The Long Shadows of Western Colonialism

In May, this year, the newly elected President of the Democratic Republic of Congo paid visit to China, to renegotiate the terms of an agreement signed by the two states back in 2008. La Sino-Congolaise des Mines (Sicomines), thus the accord is named, is a sort of barter deal allowing China to mine rare earths (mainly cobalt), in exchange for a program of investment in the country. The lack of infrastructural investment in DRC is just one of the handicaps hobbling one of the richest, but also poorest countries on Earth. Today nearly two thirds of the Congolese, who are around 60 million in a country the size of Western Europe, lives on less than $2.15 a day. The ties between China and DRC go back to the country's independence in 1960 and today China is Congo's main trading partner. China enjoys a favorable view among an overwhelming percentage of the population in sub-Saharan Africa.

DRC is the perfect example of the long shadows of Western colonialism. Le Congo belge was an outcome of the partition of Africa among European powers following the Berlin Conference in 1885. The "scramble for Africa" embodied the will of European powers to seize control of natural resources, but also to accomplish a moral civilizing mission, and at the same time export their geopolitical aggressiveness outside the confines of the Old Continent. The result was invariably exploitation, environmental catastrophes, atrocities, plunder, violence, repression and widespread inequality. Besides, European designed the borders of their colonies with utter disregard for ethnicity, setting the stage for future tribal clashes. Very few contemporaries dared criticize such views. One of them was English novelist Joseph Conrad, who set his fundamental 1899 novel Heart of Darkness precisely in Belgian Congo.

Colonial empires exacerbated the asymmetric structures intrinsic in imperial rule, emphasizing power polarization in the hands of "happy few" colonizers, socially distant from the rest of the population. However, the two World Wars deeply dented imperial rule. The Great War threw Indians, Africans, Indochinese into the European trenches, simultaneously planting the seeds of nationalistic sentiment. The subsequent world conflict made overseas Empires obsolete, and, for many Europeans who had experienced Nazi rule, morally untenable in a world where the notion of human rights was spreading. In less than two decades independence spread across most of Africa and Southeast Asia; in some cases, peacefully, in others, as in French Algeria and Indochina, or Dutch Indonesia, with military conflicts pervaded by ruthless violence.

Worse than colonization, there was perhaps badly managed decolonization, however. Back to DRC, Belgium gracefully conceded independence, but made efforts to preserve the control that Belgian companies (above all, the powerful Union Minière) had over the richest area of the country, Katanga. A separatist revolt broke out a few days after Independence Day on June 30, 1960, culminating in a military coup against the newly elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, who was then jailed, assassinated and dissolved in acid by the rebels, with the logistical support of Belgian and French officers, in a framework that was seeing increasing Cold War meddling with the decolonization process.

A few years before Lumumba's murder, in 1955, many former colonies had met in Bandung, Indonesia. The first meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement aimed at breaking with the logic of the Cold War: development and human rights, instead of ideology and geopolitics. The Chinese Foreign Minister, Zhou-En-Lai, in a masterful speech stressed how former colonies (among which revolutionary China, after a long century of humiliation finally free from Western subjugation) had the right to rise, defeating poverty, thanks to mutual respect and support.

Heralding the visit of the DRC President, the Global Times, a mouthpiece of the Chinese government, underlined how China's willingness to support "African countries based on their own interests and needs has never changed over the past six decades and will not change in the future, in stark contrast to the US and some Western countries' attaching political conditions to assistance".

In sum, the long shadow of colonization is fully at work, explaining much of today's scramble for Africa.