The CIA and MI6 conspired to assassinate him (whether they succeeded directly is open to debate-what is certainly very clear is that he was killed), eventually installing in his place Joseph Mobutu, a man of spectacular rapaciousness, brutality, and megalomania. The Congolese people then made the very untimely tactical mistake of democratically electing a socialist president in the midst of the nuclear arms race between East and West. The Belgians who followed left behind a deliberately uneducated governing class and a few sergeants. Handed outright to Belgium’s King Leopold for his personal exploitation, nearly half its population were worked to death, whipped, dismembered, executed outright, or sent running into the bush to die of starvation and disease in a pitiless quest for first ivory and then rubber. Stripped of its population by Arab and Portuguese slavers, its tribal societies were devastated.
This is its curse.īut from before its beginnings the Congo has been ravaged by greed. In short, it has everything that the First World needs and desires. It possesses the equivalent of trillions of dollars in resources: diamonds, gold, coltan (which the whole world requires for cell phones), minerals, timber, probably oil, uranium, and hydroelectric power. Occupying an ungovernable mass of land the size of all Western Europe combined, the Democratic Republic of the Congo should be the richest country in Africa. It is a country, a subject so large and so complicated as to defy explanation-or any summing up in a sentence, a volume, an hour of television, or even ten hours of television.
It is the most relentlessly f*****-over nation in the world, yet it has long been my dream to see the Congo.
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