Brussels, September

I.

The ‘indigenous uprising’ of 4 January in Léopoldville, the fire of which – as recent episodes show – still smoulders under the ashes, flaring up again here and there, has thrown not only the Europeans living in the colony into a panic, but also their mercenaries in the police force as well as the indigenous leaders ‘prefabricated’ by the colonial authorities into panic.

Even the official press had to admit at the time that the rioters were mainly teenagers who dragged themselves, jobless and malnourished, through the slums and malodorous alleys of the indigenous quarters, their eager eyes fixed on the insolent wealth of the European quarters. Yet in the face of this hungry and unarmed youth, the proud and well-fed ‘civilisers’ went on a stampede chanting ‘every man for himself’. What is even more remarkable is that six months after that ‘youthful flare-up’ it is now re-emerging in a ‘crisis of authority’ that is transforming the ‘calmest colony in black Africa’ into a social volcano, on whose treacherous terrain the dismayed dregs of the motherland and the envoys of the Belgian government (the colonial minister, tired of being the target of the black population’s booing and rotten tomatoes, has offered his resignation: he understood, from hard experience, the poor guy, that the patch is now worse than the hole) no longer know which foot to dance on.

Accusing each other of torpedoing the new policy of ‘decolonisation’ and poisoning ‘human relations’ between whites and blacks, the Europeans turn heel and drift away under the ironic gazes of the ‘teenagers’ and the astonished looks of the sold-out indigenous chiefs: while the ‘whipping fathers’ of the Christian missions become the laughing-stocks of the natives, the ‘grandiose work of the builder king’, Leopold II, collapses in ridicule, and risks falling into nothingness.

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In Belgium, the union sacrée, realised on 13 June during a ‘historic’ session of the urgently convened Chamber, gave way to a national discord that adds a new and hilarious note of colour to the already brilliant chronicle of nationalist vaudevilles. Elsewhere, in the world of the great colonial empires, ‘one melts away like an Englishman’; in Algeria, ‘one dies for the king of Prussia’; in the Belgian Congo, one takes refuge in the religious and civil sacristies to recite the ‘mea culpa’ there, at the very moment when, in the metropolis, the so-called economic revival sponsored and directed by the supernational High Authorities makes the ruling class appear in the light of a squalid coven of decrepit old men put under family council.

The task of the liquidators is, it must be acknowledged even if we certainly don’t pity them, is a most humiliating one. It is a matter of making the spectre of a stupefied ‘public opinion’, drugged by a decade of democratic opium, swallow the bitter pill of a ‘good deal’ that suddenly turns out to be a ‘bad deal’, and of a ‘work of Christian charity’ for which, all of a sudden, the beneficiaries show no gratitude; of making them digest the double affront of a colonial authority powerless to stem the tide of the ‘black purge’ and of a metropolitan authority begging the help of ‘foreign’ financial powers to prop up the tottering edifice of a papier-mâché prosperity. It is no coincidence that HM’s former socialist ministers, ardent defenders and sworn patrons of the national community in prosperous times, are now prudently holding on in an opposition that leaves the thankless job of liquidating the past grandeur to the socialists and liberals, and will perhaps win them votes on the coveted day of the ballot box.

Can the liquidation, sooner or later inevitable, find an obstacle in the miserable remains of human refuse still residing in the colony? Certainly not. If they ever feel the itch, if they ever want to play ‘ultra’ like their white brothers in Algeria, all it would take is for the ‘teenagers’ to take to the streets again to scratch their itch. There are no real forces – much, much less than behind De Gaulle’s promises to the Algerians – behind the solemn promise of Congolese independence made on 13 January in the presence of a ‘tout Bruxelles’ in full uniform. Stuck between the rock of a iron fist policy that has no arms to back it up, and that of a policy of an outstretched hand in which the course of events is denying any confidence in, what will the ruling class, if not just drift away? More liquidations are in the offing, so the little kingdom with feet of clay can hope that God will spare it.

The negative aspect of this situation is that the working class is indeed watching this historic vaudeville with indifference, not caring about a colonial empire in which a few thousand Belgians are getting fat at the expense of the indigenous population and which, what is more, belongs ‘in full ownership’ to a few dozen large private companies and the Catholic missions, but proves to be no less deaf and indifferent to the tumultuous entry of the Congolese popular masses into the arena of contemporary social life, whose significance and historical importance for the proletarian movement it does not grasp, except in very small minorities. This is the fruit of the double betrayal by the socialists and Stalinists, which diverted it from the path of anti-capitalist revolution to plunge it twice into the massacre of imperialist conflicts and bog it down in the mire of democratic legality and a wimpy reformism.

It is no coincidence that the linking up over time between the Borinage riots and the Léopoldville riots did not take place on the terrain of political action and within an ideological framework.

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In the tragic conditions of isolation in which the uprisings of the exploited peoples of colour are taking place, in the state of political impotence which prevents the international proletariat from resuming its historic function as the only revolutionary class capable of carrying forward, under the leadership of the class Party, the struggle for the final destruction of imperialism, and thus also from imparting a much more mature and advanced orientation to the awakening of the indigenous peoples subjected to the colonial yoke, it is inevitable – even irrespective of the conditions of the environment – that the Congolese and, in general, ‘negro’ revolt will take on aspects of racial hatred and forms of xenophobia, directed against the ‘chosen race’ without distinction of social origin. Whatever the ‘repentances’ of the ‘men of goodwill’ on the bourgeois left, around them the small secret meetings of a so-called ‘proletarian left’ prolong their ‘workerist-democratic’ agony. It is the inevitable response to the fierce racism of the British, French and Belgians (to say nothing of the rest), in a frantic search for an ‘effective interlocutor’, i.e. a servile one. It is the centuries-old fruit of ideological mystification and historical falsification behind which lies the repugnant reality of Europe’s imperialist and colonialist saturnalia.

On the other hand, this racial hatred crosses over to mingle with a hatred whose roots are clearly of a social nature. If the xenophobic stamp is particularly alive in the ferment of the black peoples of Congo, its deep origins must in fact be sought in the fiercely monopolistic character of colonial exploitation by Belgian capitalism. This exploitation rests on the foundations of an industrialisation that, although geographically localised in a few areas, is nevertheless unparalleled in the rest of black Africa. In all other colonies, exports of agricultural products exceed those of products needed by the processing industries of the West. In the Belgian Congo, the reverse is true: it is therefore much more dependent on the world market and more sensitive to economic fluctuations, to periods of prosperity followed, with increasing social convulsions, by periods of crisis.

This powerful infusion of industrial structures (at least in the mining field) has taken place and is taking place by and under the control of big metropolitan and international capital. The Société Générale de Belgique is, of course, the financial group that has so far secured the lion’s share. Its powers are unlimited: it controls the colonial administration and all ‘private’ enterprises, not to mention all the civil, religious, military and political institutions of the colony. But its powers are no less extensive in Belgium, where the ‘democratic supervision’ of parliament slavishly obeys the colonial policy plans of the state agent in the name of the ‘national community’.

The European population of the Belgian Congo and Rwanda-Urundi is naturally subordinated to the all-powerful and anonymous presence of financial capital. In the shadow of this ‘golden calf’, the Europeans – 108,000, of which 85,000 are Belgians – enjoy absolute priority over the 12 million indigenous peoples of the Congo plus the 5 million of Rwanda-Urundi, entrusted to Belgium under trusteeship by the UN after World War II, as under mandate by the SDN in 1922.

With the exception of the indigenous notables, mercenaries of the Europeans, the entire Congolese population constitutes an immense labour reserve at the mercy of state enterprises, industrial and agricultural production apparatuses, and trading companies. No indigenous bourgeoisie has been formed there, since the notables are nothing but ‘idle’ chiefs living off the backs of their tribes. The indigenous petty merchant bourgeoisie is suffocated by competition from European trade, itself absorbed into the orbit of the big industrial companies. For some years now, an ‘indigenous peasantry’ has been forming, organised into cooperatives; but this experience only fattens a ‘kulakism’ that exclusively benefits the Catholic missions that keep them under control.

Livestock farming is in the hands of either the Europeans or the feudal lords of Rwanda-Urundi, while only a small percentage is reserved for the tribes and the indigenous peasantry. For the rest, all the productive forces are ‘salaried’ as porters, dockers, bellboys, maids, and proletarians employed in the large mining, industrial and commercial enterprises. On the fringes of this urban concentration of foreign capitalism, a slender ‘evolved’ class is emerging from the technical schools organised under the whip of the missions. A few hundred of these ‘educated’ young people who grew up ‘in a closed pot’, who – except for the privileged few chosen from among the children of notables or ‘white negroes’ – have never left their native soil, form the intellectual summit that the Congolese peoples have been able to reach after 80 years of political paternalism and piratical Belgian economic exploitation – a sterilising tutelage that, among other things, has created among the indigenous ‘elites’ who have come into contact with African intellectuals coming out of European universities a bitter sense of humiliation, a painful inferiority complex.

It should be added that the European presence and a certain proletarianisation that spread among the indigenous peoples at an accelerated pace during the world war (but was partly halted by the recent economic crisis) led to a rapid deterioration of traditional structures on the one hand and masses of people being uprooted and violently separated from their original communities and suddenly relocated to industrial and commercial urban centres on the other, which were too quick to destroy ancestral customs and traditions while replacing them with a mentality and forms of association and solidarity comparable, let us not say, to those of the nascent European proletariat, but not even to those of today’s China and India. All this explains both the violence of the outbursts of popular fury and the gracelessness of the political and ideological superstructures that correspond to them.

II.

In spite of the imbalances we illustrated in the last issue, the momentum of the African anti-colonial movement, which is boldly developing on the borders of Congo, and the whiplash of the events of Léopoldville cannot in the long run fail to free the young parties in which the Congolese peoples’ will to revolt is expressed from the weight of old inferiority complexes. We are referring to the two most notable groupings: the ABAKO and the Mouvement Nationaliste Congolais, since the other groups that multiplied after 4 January gravitated around them or were influenced by Europe.

The former, whose popular roots are now being traced back to the traditions of the famous anti-white Kimbanguist movement of 1921 and in subsequent years, aims to establish an autonomous African state in the province of Léopoldville. This province, which, together with Katanga, is the most important centre of the immense Congolese territory (2,350,000 square kilometres), is considered by the ABAKO leaders as the springboard for the independence movement. The pilot-nation that it proposes to found in the Léopoldville area – from where the January blaze spread – is also linked to a historical precedent, namely the existence in the same province, between the 13th and 15th centuries, of an African kingdom whose events we will recall below. It is a plan that is not lacking in audacity and is likely to seriously embarrass the Belgian authorities who, if the project succeeds, would have to stitch up the royal mantle of the metropolis to the size of a pygmy.

The second party, the ABAKO’s rival, which it accuses of particularism, does not enjoy as widespread an influence and, patronised – at least originally – by the Catholic missions, represents the populations of the Upper Congo that are least affected by the European and even cosmopolitan influence reigning in Léopoldville, the colony’s most notable port and mercantile centre. Its expansion is hindered by the retarded nature of the regions in which it was born and where the old indigenous powers still retain some authority. However, recent events and competition from the other party are pushing them to radicalise, although their poor electoral successes in December 1957 and the fact that they were not disbanded after the events in January 1959 have not enhanced their popularity. On the other hand, their goal of saving the ‘geographical unity’ of the Belgian Congo is ill reconciled with the fact that this unity is merely the product of the artificial division of Africa into zones of influence by British, French, German, Portuguese and Belgian imperialisms. In this respect, the ABAKO’s position appears more realistic, because it is based on ethnic groups of greater stability and longer duration, which may represent a centre of attraction all the more remarkable insofar as the power of European colonial authority has been radiating from the same geographical location for over 80 years, while the MNC, wishing to embrace and preserve the geographical and political status quo of the Belgian Congo, risks crumbling under the impact of the particularisms that will inevitably be unleashed as the colonialist forces weaken and eventually disappear. However, the MNC declares itself for immediate independence, for the formation of a properly African government, and against the ‘Belgian-Congolese community’.

Alongside these two parties, the Union des Travailleurs Congolais has recently formed, the first strictly African trade union organisation, which opposes the tame European trade unions. (We note in parenthesis that there are so far neither laws authorising indigenous people to form trade unions independent of the European trade union authorities, nor the right of assembly or freedom of the press in the proper sense). For all these groupings, future prospects depend on the degree to which the spontaneous evolution and violent pressure of the masses, also in relation to political and social developments in black Africa as a whole, will be reflected in the combativity of today’s elites and the social composition of their cadres. It should not be forgotten that gigantic economic and social obstacles hinder the maturation of an autonomous political consciousness in the indigenous peoples. The events of Léopoldville opened a period of social chaos and popular unrest in which, day by day, the age-old defects of white paternalism resurface. The legacy left by the ‘Belgian benefactors’ increasingly reveals itself as one of the most stomach-churning forms of European exploitation of those indigenous peoples of Central Africa whom they proclaimed they wanted to raise to the standard of living ‘enjoyed by civilised peoples’.

9/10 of the immense territory is still covered by a network of archaic structures within which the indigenous people oscillate between famine and hunger. The colonial authorities, very democratic, very progressive and very Christian, cling to the corrupt indigenous potentates in the traditional centres in order to prolong an agony that makes the political rebirth of the Congolese peoples even more difficult. It is up to the new movements to uproot forever the reactionary indigenous petty lords who, trembling for their fate, invoke the commitments made by the ‘slave-trader king’ Leopold II, at the founding of his hellish African empire, with a view to maintaining traditional authority! But they will only be able to do so with the help of the popular masses concentrated in the large industrial and mercantile cities, while awaiting the decisive – and so far absent – contribution of the European metropolitan proletariat and, in particular, the Belgian proletariat. Will they be able, under this ‘mass’ pressure, to free themselves from the sterilising influence of the vehicles of ‘peaceful and democratic coexistence’, imported from the decaying West as from the East in a frantic race to ‘catch up’ with the Western model? The near future will tell. In the meantime, it is worth recalling the history of Congo’s political past, the reflections of which reappear evident – as mentioned – in the programmes of the indigenous parties.

A bit of history

At a time when Europe, struggling to emerge from the Middle Ages, was seeing the emergence of the first bourgeois states still under the rod of monarchies ‘by divine right’, there already existed in Black Africa powerful ethnic units whose political organisations, more or less related to European feudalism, nevertheless enjoyed far greater stability due to their geographical remoteness from the great commercial and civilising centres of the Mediterranean and, later, the Atlantic Coast. But this was an entirely ‘provincial’ stability that, if it was sheltered from the great social and military turmoil of the Mediterranean belt, was nevertheless not the fruit of autonomous development and, even less so, of ‘paradisiacal’ living conditions. Under the infernal blaze of the tropics, enclosed by an insurmountable belt of virgin forests and, further afield, deserts, the Kongolese peoples struggled tenaciously against material conditions that were among the most hostile to the human race and, if the forms of social organisation they developed deserve the admiration of the historian all the more, it was inevitable that, by their very evolution on the fringes of the great currents of civilisation of the Mediterranean world, they would remain prisoners of a slow process of decomposition of primitive communism, and unable to overcome it following the deadly blows dealt by the colonialist scourge and, under its shelter, by the corruption of the tribal leaders.

Of the West African populations that reached the level of the Kingdom, those established in the Lower Kongo were undoubtedly the most remarkable. Of all the monarchies and sultanates that succeeded one another from the beginning of the first millennium A.D. to the 19th century on the plateau dominating the central Kongolese basin, the Kingdom of the Lower Kongo is indeed the only one that has distinguished itself in world history, maintaining relations not only with the first European maritime monarchies of Portugal and Holland, but even with the Holy See (since it was also the only one to adopt Christianity as a means to increase the prestige and strengthen the privileges of the ruling hierarchy) and surviving for some three centuries in the same area that in January 1959 was the scene of the popular Negro uprising.

Before describing its history, it is imperative to highlight the nature of the relations that the populations of the Lower Kongo had at that time with those of the interior and especially with the pygmies, whose disappearance is currently the subject of the curiosity of bourgeois ethnographers and the philanthropic care of Christian missions. The oral tradition of the Congolese populations has it that the pygmies were the first occupants of the Lower Kongo, partly submerged by Bantu populations that had immigrated from distant East African regions. However, at the time of the Lower Kongo Kingdom, they were not, as they are today, ‘paternally’ enclosed in special ‘reserves’, but treated with respect by the ruling tribes, both because their great skill in hunting wild beasts and elephants made them valuable, and because their sense of direction in the equatorial forest, and their famous sense of smell, made them indispensable tools in the penetration and clearing of new lands. Many, therefore, lived sedentary lives within the tribes of the ‘invaders’, with whom they practised agriculture as free labourers and maintained ‘good neighbourly’ relations, albeit under a regime of political dependence. This was not the case with the white invaders: determined not to allow themselves to be domesticated and, on the other hand, unable to put up an effective resistance in terms of force, the pygmies saved themselves by ‘disappearing’ into the maze of virgin forests and leading a life of proud independence several thousand years old, which ended in the almost total disappearance of the race without the executioners of colonialism needing to mow them down with fire and iron.

But let us return to the Lower Kongo. According to bourgeois ethnologists (not all of whom agree and are always suspicious) and also according to certain chronicles of the time, the Kingdom of Lower Kongo was founded towards the end of the 13th century by peoples of the Bantu race coming from southeastern Africa in the course of a long and tortuous historical migration. Arriving on the Atlantic shores, at the mouth of the Congo River, they would have been at the origin of the formation of a kingdom that remained immune to Mediterranean influence, since neither Egyptians nor Arabs ever penetrated Central Africa, nor did they push along the Western Coasts of the Continent either. Needless to say, contacts took place with detached tribes gravitating towards the centres of the North African belt; but it is a fact that the social, political and economic characteristics proper to the civilisations and states of North and South-Saharan Africa were not present in the Kingdom of Lower Kongo when the first European pirates landed there. If foreign influences are noted there, they are limited to material elements of agricultural technology, while they do not affect the social structures at all, the dominant and most notable feature of which is the still lively presence of primitive communism.

In 1484, the territory of the Kingdom, now divided between France, Portugal and Belgium, reached a surface area of 300,000 square kilometres, not including the areas that were more or less directly under its authority. It was ruled by a monarchy that was not hereditary but elective, since the sovereign was chosen, on the death of the predecessor, by assemblies of chiefs of the tribes federated and vassalised by the royal power, and was divided into provinces and districts on the basis of the ethnic origin, pre-Bantu and Bantu, of the local populations, controlled in turn by chiefs recognised and supported by the tribes. Social life was still strongly imbued with an essentially communal infrastructure, based on a land regime in which cultivated and ‘vacant’ land was available to the tribes according to their needs for agricultural products and hunting reserves. Slavery existed, but limited to a ‘domestication’ that in the long run turned into assimilation into the tribe: it was not until the arrival of the ‘European colonisers’ that the slave trade extolled its horrors.

Hunting, fishing and the spontaneous gathering of wild fruits complemented agricultural production, eliminating the recourse to cannibalism from which the populations of the interior still suffered, and which reappeared with violence under the reign of the great white king Leopold II, still perpetuating itself in some regions, recently put under ‘quarantine’ to spare the Belgian colonial hangman an inglorious end to its career.

Production techniques had reached a remarkable level in the Kingdom of the Lower Kongo: iron, copper, gold and diamonds extracted from the subsoil were processed locally, and even the explorers of the 19th century themselves were to find that the iron then produced was of a higher quality than that of European production. Artisans made weapons, vases, furniture, textiles, jewellery, and excelled particularly in ivory and wood carving with products that the European antique dealers of our century would launch on the market at fabulous prices.

Livestock farming was not practised on a large scale in the countryside: small livestock and poultry – pigs, rams, goats, chickens – predominated, because the scourges of malaria and sleeping sickness decimated the herds of wild oxen and other large animals, while horses and camels were unknown, and are still absent from the Congolese landscape. On the other hand, the scarcity of livestock justified, on a historical level, the enslavement of the representatives of the subjugated tribes. Agriculture, due to the peculiarities of the soil and the vast equatorial expanses, was practised on the basis of the collective ownership of the land and work in common: the plague of small property ownership had not taken root and, moreover, was unlikely to spread even under the banner of the white colonisers – an element that would certainly prove positive in future developments of the class struggles and their corresponding political forms.

Until the arrival of the horsemen-crusaders of western mercantilism with their baggage of individualistic ideologies, social relations were spared (apart from slavery, a phenomenon typical, moreover, of all ancient civilisations, even the most evolved) from archaic forms of enrichment of an idle class through the oppression and exploitation of the productive classes. The kingdom had not yet emerged from the historical phase in which men were valued as forces of socially productive utilisation in a sense extended to the whole community, not as holders of wealth acquired by exploiting the labour of others. Men harvested, cultivated, fished and hunted, without being bound by anything other than the laws of an inter-tribal solidarity prevailing throughout the kingdom under the threefold aspect of mutual food aid, free movement over land, and mutual assistance in war. There were bonds of solidarity whereby, except in cases of general famine, no one was condemned to starve, and there were no ‘orphans and widows’, in the sense that everyone found in the community the means to live or, if necessary, survive. A framework, in short, of the perpetuation (in its general lines) of primitive communism.

But the internal situation of the Kingdom of the Lower Kongo, outwardly static even in terms of social relations, was nevertheless deteriorating under the pressure of the development of the productive forces which, although not yet industrial, were by then too developed to be kept within the confines of a restricted economy and market. Trade was already taking place between the regions along the coasts, roads and waterways; handicrafts flourished in parallel with the development of material needs among the inland populations, themselves producers of ivory and hides and ready to exchange them for foodstuffs, manufactured goods and weapons. Thus, without giving rise to clear class divisions, a decomposition of traditional relations began to take shape from which the royal aristocracy was bound to profit, although its enrichment did not go beyond the limits of hoarding and did not affect the general foundations of an economic structure strictly regulated by customary rights in which the objective living conditions of the indigenous populations were reflected. Revolts against the despotism of individual chieftains, attacks by tribes not yet subjugated, incursions by starving tribes, and other manifestations of unease, only superficially upset the unstable equilibrium determined by the alternating play of checks and balances at whose extreme poles were the economic and social customs of the past on the one hand, and the thrust of expanding productive forces on the other.

This unstable equilibrium was to be definitively broken by the landing of the first European merchants and soldiers, who, far from elevating Kongo to the superior level of civilisation they boasted of, precipitated its collapse and eventually erased it from African history for centuries.

Having landed in 1482-83 at the mouth of the great equatorial river, and faced with a political structure such as the Kingdom of the Lower Kongo that, although not rigid, was not a fragile aggregate of tribes that could be subjugated with a few strokes of the cannon, the Portuguese under Diogo Cam sent an initial embassy to the indigenous king, who resided in M’banza (later renamed San Salvador): Determined to defend the proud Kongolese independence, the sovereign held the European envoys as hostages, and Cam left for Lisbon, taking with him a small group of natives, captured in retaliation and with a view to future contact with the precious territory. It seemed he would never return, but instead...

The second act of the drama occurred a few years later, when the Portuguese made a second landing, sending to the king of the Lower Kongo a new mission composed of the previously captured natives, whom politicians and religious men in Lisbon had wisely converted, Europeanised and ‘conditioned’. Instructed by the missionaries, they achieved what the navigators had set out to do: they impressed the king with tales of Portugal’s prodigious riches, flattered his vanity by treating him on an apparently equal footing, and finally enticed him with the lure of honours and riches. The sovereign not only converted, but obliged first his court dignitaries, then his subjects, to do likewise, and began to open up to Europeans the avenues of a trade that soon revealed itself not only as an exchange of products, but as a traffic in human flesh, as ferocious slavery. Once the traditional economic and political isolation was broken, Kongo fell prey to the ‘vector insects’ of colonial exploitation: first the import of manufactured goods and the export of raw materials, then alcoholism, venereal diseases, the opium of a religion soon allied with primitive magic rites, corruption at the top as well as on the periphery, the slave trade and the disintegration of the social and political fabric handed down over the centuries.

In this endeavour, the white colonisers took advantage of the corruption of the royal authority, which took to sending its sons to Lisbon to study there and make careers as administrators or priests (the son of a local lord, Afonso I, became the first bishop and vicar apostolic of Kongo), and that of the petty lords of the provinces, who were happy not only to trade, but to offer the body and soul of their blood and tribal brothers to the invaders. In the meantime, diplomatic relations were also being established with other European powers and with the Holy See itself: the foundations of the ‘holy alliance’ between white colonisers and native potentates (backed by the holy alliance between Catholic missionaries and witch doctors) were thus laid, and the unstable equilibrium we spoke of was definitively broken. The kingdom was irretrievably condemned to death.

The process did not take place without severe shocks: several tribes particularly affected by the scourge of slavery rebelled, in some cases forcing the king to ask for the protection of the Holy See (who referred him to the benevolent protection of... Providence) against the threat of depopulation and therefore the economic and civil decadence of the country, in other cases forcing the united forces of the king and the Portuguese onto the defensive. But the latter, on the other hand, had a good game in exploiting the inter-tribal rivalries and manoeuvring the minor potentates against the major ones, and vice versa, while the invasion of the kingdom by the warlike and proud Jagga tribes, towards the middle of the 16th century forced the Bantu potentates, with the king at the forefront, to solicit the military aid of the whites – who were happy to comply with the request as it came at a good point to allow them to extend their mining exploration and widen the scope of the slave trade. Everything conspired, therefore, against Kongolese independence.

The decline of Portuguese supremacy came in the late 17th century, when the king’s decision to grant the whites a certain extension of land provoked the revolt of some tribes and, above all, of the province of Sogno: in fact, the ceding of land to foreigners in private ownership struck at the roots of customary law, according to which land was a collective good according to the interests and needs of the community. The revolt became war, and finally the Portuguese were pushed back to the left bank of the Kongo and the neighbouring colony of Angola, while the Dutch, who had already sent ambassadors to the king of the Kongo in 1642, took over control of the markets and ports, without pushing into the interior and showing greater diplomatic skill in dealing with the natives, but revealing themselves in practice to be no less greedy and ruthless than their predecessors. The following centuries saw other European powers appear on the west coast of Africa, the Dutch move towards South Africa, the Portuguese regain some of their lost ground, the Kingdom of Kongo decline and eventually become a shadow of its former self, before in 1876, after the great geographical discoveries of Livingstone and Stanley, Leopold of Belgium founded the ‘International African Association’, in 1885 the Congress of Berlin recognised the ‘Independent State of the Congo’ colonised by it and, in 1908, it came under the direct rule of the Belgian Kingdom.

Before following this last course of Congolese history, it should be noted that the Kingdom of Lower Kongo, if it was by far the most important indigenous political structure, was nevertheless not the only one. In the 17th century, the Bakuba Kingdom fell under white pressure – famous for the refinement to which its art had reached – located between the Cassai (the Portuguese name for the Kasai river) and the Sankuru and founded as early as the 6th century by tribes possibly coming from the Sudanese savannahs. The Baluba Empire, founded in the 17th century and extended over the furthest inland areas of the basin as far as Tanganyika, and that of the Lunda, located on the highlands of the Cassai and extended in the 16th century as far as Angola, had a somewhat longer life, while at the beginning of the last century the Mitsiri Empire spread from Tanganyika to the border regions of Congo. There is no need to dwell here on these marginal states, except to emphasise once again the fact that, before the white invasion and colonisation, the immense territory had already given itself original political structures: against the mythology of imperialism, the appearance of the European ‘civilisers’ was the sign not of an ascent of black Africa towards superior forms of life, but of its inexorable economic, social, political and cultural desiccation.