Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo on a patrol car in Mukakati on December 10, 2021. PHOTO | AFP
February 23, 2024
There’ll be no peace for DRC. If any of you has been entertaining such illusions, I beg to disabuse you of them. The powers that be have willed it thus and even if counterforces were to change this fate for the country, it’ll be after a long, blood-spilling struggle.
Because when you look back, you realise how DRC’s fate has been sealed. There was such a delusional spell of peace during Mobutu time but it was exactly that: delusional. In truth, the then-Zaïre was haemorrhaging.
It all started with Belgian King Leopold II. In 1885 he sent agents to violently take claim of what he called Congo Free State and its people as his personal possessions. His brutality is said to have counted in excess of 15 million Congolese dead. Those who were not worked to death were brutalised in the worst manner possible: maiming; severed limbs; chopped lips; raping; say any immorality, his agents visited it on hapless Congolese.
Finally, when shame penetrated the ‘anti-feeling armoured’ conscience of the West, they piled pressure on the killer king and in 1908, he relented. He sold his property (!) to the Belgian government. And the government devised ways of doing an even more sinister job, without attracting too much attention; without overtly counting equally many deaths.
Belgian Congo, for that’s now what it was, must have been feeding more Western countries than just Belgium when the African wind of change plucked it from them in 1960 when it gained independence. Was it really plucked from them? The now so-named Democratic Republic of the Congo, did it actually gain independence?
Not in the least. The power struggle that ensued was not exactly free of Western power influence, it’s said. And the death of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, on January 17, 1961, is said to have been perpetrated on clandestine orders from outside the country. Where? You guessed right!
After all, he was such an impatient firebrand that he was not going to settle for half-measures. How strongly he was going to succeed in fighting the power of these forces to deliver a truly independent DRC, we didn’t get a chance to find out.
We didn’t take long to see the power of those forces, either. And if they were ready to take one of their own, one from a Western country, you can imagine how truly, frighteningly determined they were to go to any length and break any barriers to achieve their end.
The Swedish Dag Hammarskjold thought he could bring truth and fairness to the UN. And, thus, use his seat as UN SG to bring peace to the DRC. He was felled a few kilometres from the country he had set out to rescue, on September 18, 1961.
By then, the powers that be had got a local lickspittle they could do business with. Mobutu was Mr. Kleptocrat himself and he and his masters sat down to loot what he later baptised as Zaïre.
However, as they were riding along in this gravy train into the 1990s, one of his masters together with a fellow lickspittle next door were having a spot of trouble.
There were busybodies who wanted order and unity in that neighbouring country and, to keep the disunity intact, Mobutu had to host some of the neighbour’s people so that they could reorganise and go back.
Too bad for them all, however, France and fellow Western countries (Mobutu’s fellow Lickspittle was no more), the neighbouring country managed to pull back her people and only hard-core génocidaires remained. After a succession of other lickspittles, today’s lickspittle (Tshisekedi) has integrated these génocidaires into his national army to strengthen an ethnic cleansing in DRC that the deceased lickspittle did not fulfil in his own country and to gun for Rwanda.
MONUSCO, the humungous, money-munching UN peacekeeping force was supposed to douse DRC fires and repatriate the genocidal force to Rwanda. And the fact that every Western country possessively harbours génocidaires without any qualm or apology. For decades, they’ve lived with the shame. Together, their aim is to protect those génocidaires for later-day action against Rwanda.
Of course, the powers that be had seen a lot more coming. And so as far back as the 1990s, if not before, they had alerted the whole of Africa to an impending danger: the rise of the Hima Empire.
You must’ve heard it that long ago and wondered what new phenomenon that was supposed to be and how and for what these Western powers had come up with it. The way I see it, they must’ve seen some new firebrands that seemed unbending to their will and standing up for independence. This way, they sought to create a rift between what they called Bantu and those they called Hamites. They knew that rift would come in handy in their division drive.
Powers like USA, France as well as sister countries like Burundi, DRC, South Africa, Tanzania, Malawi, for leading SADC into snubbing the EAC, beware the blood of DRC’s Tutsi community.
Africans, knowing our history, we should together work for the unity of DRC, of Africa. Hamite, Nilotic, Bantu or whatever, forget these Western constructs. Our enemy is poverty and these malevolent neo-colonialists, not ourselves.
Only strong-willed leadership espousing the above ethos, and seeing through the trickery of antagonising the independent-minded leadership of neighbouring Rwanda, can save D.R. Congo.
