Congo, Republic of the

By: Eric Young

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Congo, Republic of the

In the Republic of the Congo (henceforth Congo), regional shifts in population and power have long shaped the country’s history. In precolonial times migrations, state formation, and slave trading concentrated population along the coastline and in the river valleys of the south, leaving northern peoples relatively isolated. French colonialism widened regional differences by pouring resources into urbanization and infrastructural development in the south, while drawing military recruits from the less developed north. In the early years of Congo’s independence, Communist rhetoric flourished in the south’s burgeoning cities—home to vocal intellectuals, students, and workers—but power remained with a military elite from the north. Although some of the country’s leaders have since attempted to address the uneven development between north and south, city and countryside, real progress has been slowed by economic crises as well as by the highly militarized nature of national politics. Short-lived political liberalization in the 1990s was brought to an abrupt halt in 1997 by civil war—fought on the streets of the capital, Brazzaville, until a peace accord signed in 2003 brought an uneasy peace.

Early Congolese History and Imperialism

Republic of the Congo

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The earliest inhabitants of present-day Congo were small communities of forest-dwelling hunter-gatherer Pygmy peoples known as the Binga. Historians believe that Bantu-speaking people migrated to the region from the northeast, around the Lake Chad basin, in the early fifteenth century. Their arrival opened an era of centralized state formation, beginning with the emergence of the Kongo kingdom in present-day Angola, just south of the Congo River. The Vili split from the Kongo and moved north toward the coast, where they founded the Loango kingdom. It became a major slave-trading center, with Dutch, French, Portuguese, and British ships calling at the port, and caravan routes reaching far inland. On the central plateau the Téké, who are believed to have migrated there during the fifteenth century, established a kingdom known as Tio, and controlled much of the commerce on the Congo River. The transatlantic slave trade ultimately took some thirteen million people from the Congo River basin before its abolition in the early nineteenth century.

Although participation in the slave trade made some of region’s kingdoms extraordinarily rich, the raids, warfare, and political rivalries engendered by the trade also contributed to regional instability. In the late seventeenth century the once-mighty Kongo Kingdom collapsed and many of the Kongo migrated north, forcing the Téké further north. At the end of the eighteenth century the Mbochi migrated south from the western bank of the Congo River and became fishers, boat builders, hunters, and traders in the areas around the Sangha, Likouala, and Oubangui rivers. Over the long term, these patterns of migration, and the Arab slave trade in the north, led to much denser population settlement in the south of present-day Congo than in the north. They also formed the three main ethnic groups that inhabit present-day Congo: the Kongo, including the Vili and Lari subgroups (53 percent of the total population), the Téké (13 percent), and the Mbochi (12 percent).

French Concessions, Colonialism, and Congolese Nationalism

By the 1780s France had become the major European influence in the region, having established more than seventy trading companies north of the Congo. French missionaries soon followed, though extensive European exploration did not come until 1875, when France dispatched Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza to fortify French claims. Aware that King Leopold II of Belgium already had designs on the Congo River basin, de Brazza negotiated a treaty with the Téké and established a trading post. Competition between France and Belgium in the Congo basin led to the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, which gave the territory along the river’s northern bank to France. France appointed de Brazza commissioner of the Congo—then called Moyen-Congo—and subsequent negotiations between France, Belgium, and Portugal delineated the country’s present-day borders.

France exploited Moyen-Congo’s resources through a concessionary system, which granted private companies, chartered by the French government, thirty-year monopolies over vast tracts of land. The concession companies’ forced labor regimes not only depleted the region’s rubber and ivory supplies but also decimated the population. Thousands of Africans died, and many others fled to the interior. By 1920 international outrage had brought an end to the system, which had, in fact, generated more bankruptcies than profits.

In the early 1930s the French built the Congo-Océan railway from Brazzaville to the deep-water port at Point-Noire, at a cost of 15,000 to 20,000 African lives. Many of the laborers, most of them northerners, eventually settled in the two cities. With the only major railway or port in French Equatorial Africa, which included Gabon, Chad, and Oubangui-Chari (the present-day Central African Republic), Moyen-Congo became the commercial and administrative center of the four territories. The French administration built the most extensive infrastructure as well as the greatest number of schools, courts, and hospitals in Moyen-Congo, particularly in Brazzaville, the capital. Although the colonial government remained strongly centralized—the governor general ruled by decree—educated Africans were employed in the lower levels of the civil service.

During World War II Brazzaville became sub-Saharan Africa’s capital of Free France, and Congo became an important source of troops (thousands of Congolese fought in Europe). The expansion of government bureaucracies and urban services during and after the war provoked a second wave of urban migration. Many urban occupations became associated with specific ethnic groups—entrepreneurs and religious leaders, for example, often came from the Lari and Sundi Kongo groups. The French colonial administration contributed to the growing economic and social differentiation between ethnic groups by recruiting northerners, considered more “backward” than southerners, into the military.

At the 1944 Brazzaville Conference, France promised limited self-rule and abolished forced labor. Not surprisingly, nationalism in Moyen-Congo began in the cities. Urban intellectuals and workers together built a strong trade union movement, influenced by French socialists and communists. Members of these groups also founded the Vili-supported Congolese Progressive Party, which sought a gradual progression to self-rule, and the maintenance of strong ties to France and to the Mbochi-dominated African Socialist Movement. The best-known nationalist hero, however, was the evangelical cult leader André Matsoua, who, despite his death in the late 1930s, was elected in absentia to the French National Assembly in 1945 and 1951.

By the mid-1950s, nationalist movements throughout Africa had made colonialism excessively costly for France and the other European powers. In preparation for decolonization in the Congo, France expanded voting rights in 1956, under the loi cadre, and in 1957 territorial elections were held. Fulbert Youlou, a defrocked Lari priest and founder of the Lari-dominated Democratic Union for the Defense of African Interests, or UDDIA, was elected vice president of the Moyen-Congo’s government council. While Youlou was considered pro-French, he enjoyed strong support from fellow Lari as well as from the many Congolese who saw him as Matsoua’s political and religious successor. In the 1958 elections, UDDIA victories made Youlou prime minister. When the Congo achieved independence on August 15 1960, he became president.

Political Economy of Independence

Youlou’s government, making no secret of its close military and economic ties to France—or of its distaste for radical politics—quickly lost support among Congo’s students and workers. As unemployment rates increased and evidence of government corruption accumulated, popular discontent mounted, culminating in widespread demonstrations in August 1963. Youlou was forced to resign, and the military replaced him with the southern Kongolese Alphonse Massemba-Debat.

A former schoolteacher, Massemba-Debat made it his first priority to secure authority over the country’s politically influential urban workers, youth, and intelligentsia. He established a single-party state, marginalized conservative opposition, and handed out jobs in the expanding state bureaucracy. He also checked the power of the northern, French-trained military by boosting the role of both the party’s National Youth Movement of the Revolution, or JMNR, and the militia Civil Defense Corps, composed primarily of southerners and trained by North Korea and Cuba. Massemba-Debat’s nominally socialist economic policies established state-run enterprises and won significant financial support from the Eastern Bloc, but left private industry largely intact. Western investment in the country continued, especially in oil exploration.

Although Massemba-Debat’s policies brought neither economic prosperity nor much political support, they did set a precedent for the military regimes that followed his unremarkable term in office. Unpopular among Congolese radicals, conservative business interests, and army officers, he resigned in 1968. After a brief struggle with the JMNR, army captain Marien Ngouabi came to power in August of that year. He established the “vanguard” Congolese Worker’s Party, or PCT, proclaimed a “people’s republic,” and officially adopted scientific socialism. The charismatic Ngouabi incorporated the police and gendarmerie into the military and brought them all under the control of the party. The greatest political implication of the 1968 coup, however, was the power shift to the north. Presidents Youlou and Massemba-Debat had been Bakongo from the south, but Ngouabi and his successors were fully or partially Mbochi from the north, where support for socialist policies was typically stronger. Ngouabi catered to the new power base by implementing reforms more radical than those undertaken by Massemba-Debat, such as nationalizing the main oil company, though many of his policies were more show than substance.

The discovery of oil offshore in 1969 and of phosphate deposits in 1973 led to a brief development boom, outlined in the euphoric three-year (1975–1977) plan, but also to mounting contradictions. International banks loaned generously to the newly oil-rich Congo, allowing the government to pour money into infrastructure projects and social services (especially education), but also accumulate a four-billion-dollar national debt. The nation’s leaders, known for their taste for French couture, became even less convincing proponents of socialism than before, and left intact Italian and French corporate control over oil extraction. Except for the main urban centers, the country remained poor and underdeveloped; not until the early 1980s did paved roads reach the Congo’s northern regions.

After a 1972 coup attempt, Ngouabi employed the military and security apparatus to crush the youth movement and any other opposition, while at the same time trying to broaden the government’s populist appeal. He reestablished the national assembly and the post of prime minister, both of which he had abolished upon coming to power, and promised development projects to the rural population. But moves to cooperate with southern leaders and increase party control over the military alienated many hard-line northern military officers, some of whom were suspected of involvement in Ngouabi’s assassination in 1977. Ngouabi was replaced by Brigadier General J. Yhombi-Opango. Known more for his opulent lifestyle than for his ideologies or policies, Yhombi-Opango accomplished little during his two-year term, which ended with a bloodless coup led by Colonel Denis Sassou-Nguesso.

Sassou-Nguesso became president with the support of the PCT, the military, the national assembly, and the sole legal trade union. To satisfy radicals and consolidate his rule, Sassou-Nguesso limited the powers of the PCT, expanded the paramilitary forces, promoted more northern Mbochis, and propounded Marxist-Leninist ideologies. He also renewed ties with the East, sending more military personnel to the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Cuba for training, and allowing Cuba to use the Congo to ferry military troops and equipment to the Angolan government, which was then engaged in civil war. Like his predecessors, Sassou-Nguesso came to rely on periodic purges of the top political leadership in which he attempted to eliminate opponents while maintaining at least the façade of an ethnic and regional balance within the government. Yet opposition groups, whether operating underground or from abroad, continued their calls for democracy and an end to “pseudo-socialism.”

During a brief economic upturn in the early 1980s Sassou-Nguesso sought to spread some of the wealth to the countryside, and in so doing both slowed urban migration and broadened his rural political base. He initiated rural infrastructural projects and restructured the national assembly to include particular interest groups. But these measures did little to revive an agricultural sector stifled by years of state control. Moreover, generous government spending in both rural and urban areas waned in the mid-1980s, when declining oil revenues forced Sassou-Nguesso to undertake austerity measures as part of a World Bank/IMF structural adjustment program. By then, the civil service employed 73,000 people—one quarter of the labor force—and students had come to expect government jobs upon graduation. Not surprisingly, cuts in wages and education spending sparked strikes and riots in 1985–1986 .

In the late 1980s the Congo government privatized, semi-privatized, or closed seventy-six of its 100 state-run industries. It also terminated state monopolies and liberalized investment codes, encouraging investment in mining (copper, gold, lead, potassium, tin, and zinc), secondary industries such as food processing and textiles, and timber. Congo’s hardwood forests have since been rapidly logged. But an economy that was still strapped by low oil prices took its toll on the already tenuous legitimacy of the Sassou-Nguesso regime.

Economic liberalization, the loss of support from the disintegrating Eastern Bloc, and pressures from international donor agencies forced quick political liberalization in the Congo. In mid-1990 the PCT, which had a hand in governing as the sole legal party for the previous twenty-two years, abandoned Marxist-Leninism and initiated a transition to multiparty rule. In early 1991 Sassou-Nguesso convened a national conference that, over the next eighteen months, wrote a new constitution, established an interim government, and scheduled elections. In August 1992 southerner Pascal Lissouba was elected president and his party won a plurality. Lissouba’s party, the Pan-African Union for Social Democracy, or UPADS, joined in a coalition with the PCT, and in attempt at national reconciliation appointed the northerner Yhombi-Opango prime minister. The PCT-UPADS coalition soon fell apart and in 1993 Lissouba called for new elections, which the UPADS won convincingly, over the Lari Bernard Kolélas, and distant third-place Sassou-Nguesso.

Disagreements over legislative elections between Lissouba and Kolélas, who became mayor of Brazzaville, led to open warfare in 1993 between each man’s private militias, forces popularly known as the Zulu and the Ninjas, respectively. In May 1997, shortly before scheduled presidential elections, Lissouba’s forces tried to disarm members of Sassou-Nguesso’s militia (known as the Cobras), claiming they might disrupt campaigning. Clashes between the two forces exploded into civil war in the streets of Brazzaville, killing between 6,000 and 10,000 people and largely destroying the city. In October, with considerable Angolan assistance, Sassou-Nguesso and his Cobras took control of the capital. In an election soon afterward, Sassou-Nguesso became president. He has promised national reconciliation, a return to civilian rule, and a professional military. To revive the war-torn economy and rebuild the capital, the president has liberalized the country’s tax codes, and continues to encourage foreign investment and diversification of the export sector. These reforms, however, were hampered when fighting again broke out in 1998. Sassou-Nguesso was reelected in 2002 with 89.4 percent of the vote. A peace accord was brokered in 2003.

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