BELGIAN CONGO

French Congo Belge, former colony (coextensive with the modern Democratic Republic of the Congo) in Africa, ruled by Belgium from 1908 until 1960. It was established by the Belgian parliament to replace the previous, privately owned Congo Free State, after international outrage over abuses there brought pressure for supervision and accountability. The official Belgian attitude was paternalism: the Africans were to be cared for and trained as if they were children. They had no role in legislation, but traditional rulers were used as agents to collect taxes and recruit labour. Uncooperative rulers were deposed. In the late 1950s, when France and the United Kingdom worked with their colonies to prepare for independence, Belgium still portrayed the Congo as an idyllic example of parent-child relationships between Europeans and Africans. Private European and American corporations invested heavily in the Belgian Congo after World War I. Large plantations (growing cotton, oil palms, coffee, cacao, and rubber) and livestock farms were developed. In the interior, gold, diamonds, copper, tin, cobalt, and zinc were mined; the colony became an important source of uranium for the United States during World War II. Africans worked the mines and plantations as indentured labourers on four- to seven-year contracts, in accordance with a law passed in Belgium in 1922. Roads, railroads, electric stations, and public buildings were constructed by forced labour. Native resistance challenged the colonial regime from the beginning. A rebellion that broke out in several eastern districts in 1919 was not suppressed until 1923. Anti-European religious groups active by the 1920s included Kimbanguism and the Negro Mission in the west and Kitawala in the southeast. Unrest increased in the depression years (1931-36) and during World War II. Because political associations were prohibited, reformers organized into cultural clubs such as Abako, a Bakongo association formed in 1950. The Congo National Movement was founded in 1958 by Patrice Lumumba, and riots broke out in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) in January 1959. Belgium suddenly capitulated and arranged for the Congo to become an independent republic on June 30, 1960. See also Congo, Democratic Republic of the.