Fifty years of Congolese independence

I remember trying hard, as an 8 year old, to make some sense of the scenes of conflict shown on TV. It was hard to make sense of the images of jungles, soldiers, helicopters. Then along came Vietnam ….

This statement by a General:

“My dream for the Congo is for an ex president, just someone simply who hasn’t been assassinated, who hasn’t gone to live in exile, who hasn’t had any reason to go and live in exile, who doesn’t have to illegally stay in power, but who can continue to live here peaceably at the end of his term.”

So, to what extent have the “Congolese” made their own history in the last 50 years, and to what extent has it been the product of circumstances not of their own making?

‘So, to what extent have the “Congolese” made their own history in the last 50 years, and to what extent has it been the product of circumstances not of their own making?’

“The speed with which African decolonisation was carried out can only be explained by the imperialists countries’ need to steal a march on their own settlers, who were threatening nearly everwhere to secede and form ‘white states’. At the level of trade, a ‘native state’ is far more exploitable, commercially speaking, than a ‘white’ state. As Selbourne had written to Chamberlain in 1896: ‘What are to be avoided at all costs are new Canadas or United States'”.

Arghiri Emmanuel, 1972.

This is an interesting idea, but was Ghana (for example) really full of secessionist-minded white settlers? Algeria? Nigeria? Congo?

Well Algeria was certainly full of white settlers, but secession was the last thing on their mind. I think the quote may have some relevance to British colonies in central and east Africa, but not really anywhere else. The degree to which the French colonies other than Algeria were in fact ‘decolonised’ is a point of contention – French governments have tended to assume a right of intervention at a level that British governments have not. (This isn’t to be read as ‘French bad, British good’, it’s simply an observation that the two colonial powers had different strategies for continued control of their ex-possessions.)

Also, the UK government spent much time and effort trying to come up with a political structure that would accommodate the settlers (the East African Federation and Central African Federation).

11: implying, what, that post-independence Congo was more easily exploited than the Belgian Congo? That doesn’t quite seem to fit with the history.
And I am not sure that, as that quote implies, Congo was decolonised fast because the Belgian government was worried that the white population of Congo would otherwise declare unilateral independence. (Though, as an old Congo hand himself, Emmanuel would have known. ) Were there even enough to do so? There were only about 80,000 Belgians in the entire country; far fewer than in, say, Rhodesia, which was a much smaller country. And not all of these, of course, would have been true colonists; administrators, mining engineers and so on would have made up a large proportion, who would have presumably expected to return home to Belgium inevitably, rather than settle down for life.

#11 also neglects the Cold War context. South Africa’s whites played that card very successfully, and if white rule had been a serious proposition you might expect it to have been tried more widely. Emmanuel seems to be applying the reflexive mindset of the colonised: things happened because they were manipulated in secret by a powerful, scheming oppressor. I suspect the truth is that the option for white rule did not exist. Very little in the history of Belgian colonialism or Belgian statehood suggests they could have made it stick. Still less can one credit the idea that the failures of post-independence rule were the results of deliberate Belgian policy, competently executed.
Do you have any context for that 1896 quote, by the way? It seems an extraordinary thing to say.

the twin obsessions with federation and partition are a constant theme. They never bleeding learned.

Worked OK for Canada, and Australia; quite well, sort-of, for Malaysia. And, ironically, the USA.

I should have thought that ‘federation’ and ‘partition’ were inevitable topics when considering what to do with colonial territories that had never had an independent political existence consonant with their imperially-defined borders. ‘Obsession’ seems a little harsh.

Mightn’t Chamberlain have been speaking largely in the context of (a) the Boers and (b) Ireland?

Well if he (Selbourne?) was saying that he was just out of luck, because what he got was the Union of South Africa, loosely analogous to Canada in structure, and the Irish Free State which was originally another Dominion just like the other ones. I wonder if he’d have been happier to know that these were transitory solutions…

If you have a block of land to which you intend to grant independence, you can pretty much either a) keep it together (federation) or split it apart (partition).

No, the third option is just to grant independence to the block of land (or rather to the people living on it). The federation thing involved (post 1945, Canada, Australia and S.Africa aren’t really relevant) wedging several blocks of land together for (stated) reasons of geographical proximity. Malaysia sort of worked, as Alex points out, if we ignore the rejection by Brunei and the secession of Singapore. The Central and East African federal projects would have resulted in the creation of states which were even more multilingual and historically insensitive than the ones which emerged – the blocks of land which were granted independence. The West Indian project was finally killed by the refusal of the larger states (Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad) to sign up to subsidising the small islands sine die. But it also rode roughshod over the fact that the Caribbean countries actually did have real histories.

post 1945, Canada

Note.

And if the block of land in question is “pretty much the whole of East Africa”, all of which was under British rule?

Then you have three separate governments, each of which can provide basic infrastructural continuity, three separate emergent national identities and three separate independence movements, none of which support confederation, each of which you have to knock on the head and replace with a new one, without even the few decades of roots that already exist, in the space of a couple of years.

I don’t know why everybody’s so fired up to defend the record of the British Colonial Office, when even they admitted they were wrong eventually.

26: that does rather suppose that, denied their separate homeland, the Muslims of India would all have simply shrugged their shoulders and settled down peacefully in a Hindu-dominated country. Similarly the Protestants of Ireland.

Note that India’s simultaneously an example of a failed partition and a successful confederation. There wasn’t an “India” covering that area of land pre-Raj, and even during the Raj it wasn’t all one political entity, it was over 500 of them – directly ruled land and the many historically independent Princely States.

As far as Israel/Palestine is concerned, current conventional wisdom is that the problem is insufficient partition, which the two state solution seeks to remedy.

The most important aspect of Indian partition is not the fact of Pakistan/India but Kashmir. Bengal and Punjab were also partitioned of course, but under far less arbitrary conditions, and they seem to have survived the process better.

32: yes, we’re all terrible old tories here. Still waiting to hear about all those secessionist Belgian colonists in Leopoldville from you, btw.

Is partition Tory? Or New Labour soft Tory?
Wilson’s 14 points amounted to imperial breakup and partition.
Joe Biden argued in the primaries for the partition of Iraq.
I can understand why you’d want to be in an argument against Ferguson.
I’d prefer you engage with the thread.

@26 – BTW, Biafra was NOT a partition, it was a post-independence secession. Much like the Kashmir situation, which had rather less to do with the British [other than in the general they-started-it, what-have-the-Romans-done-for-us sense] than with uncompromising Indo-Pakistani hostility.

@35 – Engagement with the thread, hmm; as most of the thread consists of competing dubious generalisations, I think they probably are.

27: Who are these Muslims of India? Do we mean the Baluchis, who have been fighting a low-grade insurgency against Pakistan for a very, very long time? Or the Pashtuns, who also are rather vigorously fighting the Pakistani state and the Mohajirs in Karachi? Or how about the Sindhis, who also have had a long running secessionist movement, which even in some cases suggests accession to India?

The British decided to elevate the half-baked and totally ridiculous idea of Two Nations and partition India. It never made sense, and led directly to things like the massive deaths in Partition and the death squads in East Pakistan and the ruinous war that lead to the formation of Bangladesh. It also has meant the ethnic cleansing and partition of Kashmir and the abandonment of nonviolence by Pashtuns.

Now, one could argue that Raj India wouldn’t survive as a single polity, but then people have been saying that about the India we have now for a long time and it seems to be doing ok, certainly much better than Pakistan or Bangladesh.

And that’s just one in a long line of partitions and massive ethnic cleansing that accompanied decolonization by the British. The French record, horrific as it is, looks almost good in comparison.

‘And that’s just one in a long line of partitions and massive ethnic cleansing that accompanied decolonization by the British.’

FWIW there is a theory that partition was not a ‘mistake’ but instead a cynical attempt to split up India (by the British) and create a Muslim client state, ‘Pakistan’, which could be easily manipulated by the ‘Great Powers’ (i.e. the US/UK) and could have those all important military bases position on it. Oil was also important. I have no idea whether this is true or not but it wouldn’t surprise me.

http://www.chowk.com/articles/16444

It also has meant the ethnic cleansing and partition of Kashmir and the abandonment of nonviolence by Pashtuns.

Wait, the abandonment of what by whom? You’re saying the Pashtuns were non-violent before Partition? OK, that’s enough.

44: ajay, Go look up Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and then come back.

Re: India,

It was more a class struggle rather than an anti-colonial one. It certainly was not a Hindu-Muslim one _before_ the partition. The growing Wilsonian sentiments in this part of the world pushed the “babus” who enjoyed considerable power under the Raj had to band together to create a nation, since the 500 odd principalities could not sustain themselves economically (India was always an empire, for a long time before the Raj, or for that matter even the Mughals. Remember, Malik Gafur entered Tamil Nadu with his hordes).

The continuation of economic stability is what motivated the bureaucrats and technocrats to create India instead of chopping it up into smaller units. The INC was chock-a-block of lawyers and educationists and scholars. Not any local princes or “blood-and-soil” folks.

This need for stability was of course exploited by the Brits to create an identifiable Pakistan though the points raised by Sarila played not a small part in this exploitation. Maritime trade was the only viable trade and ports had to be “protected”. The perpetual crisis in Pakistan is more Punjab vs. Sindh, Lahore vs. Karachi than anything else.

And as an aside, British India should never be discussed without Afghanistan just as Vietnam should not be discussed without Thailand. Both played the buffer between imperial powers, each in its own unique way.

ajay,

Done that. Not seeing the point you are trying to make here.

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan had a lot of political support and led a nonviolence movement amongst Pashtuns that was vigorously fought by the British and the partitionist Muslims, and they succeeded in killing the movement.

What was your point about Amanullah Khan?

It was more a class struggle…
A previous Labour government had irked the high-caste members of the congress delegation by pushing for formal acknowledgement and representation of untouchables.

ajay,

So you are claiming Amanullah Khan’s war with Britain in 1919 is relevant to the political stances of the Pashtuns in British administered India in the 1940s? You are also claiming this on the basis of Amanullah Khan, who had been in exile in Europe since 1927 and who in fact never returned to Afghanistan and died in Switzerland in 1960.

I still don’t see it. There was clearly a viable nonviolent movement among Pashtuns in British administered India in the 40s, and the British government and the Muslim partitionists combined to destroy it. So why are you so willing to reject out of hand nonviolent Pashtuns? Have you read too much Victorian propaganda?

On second thought, Hidari may well be saying that our era sucks. Hard to argue.

Anybody, just for my information, as someone who worked his way through The Mediterranean in the Age of Phillip II decades ago: Where does Braudel’s reputation stand among professionals these days? To the extent he has critics, is there a political element to the criticism?

Incidentally, #55 and 56: yes.

26: that does rather suppose that, denied their separate homeland, the Muslims of India would all have simply shrugged their shoulders and settled down peacefully in a Hindu-dominated country. Similarly the Protestants of Ireland.

and what of the fact that present day india contains 160 million muslims (about as many as are in pakistan) who seem in general to have settled down pretty peacefully in a hindu-dominated country?