Belgium's King Leopold Forgotten Congo Genocide 10+ Million Killed

[MrFanti]

https://www.dispropaganda.com/single...Congo-Genocide
Over 10 million Africans killed - more of Europe's destruction of the African Continent....

[Stavros]

Then came Mobutu, America's boylet, soaked in violence and corruption, Muhammad Ali's paymaster -did this disgrace to sport ever once think about his African brothers rotting in the cells beneath his feet in the stadium where he fought the 'Rumble in the Jungle' or was he just gloating at the bags of gold Mobutu gave him, stolen from the African people? Should we ask his manager, the guy who was a convicted murderer and racketeer? Just as decades later, Mugabe and his buddies grabbed as much diamond wealth in the DRC as they could lay their hands on....

If the link interests you, there were a series of (three, I think) articles on Zaire in the Journal of Modern African Studies in the second half of the 1980s.

Zaire: An African Horror Story - The Atlantic

[MrFanti]

Then came Mobutu, America's boylet, soaked in violence and corruption, Muhammad Ali's paymaster -did this disgrace to sport ever once think about his African brothers rotting in the cells beneath his feet in the stadium where he fought the 'Rumble in the Jungle' or was he just gloating at the bags of gold Mobutu gave him, stolen from the African people? Should we ask his manager, the guy who was a convicted murderer and racketeer? Just as decades later, Mugabe and his buddies grabbed as much diamond wealth in the DRC as they could lay their hands on....

If the link interests you, there were a series of (three, I think) articles on Zaire in the Journal of Modern African Studies in the second half of the 1980s.

Zaire: An African Horror Story - The Atlantic

Oh the list of the destruction to African Continent by Europe (root cause) is an almost endless story....All the crap happening now can be traced back to European Colonialism.
That's a tough truth to swallow which is why the topic is so often avoided....

I would also debate that the Middle East is what it is today due to European Colonialism as well....

America is not the only "guilty" country of abuse of Blacks....

[Stavros]

Oh the list of the destruction to African Continent by Europe (root cause) is an almost endless story....All the crap happening now can be traced back to European Colonialism.
That's a tough truth to swallow which is why the topic is so often avoided....

I would also debate that the Middle East is what it is today due to European Colonialism as well....

America is not the only "guilty" country of abuse of Blacks....

I would not say the debate is 'so often avoided', nor is the harder questions to answer -why did the Independent State reproduce the sins of the Colonial State it replaced? There was an extensive literature on this when I did my Graduate thesis on the Post-Colonial State years and years ago, and it has grown since then, but rarely makes it into the 'mainstream' media. One wonders if the students who have had access to it have ever got beyond their outrage to work on something more meaningful and productive than some idiotic call for 'Reparations' given that decades of African, Caribbean and Middle Eastern 'leaders' have been robbing their citizens on a scale at least as great if not greater than the Colonial masters who preceded them.

The reason it makes people uncomfortable is due to the fact that the first generation of, say, African leaders, failed to achieve their lofty ambitions when succeeding British or European colonial rule. Nkrumah would be a good example, but so so the much-revered if functionally useless Nyerere -and one notes that in some of his catastrophic policies, such as Ujamaa, he was being advised by White guys.

A mini-cult has sometimes attempted to argue Patrice Lumumba was murdered because he was not what the West wanted, and to some extent it is true, but the same people having pointed out the abysmal record in education that was the legacy of the Belgian Congo, don't admit Lumumba was a drunkard prone to episodes of such intense stupidity he was unfit for public office -he would never have made it to Congress or the House of Commons. That Mobutu was the chosen successor and went on to create one of the most violent and shameless Kleptocracies in the world is only partly due to the Cold War rivalries he was able to exploit. And is it always Empire that is to blame?

On the one hand, Nelson Mandela came out of prison to present to the world the option of a popular leader whose agenda marked a radical departure from the Apartheid that had done such damage to South Africa. But did Jacob Zuma then become just another crooked African leader, more interested in enriching himself than the people who voted for him? Mandela's legacy didn't last long. Part of the answer is the irony that in leading the largest proportion of people committed to ending Apartheid, the ANC became what it appears as today, in effect a One Party State that has strangled diversity, failed to 'spread the cash' and opting instead for a piecemeal distribution of funds over which local elites bargain for with the elites in Government.

The arguments have been advanced by Clive Thomas, in The Rise of the Authoritarian State in Peripheral Societies (1984), and Joel Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States (198. In effect, the legacy of the Colonial State was a bias toward state institutions that a new elite were able to take over on independence, but as only limited social development that had taken place in the colonial era, when resource extraction dominated the economy, this meant that the loyalty of the citizen was strongest in its local environment, and thus weak or even non-existent in relation to the State.

The independent state thus provided a new elite with the levers of power, which they could exercise over a recalcitrant population, and as the elites benefited from the continuing economic relations with 'the west', so an alienated network of societies either participated reluctantly, or on occasion rebelled, the tragedy of Biafra being an example of a Nigerian province opting for independence to create the benefits for itself that were otherwise being syphoned off by elites in Lagos.

In the case of the Congo, Mobutu preserved the lamentable state of the economy and society that was inherited from the Belgians, in which he and his elite supporters relied on the rents from the diamond and minerals trade to enrich themselves while failing to develop to any great extent the civic society that would have created strong state-citizen relations and enable the Government to engage in nationwide reforms to give Zaire a better foundation on which to function.

In other words, the Black African leaders betrayed the promise of independence by merely reproducing the structure of colonial rule. In other cases, such as Algeria, the promise of independence ran into the ground because the leadership of the revolution never really took the broad mass of people with them -there was solidarity in the positions taken when it was opposition to French colonial rule, with all the atrocities that went with that -though in Algeria the FLN were also capable of the most revolting crimes against 'their own people' if that is what they were. But when the oil and gas that was the foundation of Algeria's income remained so 40 years after the revolution at the expense of a more diverse economy, it is hardly surprising if elite indifference and complacency created space for a radical alternative which in Algeria became Islamist- Michael Walzer has looked at this in The Paradox of Liberation (2015).

So at some point the legacy of Empire has to take a back seat, because the people driving the independent state had the power and often the means to do things differently for the benefit of the people, but did not. Iraq would be a classic case of monumental state failure, another example of a State in which loyalties to tribe and religion and ethnicity have proven stronger than loyalty to the State, with the failure to develop or allow the development of civil society a key cause of weakness, as is also the case in post-Soviet Russia.

It is these days tiresome to blame Imperialism for the failures of a state when generations have had the opportunity to do things differently. If the Colonial State was that bad, one feels inclined to ask, why did it persist, in barely a new uniform? And why did Revolution fail, be it in Algeria or the Caribbean (eg, Brian Meeks Caribbean Revolutions and Revolutionary Theory, 2001 as an example of fantasy replacing hard analysis, notably in regard to the farce of the Grenadian 'Revolution' which Meeks can't bring himself to admit never happened, probably due to the influence of his then wife, and his addiction to vulgar Marxism) -?

So many reports, so many questions.

[Stavros]

I forgot to add this link, an interesting take on why Socialism was the wrong option in post-Colonial Africa.

How Socialism Underdeveloped Africa - Intercollegiate Studies Institute (isi.org)

[MrFanti]

In other words, the Black African leaders betrayed the promise of independence by merely reproducing the structure of colonial rule. In other cases, such as Algeria, the promise of independence ran into the ground because the leadership of the revolution never really took the broad mass of people with them -there was solidarity in the positions taken when it was opposition to French colonial rule, with all the atrocities that went with that -though in Algeria the FLN were also capable of the most revolting crimes against 'their own people' if that is what they were. But when the oil and gas that was the foundation of Algeria's income remained so 40 years after the revolution at the expense of a more diverse economy, it is hardly surprising if elite indifference and complacency created space for a radical alternative which in Algeria became Islamist- Michael Walzer has looked at this in The Paradox of Liberation (2015).

Ah...You sound very much like Republicans making excuses for America's checkered past...and blaming Africans for slavery...
But hey, if it makes you feel good like it makes Republicans feel good, then more power to you!

[Stavros]

Ah...You sound very much like Republicans making excuses for America's checkered past...and blaming Africans for slavery...
But hey, if it makes you feel good like it makes Republicans feel good, then more power to you!

But I have not said or even implied that. Were it not for it's Liberal ideology, is it not the case that when Revolutionary America replaced Colonial America it retained its class relations intact? In other words, in fundamental terms, what changed when the Founding Fathers replaced a Monarchy with a Liberal Republic? Slavery was not abolished. The land rights that men such as George Washington had were not impaired or reduced, if anything, property rights were extended to those who could afford to buy it. Prohibitions on the expansion onto the land of the First Nations were lifted, and land acquisition advanced with a degree of violence that retains its ghastly horror to the present day.

The question, does a State benefit from a Revolution has been integral to studies of Revolution for some time, and I think you know this, just as the difficulty in answering it begs the additional question 'How much time do you have to make the judgment?'.

It could be argued that the American Revolution -for the United States as a whole- did not in fact lead to significant progress and radical change until the end of the Civil War, and the emancipation of Black Americans AND their integration into the economy and social development. Indeed, if you agree that Reconstruction was a remarkable era in which Black Americans proved they could be productive and creative partners in the economy and society when they had equal access to it, but that they were then subjected to a raft of laws that not only deprived them of the advances they had made, but also re-created many of the conditions of Slavery through Segregation, then you can explain the 'backlash' against progress in terms of Race. And the Racism that is linked to the Republican Party via the Dixiecrats right up to the present day.

This brings the debate back to the question, who was the Revolution for, who benefited from it, and do the aims of 1776 have to be locked into the class relations of the time with slavery added -or does the language of the Constitution -We the People, and the Bill of Rights, not endow all born in the US with equal rights?

Blaming Africans for slavery? I don't get it. First of all, as you know, Slavery was an international business, and it would be naive and simply wrong to deny that some Black Africans were integral to the sale of slaves - just as some people in the UK and probably the US are keen to tell you they were also Muslims. In the American case, the issue of Slavery in the United States is a separate matter to the Atlantic Slave Trade, which impacted the Caribbean and the rest of Central and Southern America.

The deeper point I was making, is that the Colonial State was created by the Imperial Powers; that it rarely if ever had any geographical meaning for the people who lived in these newly created 'entities' such as the Gold Coast and Nigeria. Indeed, in the very first issue of the journal World Politics, Walker Connor argued that creating the Colonial State meant destroying existing States or Kingdoms, that of the Ashanti being one of the best known if but one example. Just as many people are not aware that Benin had a wealth of Artistic expression that was looted by the British, who then destroyed what they could not ship back to the British Museum and private collections, leaving the impression that West Africans had no art, and no skill or imagination to create it.

The Colonial experience, different as it was in West Africa, with little White settlement beyond Christian Missionaries, compared to Eastern and Southern Africa, distorted existing political, economic and social structures, and through the preferential treatment of selected groups, created new elites locked into the systems of patronage which were required to enable capitalism to extract the wealth of the land with as little trouble as possible.

Is it so difficult or controversial to see how the same clients of Colonial managers were able, often though Missionary education or their military experience, to become the first generation of leaders at Independence? Who else was there with the ability to read and write or perform admin tasks to do the job?

Once you get beyond the first flush of independence when the legacy of Empire was if anything the opposite of what Empire loyalists like to tell you, then yes the circumstances of independence were challenging -in Africa, the lack of educational attainment across the country to take advantage of new economic opportunities often still linked to/held back by the corporations and businesses that had established themselves in the age of Empire, so that to some there was a dependency relationship which meant Independence was a word rather than a reality.

But it is also the case that many of the leaders were a failure because their ambitions exceeded the ability of their country to deliver, Nkrumah in Ghana is a good example, while the privileges given to the Military in Colonial times led perhaps inevitably to those phases of military rule that were just as bad for African development as their economic dependency. And just as power corrupts, so one after another of these newly independent states were staffed by men who saw an opportunity to line their pockets and couldn't stop it once they had started. Over in Trinidad, one of the men who nationalised the oil and gas industry in the late 1960s freely admitted that once they had done so, those who had access to the revenues simply helped themselves, rather than spend it on the development of the country. You might call it a 'Carnival' of Corruption.

It is in this sense that one argues the post-Colonial State retained the sins of its predecessor, but this is also possible if State Institutions are erected onto a flimsy relationship with society where the people have no loyalty to the state other than what their local notables can extract from the bosses in terms of grants or as happened in many cases, white collar jobs creating enormous and functionally useless bureaucracies, or armies with nothing better to do than take over the Govt thinking they could do a better job.

The farce of 'African Socialism' in this sense didn't leap over any 'Stages of Development' so much as just ignore the development bit and impose costs on the people they couldn't afford. And in some cases the leadership was being advised to go for ridiculous economic development schemes funded by the Govt sometimes from overseas aid programmes, by White Europeans convinced African Socialism was going to 'liberate' the people or some such nonsense. You might ask yourself why it is that Maya Angelou and Black Americans went to live in Ghana but didn't stay -was there something about this new Africa that disappointed them?

At some point one needs to assess Africa's problems derived from Empire, because of the damage that it caused, but also the successes and failures of what came after it. it was not beyond the intelligence of the Africans to do things differently, just as some may say, If Botswana could do it, why not Zimbabwe? I worked with someone who emigrated to Zimbabwe not long after independence, because it was the most exciting place to go to in Africa, so how did a country with so much promise end up becoming a basket case? Consider Robert Mugabe in detail and then shake your head in disbelief.

At this stage, a more balanced analysis is required, one that incorporates the past into the present, but one which does not let Africans off the hook just because they were 'held back' by Empire. How did Mobutu become so rich? And why then, and now, are the citizens of the DRC so poor?