• The country that produced a first-rate patriot also gave Africa one of the worst kleptocrats
• Potentially the richest country in Africa, it is however one of the most dysfunctional
• Between 1880 and 1920, Congo lost approximately half of its population, all being victims of Leopold’s pogroms

Not too long ago, DR Congo, then known as Zaire, was a very surreal place. You could pass through Kinshasa’s N’djili airport, and maybe want to use the washrooms as you waited for your connecting flight, and the first thing the cleaners would demand from you – a total stranger – was a bribe.

Catching a domestic flight was another circus (it is easier to fly within the vast country as there is virtually no ground infrastructure). There seemed no order in ticketing. The customer who arrived at the plane’s apron first and pushed hardest – with a bribe – was guaranteed a seat. Just like a typical road dala dala (unruly public service vehicles). Woe unto latecomers, even if they had booked and paid for tickets well in advance.

At the time, the Congolese franc was virtually worthless. Market women would fight like cats to catch your attention if they sensed you had dollars to pay for your purchases.

Worst governance

Incumbent President Joseph Kabila inherited a near-absolute mess of a country. Torn by civil wars and secessionist uprisings, it had just about the worst governance record anywhere. Starting off at independence with a leader, Patrice Lumumba, who is honoured across the continent as having been a great patriot, Congo soon got saddled with Africa’s most notorious and one of the longest-serving kleptocrats, Mobutu.

Then came a stint under a beer-swilling pseudo-revolutionary who in a past life had made the legendary Che Guevara throw up his arms in disgust. If such were the vanguards of revolution in Africa, the Argentine is reported to have said, then there was no hope.

The man was none other than Laurent Kabila, Joseph’s dad.

Congo’s fabled natural riches are, in fact, its curse. Not only did these attract pure scoundrels masquerading as ‘enlightened’ colonisers, these same riches were the reason the country was brutally preyed on for decades after independence by Big Powers who turned it into their playground during the Cold War.

Global warming

The country is huge. It is bigger than England, France, Germany, Spain and Italy combined. The rainforest that covers its bulk is second only in size in the world to the Amazon basin. If this rainforest were to die, the ripple effect in terms of global warming would decimate Mother Earth.

Early on in the 15th century, the Portuguese were the first outsiders to sense there was something to get in Congo – slaves and ivory. But it was in the 19th century that a totally rapacious rascal, King Leopold II of Belgium, took over the place, courtesy of groundwork done for him by the explorer-philanderer Henry Morton Stanley. The King turned it into a personal estate, no less.

He wanted quick and massive profits from Congo’s ivory and rubber, and to make the natives tap the rubber and meet their quotas, he introduced the worst form of forced labour Africans had ever seen before or since.

Emblematic of Leopold’s rule was the chicotte, a nasty hippo-hide whip from which 90 lashes on an African labourer’s bottom was considered standard practice.

Between 1880 and 1920, Congo lost approximately half of its population, all being victims of Leopold’s pogroms. On independence day on June 30, 1960, Lumumba is reported to have said in the presence of Leopold’s descendant King Baudouin: “We are no longer your monkeys.”

It was the beginning of the saga that saw him ousted from power and murdered.

Marginally better