Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0415/04156.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 29KB | 462 lines

$Unique_ID{COW04156}
$Pretitle{267}
$Title{Zaire
Chapter 1A.   Historical Setting}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{H. Mark Roth}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{zaire
economic
political
forest
groups
bantu
government
zairian
african
peoples}
$Date{1978}
$Log{Human Figure*0415601.scf
}
Country:     Zaire
Book:        Zaire, A Country Study
Author:      H. Mark Roth
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1978

Chapter 1A.   Historical Setting

[See Human Figure: Human Figure]

     In the mid- and late-1970s Zaire was struggling through an economic
crisis and political difficulties that stemmed in part from that crisis and in
part from other sources. Its problems were in some respects the results of
factors beyond the control of the government headed by President Mobutu Sese
Seko (for example, the decline of world copper prices), but they could be
traced in other important respects to that government's economic
mismanagement, for example, its crucial failure (for all practical purposes)
to pay attention to agricultural development in general and the production of
food in particular and its focus on capital-intensive prestige projects.
Exacerbating this state of affairs was the tendency of the political elite to
use the economy for self-aggrandizement, in some cases, corruption, and their
indifference to the consequence of economic malfunctioning for the welfare of
the ordinary Zairian.

     That inadequate production and the inflated cost of necessities, food
included, and a distorted distribution of wealth and income should lead to
discontent occasionally expressed in rebellion is not surprising, especially
since it is hard for the ordinary Zairian to see these distortions in
distribution as rewards for virtue. But Zaire's political difficulties reflect
more than the economic discontents generated or at least not dealt with by its
rulers.

     A significant source of those difficulties is the fact that the drawing
of boundaries at the beginning of the colonial era enclosed a vast
geographical expanse inhabited by large numbers of diverse, usually small
communities whose experience before and during that era left them unprepared
to greet independence in 1960 as a single nation with shared goals and more or
less common assumptions as to how to realize them. The Belgian colonial
authorities, reluctant to think about independence to the last, contributed
nothing to dealing with the problem of ethnic particularism, nor did they
encourage the kind of African leadership and institutional arrangements that
would minimize intra-African differences or provide mechanisms for bridging
them. Moreover Belgian economic policy, like that of other colonial powers but
perhaps more singlemindedly, stressed the production of primary
products-minerals and plantation-produced cash crops for export-without
adequate attention to the kind of agriculture and manufacturing that would
permit a politically independent society also to be economically independent.

     Zaire's internal diversity is in the first instance the result of a
2,000-year process of immigration, internal movement and mixture, and
adaptation to a diverse physical environment and, in the case of any single
community, to the social and political environment provided by others,
frequently but by no means always of similar culture. This history led to the
sharing across community boundaries of many aspects of culture, but it also
left most of Zaire's many groups organized into small-scale polities, often
extending no farther than a village or a small cluster of villages thinly
scattered. The relations between these polities, sometimes conceptualized in
territorial terms but often in terms of descent groups-clans and lineages-
organized in principle on the basis of kinship, were, if not chronically
hostile, susceptible to the conflict always possible between autonomous
societies. This was true even if the communities concerned shared language,
culture, and common ancestry.

     Zaire was settled over many centuries by small bands of people practicing
a rudimentary agriculture but most of them relying at least as heavily on
hunting and gathering as on cultivation. Fishing too came to be an important
source of food. It is likely that the first of these bands filtered in from
the north-northwest speaking early versions of the Bantu languages now spoken
almost everywhere south of the equator and by substantial numbers of people to
the north of it. These immigrants encountered pygmy hunting peoples, remnants
of which are still to be found in the area, and possibly others. A plausible
hypothesis suggests that Zaire was the locus of the dispersion east and south
of the Bantu-speaking peoples and that the descendants of some who had moved
out reentered Zaire later from those directions.

     By the middle of the second millennium A.D. when early Portuguese
explorers touched on the west African coast at or near the mouth of the Zaire
River, some of these Bantu peoples, particularly in the upland largely savanna
regions south of the equatorial forest, had been organized into more complex
polities of somewhat larger scale. The development of small states also took
place in the eastern highlands of Zaire, stimulated in good part by
developments in the interlacustrine area (see Glossary) associated with the
western arm of the Great Rift Valley. At roughly the same time in some cases,
later in others, peoples speaking non-Bantu languages penetrated the area from
the north, also slowly and gradually, and succeeded in dominating the northern
savanna and the northern fringes of the equatorial forest. Most of these
non-Bantu peoples, constituting perhaps 20 percent of Zaire's population, have
been involved only peripherally in modern political and economic developments.

     Except for Portuguese influence on the coast beginning in the fifteenth
century and affecting the early kingdom of the Kongo (the capital of which was
in Angola) there were no significant incursions of outsiders until the second
half of the nineteenth century. In that period Afro-Arabs originating in
Zanzibar and the east coast of Africa penetrated the hinterland, eventually
reaching eastern Zaire. These Afro-Arabs and their auxiliaries, many of them
locally recruited and often operating with considerable autonomy, strongly
affected that area in several ways but above all by disrupting local
communities through extensive slave raiding. Slave raids were also carried out
by Angolans under the stimulus of Portuguese requirements for labor, and they
too recruited local auxiliaries, thus affecting patterns of political
dominance in south-central Zaire and elsewhere.

     In the third quarter of the nineteenth century agents of King Leopold II
of Belgium began to establish a rudimentary administration and a pattern of
economic exploitation under the Congo Free State, a peculiar entity sanctioned
initially by the Berlin Conference of 1885 and controlled not by the
government of Belgium but by the king and his associates. Extensive reports of
ruthless exploitation of Africans by agents of the Congo Free State in time
led to Belgium's taking on responsibility for the colony, after 1908 the
Belgian Congo.

     The policies and practices of Belgian colonial authorities and other
Europeans-settlers, missionaries, and agents of the mining corporation and
plantation holders-changed from time to time in response to their own
perceptions of better ways to realize their administrative and economic goals.
For all practical purposes, however, these goals remained the same. For the
colonial authorities and the holders of economic power, the chief tasks were
the maintenance of order and of a flow of cheap docile labor, which were seen
as conducive to the efficient and profitable exploitation of mineral and
agricultural resources for export. Given the size of Zaire, the limited
availability of administrative personnel, problems of transportation and
communication, and the recalcitrance of some groups,