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The most important events in the history of the area (from the point of view of its current situation) occurred in the fifty years or so from about 1870, when European exploration and exploitation took place. Some believe that the rape of the Congo stands alone as the single most brutal and greedy episode of colonisation in modern history. It is described in the entry on the Congo Free State.
See also Congo Free State
On November 15, 1908, King Leopold II of Belgium formally relinquished personal control of the Congo Free State and the renamed Belgian Congo came under the administration of the Belgian parliament, a system which lasted until independence was granted in 1960.
The Belgian administration might be most charitably characterized as paternalistic colonialism. The educational system was dominated by the Roman Catholic Church and Protestant churches and the curricula reflected Christian and Western values. For example, in 1948 fully 99.6% of educational facilities were controlled by Christian missions. There was little regard for native culture and beliefs. Native schooling was mainly religious and vocational.
Political administration fell under the total and direct control of the mother country; there were no democratic institutions. Native curfews and other restrictions were not unusual. Following World War IIWorld War II was the most extensive and costly armed conflict in the history of the world, involving the great majority of the world's nations, being fought simultaneously in several major theatres, and costing tens of millions of lives. The war was fough some democratic reforms began to be introduced, but these were complicated by ethnic rivalries among the native population.
At the time the multinational concessionary companies under Leopold's auspices and the Congolese had two very different concepts of land and labor. Understanding the contrasting patters of production between the traditional Congolese tribal states and modern, industrial Belgium is essential.
CapitalismCapitalism generally refers to a combination of economic practices that became institutionalized in Europe between the 16th and 19th centuries. Exactly which historic and current practices are considered part of "capitalism" varies among users of the term revolutionized the region's traditional economies, inducing social changes and political consequences that revolutionized Congolese society to this day. Balanced, subsistence-based economies shifted to specialization and accumulation of surpluses. These changes revolutionized production patterns because maximizing production and minimizing cost (the specialization of capitalist production) did not necessarily coincide with traditional, seasonal patterns of agricultural production. Rather than specializing in a particular product according to the concept of comparative advantage, and then mass-producing surplus values of this product (rubber) for profit, traditional Congolese tribal states in the past favored balanced, self-reliant, subsistence economies, and hence followed labor patterns that reflected seasonal cycles.Tribal states or empires organized along precarious, unwritten cultural traditions also shifted to a division of labor based on legal protection of land and labor—once inalienable, but now commodities to be bought, sold, or traded.
The bourgeois ethic of wage/labor productivity was thus, in many respects, a new concept to supposedly ‘idle’ natives merely accustomed to older patterns of production. On that note, it must be noted that the integration of traditional economies in Congo within the framework of the modern, capitalist economy was also particularly exploitative. The fortunes of King Leopold II and those of the multinational concessionary companies under his auspices were mainly made on the proceeds of Congolese rubber, which had historically never been mass-produced in surplus quantities. Between 1880 and 1920 the population of Congo thus halved; over 10 million ‘indolent natives’ unaccustomed to the bourgeois ethos of labor productivity, were the victims of murder, starvation, exhaustion induced by over-work, and disease.
Mass-production of rubber in a dense, tropical forest in one of the world’s most isolated regions was after all quite a massive endeavor. Other parts of Africa were not cultivating rubber (quite a harsh crop to cultivate); other parts of Africa had milder climates and topographies.