Congo and "Independence"

Reading King Leopold's Ghost developed my interest in the Congo so I did some research to try to bring my understanding closer to the present.

I watched the film Lumumba (dir. Raoul Peck) about the man who led the Congolese independence movement and became the country's first Prime Minister. The article on Lumumba at Wikipedia and the short film about Lumumba on YouTube are good to watch or read before viewing the film, as the film is more about the man than the whole historical context. Any reader of King Leopold's Ghost will find these sites interesting.

Here is a passage from the speech Lumumba gave on the day that the independence of the Congo was declared:

We have seen our lands seized in the name of allegedly legal laws which in fact recognized only that might is right.

We have seen that the law was not the same for a white and for a black, accommodating for the first, cruel and inhuman for the other...

We have seen that in the towns there were magnificent houses for the whites and crumbling shanties for the blacks, that a black was not admitted in the motion-picture houses, in the restaurants, in the stores of the Europeans; that a black traveled in the holds, at the feet of the whites in their luxury cabins.

Who will ever forget the massacres where so many of our brothers perished, the cells into which those who refused to submit to a regime of oppression and exploitation were thrown?

All that, my brothers, we have endured.

But we, whom the vote of your elected representatives have given the right to direct our dear country, we who have suffered in our body and in our heart from colonial oppression, we tell you very loud, all that is henceforth ended.

Imagine how after hundreds of years of slavery and European domination that speech and that moment of independence must have felt to the people of the Congo!

Lumumba was clearly an inspiring and upstanding leader, but the Belgians and the Americans plotted against him. The YouTube clip CIA Congo 1960 gives a good background.

To the great shame of our country, the American government helped install the tyrant who devastated the Congo from 1965 to 1997, Mobutu Sese Seko. During this time he became one of the richest men in the world, worth over 5 billion -- one of the most corrupt leaders in human history. He also ruled in an unbelievably harsh way -- and millions died. Can you believe that will all of that, Mobutu was a friend of Nixon, Reagan and George HW Bush? He contributed to their election campaigns and they supported him! Learn more about Mobutu at Wikipedia.

Shockingly, the trauma of the Congo does not stop under Leopold; it comes right up to Reagan and Bush, and to our day.