US president John Kennedy and Mobutu Sese Seko
The US arranged with Belgian colonialists the murder of Patrice Lumumba and on 24 November 1965 Mobutu stood as leader of the Congo.
The Association Internationale du Congo had been established 125 years ago when Belgium’s King Leopold II made a bid for his small state’s continued domination of the Congo’s lands and peoples. AIC was a private business entity supplying the rubber that the United States of America required for its nascent automobile industry in the first decade of the 1900s. Leopold’s vicious control of African resources through brutality against Congolese people is only today being explored extensively.
When worldwide rubber marketing had begun in the 1890s, this massive area in the south central of the African continent was an enigma—not quite a state — but managed in a way by Christian churches based in Belgium and powered by shrewd pitting of one clan chiefdom against another. Arabs and Africans loyal to them had first been marginalized.
Notions of Belgians ‘civilizing’ the Congo, later called the Congo Free State, were rampant. Natives, the Waloon and Flemish priests, boers (farmers) and peasants felt, had to come to Christ.
Dominate To Serve became a slogan of the CFS. Atrocities against the people were notably debated by other Europeans and the Americans. The racists actually only differed on how to steal and who got what.
From the Aleutians in northern Canada to what would become the nearby racist Republic of South Africa, Whites were flocking to cash in. Seeing others as subhuman was a method to conquer.
Belgium was a friend to them all through the mid 20th century. By 1960 Brussels had even cooperated with the Americans (CIA) to murder Patrice Lumumba, a unifying force for all ethnic and nationalities in Southern Africa.
Belgium itself was founded in 1830 and historically was overrun by Spanish, French and Dutch occupiers. Dwarfed by the European neighbors France and Germany, and less commercially powerful than Holland, Belgium sought a way to prosper. Belgium today has a fracture along Flemish speaking and French speaking lines. Economics has much to do with this. There are also German speaking regions.
Brazil’s Amazon river regions had by 1910 produced hevea rubber, wild grown to the tune of 40,000 tons annually. The human suffering of Indigenous people who were made to do the back wracking work caused a slowdown for the capitalists. Vines and herbal rubber in the Congo then began, though just a tenth of Brazilian tonnage at the time, to be seen as the emerging place for the rubber business. Latex was then gotten for Henry Ford and the rest of the bosses to merchandise. On a grand scale the Human Rights violations of the Amazon were duplicated-the guards, Africans from the previous era of making their Sisters and Brothers captive were used for enforcing discipline.
By the late ’30s through the ’50s, Congo yearly tonnage of rubber was at 40,000. A third Leopold (III) had in the 1930s expanded the possibilities of exploitation.
Belgium’s metropolis, Antwerp, is the harbor city that grew rich partly from Congo diamonds. The ultra hard industrial and polished jewel is famously known symbolically as the country’s main colonial resource. A main traffic artery is the Kennedy tunnel, in honor of the assassinated US president John Kennedy, who had a hand in Patrice Lumumba’s murder.
But rubber, vitally used each day in a new century, also built the Western world’s technological supremacy. Brussels, Belgium has been propelled to political capital of the EU, European Union of several dozen nations. NATO, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a USA driven military force is also headquartered in Brussels.
And the Congo played a key role, it’s people suffering today a repercussion of Belgium and it’s imperial and colonial visions. For the African people to bounce back from longterm war that still engulfs the Congo, a view of what made Belgium is essential.
22 November 2007
From Exile,
Bankole
www.geocities.com/exiledone2002
REFERENCES:
1. Patrice Emery Lumumba — Historical Biography, Poems, Letters, Speeches,…
2. Who Killed Lumumba?
3. The Passing of Patrice Lumumba — by John Henrik Clarke (1961)(John Henrik Clarke was United Nations Correspondent on African Affairs, World Mutual Exchange, and International News Features.) | More Articles by John Henrik Clarke |
4. Lumumba: A Biography
5. The Patrice Lumumba Friendship University in Moscow
6. Conflict in the Congo: The rise and fall of Lumumba (Penguin African library)
7. Lumumba speaks: The speeches and writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961
8. The Congolese are great musicians
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