CONGO FREE STATE

French tat Indpendant du Congo, former state in Africa that occupied almost all of the Congo River basin, coextensive with the modern Democratic Republic of the Congo. It was created in the 1880s as the private holding of a group of European investors headed by Leopold II, king of the Belgians. The king's attention was drawn to the region during Henry (later Sir Henry) Morton Stanley's exploration of the Congo River in 187477. In November of 1877 Leopold formed the Committee for Studies of the Upper Congo (Comit d'tudes du Haut Congo, later renamed Association Internationale du Congo) to open up the African interior to European trade along the Congo River. Between 1879 and 1882, under the committee's auspices, Stanley established stations on the upper Congo and opened negotiations with local rulers. By 1884 the Association Internationale du Congo had signed treaties with 450 independent African entities and, on that basis, asserted its right to govern all the territory concerned as an independent state. At the Berlin West Africa Conference of 188485, its name became the Congo Free State, and European powers recognized Leopold as its sovereign. Leopold extended his military control over the interior in the early 1890s. The Arab slave traders of the Lualaba River region succumbed in 1890, when their leader Tippu Tib left for Zanzibar. Katanga, rich in copper and other minerals, fell in 1891 after Leopold's troops shot the ruler, Msiri. Later rebellions were repressed. Transportation links to the interior were established with the construction (189098) of a railway to bypass the Congo River rapids below Stanley (now Malebo) Pool; the upper course of the river and its tributaries were all navigable by steamboat. The regime, under Leopold's unrestrained personal control, became notorious for the treatment of the inhabitants. Forced labour was used to gather wild rubber, palm oil, and ivory; lashings and the taking of hostages were techniques for encouraging villages to meet their rubber quotas. Belgians introduced mutilation as a common punishment even for minor offenses. Brutality was widespread in mines and on plantations. The population of the entire state is said to have declined from 20 or 30 million to 8 million. Finally, indignation among people in Britain and other parts of Europe rose to such a point that Leopold was forced to transfer his powers in the Congo to the Belgian government. In 1908 the Congo Free State was abolished and replaced by the Belgian Congo, a colony controlled by the Belgian parliament. History Early history Human habitation of the Congo basin came relatively late in the Sangoan era (100,000 to 40,000 BP), perhaps because of the dense forest. The people who used the large-core, bifacial Sangoan tools probably subsisted by food gathering and digging up roots; they were not hunters. Refined versions of this tradition continued through the Lupemban (40,000 to 25,000 BP) and Tshitolian eras. Only late in the first millennium did agriculture emerge in the savanna adjacent to the lower Congo River. The early inhabitants were farmer-trappers, fishing peoples, and Pygmy hunters. People lived in households including kin and unrelated individuals; at the centre of the household was a big man, who represented the group. Mobilityof individuals, groups, goods, and ideasfigured prominently and created a common social environment. Such intercommunication is evident from the closely related Bantu languages of the region. Speakers of the Eastern (Ubangian) languages lived in the north but maintained ties with their forest neighbours. Larger-scale societies emerged between AD 1000 and 1500; they were based on clans whose members lived in different villages, village clusters with chiefs, and small forest principalities. Chiefdoms on the southern fringes became more complex; three kingdoms eventually developed: Loango, at the mouth of the Kouilou River on the Atlantic coast; Kongo, which had its beginnings in the first millennium, in the far southwest; and Tio, which grew out of small chiefdoms on the plains north of Malebo (Stanley) Pool. Rulers derived power from control over spirit cults, but trade eventually became a second pillar of power. In 1483 the Portuguese landed in Kongo. Initially, relations between the Kongolese and Portuguese rulers were good. Characterized by the exchange of representatives and the sojourn of Kongolese students in Portugal, this period was a harbinger of late 20th-century technical assistance. Unfortunately, the need of Portuguese planters on So Tom for slaves undermined this amicable arrangement by the 1530s. Between 1600 and 1800, the slave trade expanded. Local leaders challenged state control. Among the Tio the western chiefs became more autonomous. Contact with Europeans also introduced new American food crops. Corn (maize) and cassava allowed greater population densities. This, along with the emergence of a market for foodstuffs, led to greater use of slaves, intensified women's work, and changed the sexual division of labour. The colonial era By the early 19th century the Congo River had become a major avenue of commerce between the coast and the interior. Henry Morton Stanley, a British journalist, explored the river in 1877, but France acquired jurisdiction in 1880 when Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza signed a treaty with the Tio ruler. The formal proclamation of the colony of French Congo came in 1891. Early French efforts to exploit their possession led to ruthless treatment of the local people, and Brazza returned in 1905 to lead an inquiry. In 1910 the French joined Congo with neighbouring colonies as the federation of French Equatorial Africa, with its capital at Brazzaville. The French were preoccupied with acquiring labour. Forced labour, head taxes, compulsory production of cash crops, and draconian labour contracts forced Africans to build infrastructure and to participate in the colonial economy. No project was more costly in African lives than the Congo-Ocean Railway, built between 1921 and 1934 from Pointe-Noire to Brazzaville; between 15,000 and 20,000 Africans died. In 1940 Congo rallied to the Free French forces. Charles de Gaulle, Governor-General Flix Ebou, and African leaders held a conference in Brazzaville in 1944 to announce more liberal policies. In 1946 Congo became an overseas territory of France with representatives in the French Parliament and an elected Territorial Assembly. Ten years later, the loi cadre (enabling act) endowed the colony with an elected government. Congo became a republic within the French Community in 1958 and acquired complete political independence in August 1960. History What began as a king's private domain (the Congo Free State), evolved into a colony (the Belgian Congo), and came to be known at the time of independence in 1960 as the Republic of the Congo (later the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zaire, and again the Democratic Republic of the Congo), is the product of a complex concatenation of historical forces. Some are traceable to the precolonial past, others to the legacy of colonial rule, others still to the political convulsions that followed in the wake of independence. All, in one way or another, have left their imprint on Congolese societies. Precolonial perspectives Before experiencing the radical social transformations of the colonial era, Congolese societies had already suffered major disruptions. From the 15th to the 17th century several important state systems came into existence in the savanna region in the southern half of the area. The most important were the Kongo kingdom in the west and the Luba and Lunda empires in the east. All three developed fairly elaborate political structures, buttressed by the symbolic force of kingship as well as by military force. Typically, power emanated from the capital city to the outlying areas through the intermediation of appointed chiefs or local clan heads. Competition for the kingship often led to civil strife, however, and with the development of slave-trading activities a new source of instability was injected into regional politics. The history of the Kongo peoples in the 16th century is largely the story of how the Atlantic slave trade created powerful vested interests among provincial chiefs, in time greatly lessening the capacity of the kingdom to resist the encroachments of its neighbours. Thus, in the late 16th century, the kingdom had all but succumbed to the attacks of the Jaga, a group of warriors from the east. Two centuries later the Lunda and Luba peoples underwent a similar process of internal fragmentation followed by attacks from various interlopers, including Arabs and mestizos, eager to control the trade in slaves and ivory. On the eve of the European conquest their political institutions were both fractious and oppressive. The radically different ecological conditions prevailing in the tropical rainforest raised formidable obstacles in the way of state-building. Small-scale segmentary societies, organized into village communities, were the rule. Corporate groups that combined social and economic functions among small numbers of related and unrelated people formed the dominant mode of organization. Among such corporate groups, exchange took place through trading activities and reciprocal gift-giving. Social interactions in time produced a measure of cultural homogeneity among otherwise distinctive communities, as among Bantu and Pygmy. Bantu communities absorbed and intermarried with their Pygmy clients, who brought their skills and crafts into the culture. The element of continuity discernible in the persistence of house and village organization stands in sharp contrast with the more centralized state structures characteristic of the savanna kingdoms. Nonetheless, on the eve of the Belgian conquest most Congolese societies had reached a degree of internal decomposition that greatly lessened their capacity to resist a full-scale invasion. Resistance to outside forces in the savanna region was hampered by the devastating raids and civil wars that followed in the wake of the slave trade, by the improved capacity of Africans to destroy each other through the use of firearms, and ultimately by the all-too-familiar divisions between collaborators and resisters. The relative ease with which Congolese societies yielded to the European conquest bears testimony to the profound internal dislocations most of them had experienced in the course of previous centuries.