History of the Democratic Republic of the Congo

The area now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo was populated as early as 10,000 years ago and settled in the 7th and 8th centuries A.D. by Bantus from present-day Nigeria. During its history the area has also been known as Congo Free State, Belgian Congo and Zaire.

Changes in Congolese Society (brief overview)

At the time the multinational concessionary companies under Léopold'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.

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Capitalism 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.

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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.

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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 Léopold 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.

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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.

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