DRC: Globalisation, war and the struggle for freedom

Since the unexpected arrival of the Portuguese traveler Diego Cao at the mouth of the Congo river in 1482, the peoples of the area to become the Congo had their lives more and more determined by processes started from far away and of which they had less and less control. At the time, they were hardly aware of the fact that in the world yonder, the need for peoples experienced in tropical agriculture would be forcefully satisfied by their best sisters and brothers being captured, kidnapped, shackled and shipped to America.

The resulting Atlantic slave trade, one of the cornerstones of globalisation, over determined irreversibly the lives of the peoples of the area. Even their very survival depended on the evolution of remote processes assigning changing roles to the area. Suffering and modernization would become almost two faces of the same coin marking their lives. The Atlantic slave trade was the first phase of globalisation, laying the foundations of the world market whose evolution would shape the adjustment and re-adjustment of parts of the world around an evolving center.

Three processes are involved when we are looking at globalisation: The first is the historical process of effective transition to capitalism in each country. This involves the transformation of a double articulation of relations and forces of production. This is the long process of transformation or destruction of the specific form of the African commune through the slave trade and colonialism to the present neo-liberalist structural adjustment programmes and poverty accumulation based epoch.

The second process is the historical formation and transformations of anti-colonial (in the broad sense including anti-Atlantic slavery struggles for life) 'mass' movements into more and more organized struggles for the recovering of land, bodies, psyches (selves) and cultures. This deals with the story about the changes of the agencies of struggles: their historical formation and transformations, their social character, their strategies, their programmes, their theories, prescriptions, dreams, ideologies of politico-social emancipation up to the conscious anti-globalisation civil society. In this process, we can only hail partial victories, mostly through accommodation rather than breaks from the commands from the centres.

Thirdly, the 'external domination' in Africa (or forced or willing incorporation of Africa in the outside originating processes) is what is often thought of as globalisation. It involves:
- Obstacles to national liberation/independence and local/national self-determination, self-reliance, South-South initiatives and pro-people developments;
- Imperialist domination and regional expansionism;
- Forms taken by super-power struggles for world hegemony inside and around certain countries in relation to conditions of accession into and character of their independences;
- The transnationalization process through multinational corporations and international economic organisations up to the ultra-liberalist destruction/reduction of the nation/state and the pursuit by the US of the politics of pure super-power, linking tightly politics to war and the US dream of becoming the present-epoch-Roman Empire;
- A world system of a political economy of crime (money laundering, drug and arm traffic, new forms of labour/sex enslavement, private or super-power State terrorism, etc.) develops and comes along. High and low intensity warfare, through regional relationships of forces of super-powers' proxies, continues.

Thus we differentiate three phases of globalisation: the first phase is based on the Atlantic slave trade (sometimes viewed as a pre-globalisation phase), the second phase was the integration of Africa through colonization and the third phase began in the late 1980's and continues up to now. The peoples who became known as the Congolese from the second phase, miraculously survived the first two phases. While the population was being drastically reduced by the slave trade, people took sometimes self-defeating forms of resistance. Some preferred to commit suicide rather than be enslaved and for a long time women were refusing to bear children for the slave trade. Communal forms of resistance and more advanced forms of capitalist opposition to the slave trade helped people survive, but only to be militarily conquered for domestic colonization. The forgotten holocaust (Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost, 1998), during the so-called King Leopold's Congo Free State, the most brutal integration of the area into the world economy, reduced the population estimated at 20 million to a mere 8 million in less than 30 years. It has not been possible to completely heal the effects of the accumulated traumas strongly influencing the forms, styles and sometimes content of the diverse cultures of our country. The continuing replay of those effects not only organize the submissive and docile character of public consciousness, but the regular violent outbursts that mark the bloody history of the Congo. Is the prevalence of the song a form of healing?

The international civilizing agents of globalisation initially behaved in a way that made the country become what one of the most honest of them described as Heart of Darkness. The colonialist attitude was more concerned about How much did the Congo cost Belgium (Jean Stengers, 1957) rather than how much did Belgian colonialism cost the Congo. Each attempt at trying to recast the relationship between the Congolese and globalisation psychologically (radical prophetism as healing - Simon Kimbangu and others), politically (P.E. Lumumba and others), militarily (P. Mulele and others), etc., unleashed the most barbaric forms of violence to infinitely discourage the possible resumption of similar attempts. Kimbangu was condemned to death and then to a life sentence (he died in jail, 1921-1951), Lumumba and his companions' remains were dissolved in acid. Mulele's body, cut into pieces, was put in a bag and thrown into the Congo river joining in the Ocean the bones of the rebelling slaves on the way to America. That was only the tip of the iceberg; how the less known ones were treated is not known.

Throughout its various phases since European contact, Africans have been forced into relationships imposed from outside, with catastrophic consequences for the majority. The transitions which took place - whether from slavery to abolition, from "discovery" to occupation, from negation to acceptance of Civil Rights (1866-1966), (W.E.B. DuBois, Reconstruction), from colonial status to Independence, from the Cold War to re-Globalisation – have generally had a negative impact on the relations between people in the Congo and between the Congolese people and others (J. Depelchin, 2003). Globalisation involves relationships to diseases, to means of death (traffic of arms), to the ecology, to the economy of crime (money laundering, drugs, sexual slavery), to the economy dominated by the dynamic of extraction of natural resources whose market is outside the country and thus also of looting, to world hegemony, to sexuality, to God, to peoples' psychology and cultures generally.

Pan-Africanism, independence or freedom and (racial) equality have characterized the consciousness of the Black man facing the various phases of globalisation. From the anti-slave revolts up to the independence of Haiti in 1804. From the first Negritude calls (Brazil) to the US-initiated Pan-Africanist Congresses. From anti-colonial struggles to national liberationist movements and independences in crisis. The anti-slave question, the anti-racialist question, the Pan-Africanist or African Unity question, the national question, the democracy question, the social question, the question of the protracted demand for compensation for slavery and for the equality of humanity, etc: all are so many calls from the struggles against globalisation.

Pro-globalisation consciousness often opposes those calls and celebrates calls for submission to and docility vis-à-vis the grossest forms of denial of the right to reclaim history and above all, as Cabral said, to assert the right of African people to make history: "The foundation of national liberation lies in the inalienable right of every people to have their own history." (A.Cabral, Unity and Struggles: Speeches and Writings, 980). To deny that right absolutely, the very existence of History is now being denied: History is globalisation made by everybody! Victims and victimizers are made equally responsible for the havoc that befalls on humanity. The world is said to have become a village, never mind the fact that movement of people from some parts of that village to other parts is extremely selectively restricted. When history of our people is allowed to be told, it is mostly done by historians acting as organic intellectuals of globalisation.

The Congo, without the willingness or consent of the Congolese, has been drawn into processes of mass destruction. In the 1940's the uranium which the USA used to execute its nuclear genocide of millions of Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, came from the Belgian Congo. The USA responsible for 60% of world pollution, is refusing to endorse the Convention on the conservation of Nature, it sustains that irresponsible posture thanks to the deep and wild Congolese forest that minimizes pollution's impact on the whole world. But does the West responsible for most of world pollution, care about helping the Congolese protect and reproduce the forest? Each time a major virus threatening humanity's health appears, the Congo is pointed out as a possible origin of the virus. What is done to equip the Congo to avoid those possibilities? Nothing of some importance has taken place in the Congo since its creation by Berliner powers (1884-1885), without the involvement of external, generally Western, forces.

It is on this basis that the current situation of the Congo in the context of globalisation should be examined if we are going to be able to throw some light on this crucial and vital issue for the next generation of combatants for real freedom.

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