its puppets. Do not weep for me, my dear companion. I know that my country, which suffers so much, will know how to defend its independence and its liberty. Long live the Congo! Long live Africa

Every society requires leadership, and in the absence of Lumumba or any successful radical alliance to carry on his work, other forces rose to fill the gap. Prior to independence, the Congolese army, the Force Publique, was arguably the one public organisation that could claim to represent the entire nation. As in so many other newly independent African states, the army represented both an organised unified force and a vehicle for ambitious men often from humble backgrounds to acquire power and influence, and respect, within the wider society as well as within the confines of the military itself. The soldiers were generally well paid, well trained, and, with the obvious exception of the ‘insurrection’ of July , normally loyal. The army represented a rare chance of advancement. Especially in the period following independence, it was possible to experience rapid promotion. While everywhere else in society, authority was something difficult to comprehend, depending on shifting alliances, money and history, in the army, it seemed, the hierarchies were clear. The Force Publique served different purposes. It existed to protect the country’s external borders, and her embryonic divisions of class. It served the interests of the Belgian and then the Congolese rich. No matter how well or badly the Congolese economy performed, the army would always be the first item of expenditure.


If the old colonial powers were no longer willing to intervene, one power, America, was. Indeed, its strategy towards the Rwandan intervention shaped the processes that were to unfold in the Congo for years. The RPF-led Rwanda was not peripheral to their plans but central to the new alliance that the Clinton government sought to carve out in the region. The plan expressed clearly by the White House at the time was to use the Rwandan army as an instrument of American interests. One American analyst explained how Rwanda could be as important to the USA in Africa as Israel has been in the Middle East.23 By September 1996 the United Nations arms embargo on Rwanda was lifted, as a result of American pressure. Even before the invasion in 1996 a large number of US intelligence operatives converged on Zaïre. Wayne Madsen describes US embassy staff in Rwanda travelling to eastern Zaïre to initiate intelligence work with members of the AFDL. Madsen explains that US strategy in the region rested on two connected policies: military aid and trade. US Special Operations Command (SOC) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) carried out these programmes. As the rebels advanced on Kinshasa in 1996 and 1997 a US embassy official with the rebels in Goma expressed American thinking at the time: ‘What I am here to do is to acknowledge them as a very significant military and political power on the scene, and, of course, to represent American interests’.

Although he could be seen on international television networks throughout 1996 –97 lambasting imperialist powers, his Alliance was a travelling trade fair. While Mobutu might have had only token legality as president in 1996 mining companies wasted no time to meet with the rebel leader. De Beers and American Mineral Fields signed contracts with Kabila that were worth an estimated $3 billion a year. Days before Kabila’s victory, The Times reported that: Mining multinationals have signed billion-dollar deals for mineral rights with Laurent Kabila, Zaïre’s rebel leader, to get ahead in what is being billed as the ‘second scramble’ for Africa. Executives with the companies said that they are happy to do business with rebels, who control all of Zaïre’s mineral resources other than its off-shore oilfields, because they do not ask for bribes … The unusual alliance [brings together] big business and revolutionaries, many of whom were Chinese-trained Maoists and Marxists in their youth

Uganda also benefited from the shifting interests of American power in the region. In the 1990s the country was regarded as a useful ally on the border with Sudan. In 2001 Uganda received $81 million in ‘development assistance and food aid’ from the USA; in 2003 the total amounted to approximately $70 million. The Bush government awarded Uganda in 2002 favoured trading status under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). The Department of State’s annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2002 withdrew criticism of Ugandan soldiers in the DRC, perhaps as a reflection of the country’s deepening alliance with the USA.40 Influenced by alliances with Uganda, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Rwanda, the US administration was prepared to let Mobutu, its ally of thirty years, fall to a rebel army headed by the former Maoist Laurent Kabila and supported by an Angolan regime that it had formerly seen as the very embodiment of the Communist threat.

Madsen notes how Western mining companies benefited from the de facto partition of the country into separate zones of political control. First, the mineral exploiters from Rwanda and Uganda concentrated on pillaging gold and diamonds from eastern Congo. They increasingly turned their attention to coltan. Rwanda and Uganda conducted the great part of the mineral exploitation in the Congo. Western companies then bought the minerals exported by these countries, presenting a cover for their involvement in the war. The cover, however, was blown by UN reports on the illegal export of minerals. While the World Bank funded and praised Rwanda and Uganda, and the UK’s then international development secretary Clare Short went so far as to describe the Rwandan leader Paul Kagame as a ‘darling’, their economic success was being built on the exploitation of Congolese minerals sold to Western companies

The contradictions in the control and exploitation of minerals can be seen clearly. The mobilising power of the ethnic militias and rebels armies is through an appeal to ethnic loyalty and, frequently, the rejection of those who are regarded as non-originaires. Yet exploitation of the mineral reserves often requires experienced labour. This may not correspond with the ethnic politics of the militias. Ethnicity is an imperfect tool for securing control of the region’s resources. For the rebels the control of gold reserves is inextricably linked to the division of political power in Kinshasa. So the FNI is able to use the gold under its control and the presence of AngloGold Ashanti to increase its leverage in negotiations with the government in the capital. The peace process can be seen, therefore, as an ongoing process to redistribute power to military networks with the best access to and control of minerals. Even the UN was forced belatedly to accept that competition for the control of gold mining was a major element in the continuing conflict.102

Yet this has only been half our story. We have also shown that the recent history of the Congo has been set alight by the resistance of the Congolese themselves. Their struggles have so often gone down to defeat, most recently in the ‘transition’ led by a cowardly political opposition. Still, the opposition was constantly forced on, scrutinised and compelled to push further than they wanted to go by a protest movement that dissected their every move and lamented each compromise. During the independence struggle of autumn 1959 and spring 1960 it was popular resistance that led to the country’s first elections and moulded politicians of the stature of Lumumba. During the years 1990 94 the people again took to the streets, almost breaking Mobutu’s reign. Civil servants, university students, trade unionists informal traders and other groups were not acquiescent, but fought bravely for a different, democratic Congo in which people would be free of hunger and free to vote. It is to these forces, and to their resistance, that the Congo must again turn."

Basically like game of thrones but with millions of real people dying

[Tara · Rating 4 out of 5]

A clear, concise overview of the past century of Western interference in the Congo. While people have become more familiar with the literal "Heart of Darkness" the Belgians created in the early 20th century, a similar treatise has been needed to deal with the post-World Wars era. The most valuable part is its insistence on drawing back the veil thrown over the so-called "ethnic killings", such as the CIA's murder of Patrice Lumumba, Uganda and Rwanda's plunder of the region's gold, and the current rush for coltan. I only wish it could more clearly delineate the current actors in the conflict, but layers and layers of buttons and fall men helpfully obscure the fact that it is our society's greed which continues to inflict and spur on violence around the world.

I liked this: "There is nothing primitive or backward about the Congo, nor is the current period of plunder, which has seen commentators rage against the 'criminality' of foreign companies and multinationals, symptomatic of any 'deviant' capitalism. This is not the 'dark side' of globalisation... The convergence of 'criminal' activity in areas outside the control of 'legal' international and political actors is rather an integral and even defining feature of the new globalised world... The war and 'criminality' in the Congo are examples of real existing capitalism itself, transformed by the erosion of national states and by the growth of private capital and also contributing actively to that process."