Struggle News Worldwide: From Kimpa Vita to Lumumba to the women of Panzi : the fear of emancipatory history in the DRC

Any attempt to make sense of the current carnage must factor in the
connection between cheap resources like coltan, gold, cassiterite, the
warring factions and the war. Yet trying to answer all these questions
could take volumes and will not help understand why and how the DRC has
arrived at such a point of destruction and self-destruction. Among most
analysts there is deep-seated reluctance to look at the visible and
invisible legacies of a history which has been, in the main, genocidal
and predatory. And not just from 1994.(2)

While looking for the usual culprits at the highest levels of
governments and/or multinational corporations, we should not ignore
those of us who consume the latters’ goods. Why don’t consumers of
computers and cell phones feel compelled NOT to purchase items
resulting from a well-known criminal process that can be traced to the
extraction of coltan from eastern DRCongo? Is their attitude different
from that of previous generations which enjoyed the comforts provided
by the triangular Atlantic trade and then, later, by colonial
occupations? The visible crimes against humanity today have their roots
in the refusal to look at the current triumphant economic system as
part of the problem. It is not enough to rant against the usual
culprits, be they foreign regional leaders or their international
supporters. The process which brought the current political leadership
to power in the DRCongo can be traced to, at least, the conditions and
circumstances under which Independence was achieved in 1960.

As can be seen by the recent unfolding, so-called “financial”
crisis, the reluctance to go back in time to the root of the problem is
deeply ingrained. It took a long time for pundits and experts alike to
mention 1929, and it is still taboo to mention the word depression.
Yet, history, one should know by now, is not unlike nature: it unfolds
with warts and all, good and bad, regardless of what historians may
wish to edit out. While it is fairly easy to rage and rant against the
current cast of regional, national and international leaders for their
unrelenting determination to “do away with the DRCongo”, and enrich
themselves in the process, a mixture of fear and shame seems to stand
in the way of going further back in time in our history–shame in
understanding that we should never have allowed Patrice Emery Lumumba
to be overthrown, assassinated and disposed of in an acid bath.
Lumumba’s elimination was meant to be exemplary in its terrorizing
effect on the Congolese people. In the subsequent decades, everything
was done to ensure that no political leadership emerge that was
inspired by emancipatory politics. And it seems to have worked far
beyond the expectations of its sponsors.

In three years’ time, January 17, 2011, it will be the 50th
anniversary of the so-called success of having “done away with”
Lumumba. The same mentality has been at work trying to balkanize the
DRCongo. Like Lumumba’s body, they would like to dissolve it. As with
Lumumba, as with colonial rule and slavery earlier, the recipe for
dealing with persons, groups or even a country which refuses to
conform, in Africa or beyond, has been the same: do away with it. How
many Congolese know of Kimpa Vita, who was burnt at the stake on June
2, 1706 simply for having denounced the Kongo king for allowing slave
raiding? In turn Capuchin missionaries denounced Kimpa Vita for being a
heretic. That was two centuries before Simon Kimbangu’s resistance
against economic, political and religious colonialism. Imprisoned in
1921, he died in prison in 1951. Done away with.

The same dominant mentality led to the erasure of Yugoslavia from
the map. Similar processes are going on in various parts of the planet.
The targets may not necessarily be chosen for access to cheap
resources, but at the core, the objective is to target people whose
will to be free refuses to bend to a fundamentalist ideology rooted in
the notion that economic liberty must be defended at all cost.
Regardless of the genocidal sequences left in its path.

Those who might falter in the belief that capitalism is the “best
economic system man has invented”, should read the lead article of The Economist
(October 18, 2008) titled “Capitalism at bay”. Unsurprisingly, the
subtitle is : “What went wrong and, rather more importantly for the
future, what did not”. At the end of the very first paragraph, one
reads “Ever since [one hundred and sixty five years ago], The Economist
has been on the side of economic liberty”. Economic liberty has
obviously worked wonders for those who fashioned and benefited most
from it, starting all the way from slavery. In all of its subsequent
manifestations and so-called self-corrections, those who most benefited
have maintained their grip on how it should be run, while allowing a
few more into the privileged circle.

The prizing of economic liberty over everything else has taken such
a toll that it does keep at bay those who might wish to calculate its
costs. Could the fear stem from what might be found? The calculation of
human suffering is impossible. In Africa, humanitarianism has been used
to alleviate the conscience of those who swear and live by the fruits
of economic liberty. As has been seen with the so-called financial
crisis, the dominant mind-set shall always find ways of extracting
profits even where it might be thought impossible. The financial
engineering acrobatics bringing about the current crisis have been used
before against segments of humanity that had been ruled out of
humanity. How many Africans, for example, know that from 1685 to 1848,
France applied Le Code Noir as the legal tool for how to treat
Africans.(3) The abolition of slavery did not change the habits which
had been ingrained in the populace that benefited from slavery. It
would be more appropriate to speak of the modernization of slavery. The
financial engineers of those times, with the help of the steam engine,
figured that more money could be made by abolishing slavery and, to
boot, giving themselves moral accolades for putting an end to something
that was not morally sustainable. It never entered the minds of most
abolitionists that those they called slaves saw themselves as part of
humanity.

France passed the Taubira law in 2001. The law stated that slavery
was a Crime Against Humanity. Given what happened at the UN Conference
Against Racism and Intolerance in August/September 2001, France’s
acceptance of slavery as a Crime Against Humanity was certainly a
positive step; but ever since, a backlash has been brewing and broke
out in the open with historian Pierre Nora’s blunt reaction against the
law.(4) This detour may seem irrelevant to what is going on in eastern
DRCongo. It is not, because it reveals how difficult it is to transform
a mind-set born out of genocidal sequences (wiping out of indigenous
populations in the Caribbean and the Americas followed by hunting for
slaves in Africa). Segments of humanity benefited immensely from
slavery and the slave trade. In Haiti, France and its allies went even
further and insisted that the slave owners and plantation owners be
compensated for their economic losses when Haitians won their
independence. Such compensation was paid from 1825 through 1946. When
President Aristide insisted that the payment should be given back,
France, including some of its best known liberal voices, balked. They
then did everything they could to do away with President Jean Bertrand
Aristide. Luckily, unlike Toussaint L’Ouverture and Lumumba, he
survived. But the doing-away machine went to work among those who kept
calling for his return, like Lovinsky Jean-Pierre. He “disappeared” in
August 2007. His crime was fearlessness and fidelity to the truth
process of bringing about a change in the situation.(5)

The lessons of what happens when trespasses of humanity (e.g.
genocide) and its living principles are broken, have still not been
learned. The corrections, whether at Nüremberg or in South Africa, have
always been far beneath what was called for. The same happened with the
Rwanda genocide of 1994. To this day, the unfolding of feminicide
(destroying women at their most vulnerable and intimate), in eastern
DRCongo, the collateral maiming and killing of children, are the direct
continuation of a refusal to attend to what happened, at all levels,
inside and outside Africa. And, of course, this refusal is, in turn,
connected to the wider and deeper refusal to face Crimes Against
Humanity where and when they did happen. The result can be observed
today, almost like a spectacle. The inventory of atrocities committed
seems endless both in terms of numbers and intensity.

The pattern of “doing away with” is not peculiar to the DRCongo.
There continues to be a deliberate “doing away with” people like the
pygmies, immigrants, women, children, handicapped people, workers,
poor, peasants. On a larger and deeper scale, the spectacle of “doing
away with” the planet is unfolding with impunity. By calling it a
financial crisis, the leadership of the most advanced economies defined
those who must come to the table to discuss how to get out of it.
According to the defenders of economic liberty über alles, those who
have been at the receiving end of its ravages over the centuries must
be kept out of the discussion.

At the conference that is being called in Nairobi, there will be
nobody representing the women who were raped beyond description, no one
who will represent the children. The NGOs present there will follow the
protocol dictated by the modernizers of the Berlin Conference. Then it
was about carving up the continent between those who made themselves
count. The mind-set at work in Berlin in 1884-85 has not changed with
regard to Africa. Some day it will, because it has to….if humanity is
going to survive.

(1) See the documentary on the 10th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide, made by Frontline: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ghosts/

(2) See, for example, Adam Hochschild’s book King Leopold’s Ghost.

(3) See Louis Sala-Molins, Le code noir ou le calvaire de Canaan.
Presses Universitaires de France. Paris. 2002. Obviously, we are not
referring to academics, but even there, knowing and doing something
about it are two different things.

(4) See the article by Pierre Nora “Liberté pour l’histoire” and
Christiane Taubira’s response “Mémoire, histoire et droit”,
respectively in Le Monde of October 10 and 15, 2008.

(5) After Lumumba’s assassination, a process of what could be called
ideological cleansing led to the doing away of anyone who was
considered a lumumbist. It included people who came from the same
region as his birth place.