“As long as we think that we should get Mississippi straightened out before we worry about the Congo, you’ll never get Mississippi straightened out.” – Malcolm X, 1964
U.S Courts Grant Imperialist Companies Immunity
In March of 2024, a federal appeals court in the District of Columbia refused to hold Alphabet Inc., TESLA, Dell, Microsoft, and 5 of the leading tech companies accountable for their alleged complicity in the use of forced and child labor that waited at the end of their supply chains.
The case was brought by 16 plaintiffs in December 2022, including four former miners and legal representatives of child miners who lost their lives and suffered major injuries in cobalt mining operations in the DRC.
According to a Library of Congress article entitled “United States: Appeals Court Holds Tech Companies Are Not Liable for Forced Labor Used by Cobalt Suppliers,” the defendants were accused of “knowingly benefitting from and aiding and abetting the cruel and brutal use of young children in the DRC to mine cobalt,” and the case claims that the defendants “know and have known for a significant period of time” about the human rights violations in the DRC’s cobalt mining supply chain.
The Democratic Republic of Congo sits atop the list of countries with serious human rights abuses. The Bureau of International Labor Affairs produced a 2022 report entitled Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor. The report summarized that “Children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are also subjected to other forms of the worst forms of child labor,” which include the forced mining of gold, tin ore (cassiterite), tantalum ore (coltan), and tungsten ore (wolframite), and are used in armed conflict, sometimes as a result of forcible recruitment.
This is the reality that underlies the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the so-called Green Energy Revolutions in the industrialized world as they grapple with environmental pressures. Our electric cars, high-powered computers, blockchain technology, and iPhones are stained with the blood of African children, much like the Antebellum cotton worn in the 19th-century and 20th-century automobile tires.
The Democratic Republic of Congo is the second largest country in Africa in terms of land area at 2,267,000 km, and the fourth largest country in terms of population with a population of 102,262,00. The DRC is also one of the youngest countries in the world, with 46% of its population being younger than 14. With over 250 ethnic groups and over 700 languages, DRC is also one of the most culturally diverse places in the world. The country has immense economic potential. The people sit atop exceptional reserves of natural resources, including minerals like copper and cobalt ore (key to world markets), hydroelectric potential, significant amounts of fertile land, and the second-largest rainforest in the world.
Despite this, the People of the Congo have not received the fruits of such wealth. Poverty in DRC remains widespread and pervasive. In 2018, experts estimated that 73% of the Congolese population, equal to sixty million people, lived on less than $1.90 a day (the international poverty rate). As such, almost 14%—or one out of six people living in extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa—live in DRC.
Influences seeking to maximize their national interests at the expense of the soil and people extend past the West to the Chinese whose power and influence has the potential to undermine the sovereignty of African people. A case in point is illustrated by the Congressional Executive Commission on China report published in November of 2023 entitled “From Cobalt to Cars: How China Exploits Child and Forced Labor in the Congo,” which announced that “80% of the DRC’s cobalt output is owned by Chinese companies, refined in China, and then sold to battery makers around the world.”
Considering the beauty, diversity, and natural resources of the Congo, the condition of the people of the DRC can be confusing outside of the proper context. As we investigate the history of the situation, we see that the original historical trajectory of the people of the region has been interrupted and that the current state governing the affairs of the people of the DRC is a colonial institution created to serve neo-colonial interests.
History of Colonialism in the Region
Between 1501 and 1866, approximately 5.7 million of the 12.5 million Africans sold as chattel to European slavers came from West Central Africa. Today, this region includes the countries of Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo.
In the late 15th century, the Kongo dominated the region as an empire with a highly centralized political administration organized into an elective monarchy, a system of national education and initiation to train the national administration, and a developed commercial network that traded ivory, copper, gold, pottery, and other artisan crafts.
The decline of the preeminence of the polity is the result of the unequal development of the political, commercial, and cultural relationship, which was extractive and parasitic from its inception in 1483 A.D, between the kings of Kongo and Portugal. In his insightful Challenge of the Congo, Nkrumah asserts that from the onset, the Portuguese were “determined to exploit the economic superiority” found within the Empire of Kongo. The genesis of the unequal relationship can be traced to the naval superiority of the Portuguese, which they used to build alliances with the enemies of the Empire of the Kongo, as well as the corrosive effects of the African Slave Trade.
The Kongo became an official vassal of Portugal in 1866. During the Berlin Conference, the imperialists divided the region between the Portuguese and Belgium. Between 1885 and 1908, approximately 13 million of the African subjects of the Congo Free State, a private entity owned by Belgian King Leopold the Second, were murdered, mutilated, and worked to death in order to satisfy the burgeoning automobile industry’s need for rubber. Eventually, the bloodshed and human atrocities became so unbearable that Leopold was compelled to give the Congo Free State over to the Belgian government, after which it was called “Belgian Congo,” and no significant change in relations was made. It remained a colony of Belgium until the decolonial movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Within a pan-Africanist analysis, the condition of the DRC is important for 3 major reasons:
1) As a result of its position in the middle of the continent and its immense mineral wealth, the region currently known as the DRC is imperative to any serious discussion of an All-African People’s government on the continent of Africa.
2) The region is the perfect case study to understand the development of imperialism from the Slave Trade, the Berlin Conference, the post-colonial era, and finally th,e arrival of neo-colonialism.
3) It elucidated the myriad of geo-political powers that have an interest in the continued exploitation of DRC in particular and African people in general, some of these being African people.
In May of 1960, Patrice Lumumba was elected the first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo. A 39-year-old Lumumba represented the most radical Pan-Afrikanist element within the country, which posed a threat to imperialist interests. This tenacity, charisma, and revolutionary fervor that was Lumumba was put on full display during the official ceremony of Congolese independence, where Lumumba took the stage after the Belgian King Badouin and gave a stirring rejoinder of triumph and commitment to the Congolese Government and the future of Africa as a whole.
Held in Leopoldville (present-day Kinshasa) on 30 June 1960, Lumumba recounted the “80 years of colonial rule” where the Afrikans were forced to endure “forced labor” and “jeers, insults and blows.” Lumumba began the speech by acknowledging the “equal terms” that Belgium and Congo stood on as a result of a seemingly successful independence movement and ended it, stirring the blood of every pan-Afrikanist in the room, as he proclaimed that “we shall make the Congo the pride of Africa.” This speech made an already infamous Lumumba disliked by Western interests. Seven months later, Lumumba was dead, and the dream of an independent pan-Afrikanist-facing state was deferred.
Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah chronicles symbolically independent Congo as an early neo-colonialist case study as she struggled for genuine self-government and combatted Western imperialists and their neo-colonialist henchmen personified by but not limited to Moise Tshombe and Joseph Kasavuba.
Earlier that year, in January of 1960, Nkrumah writes that Moise Tshombe showed his leanings towards Western imperialist interests as he called for a loose federation for the Congo with a “certain amount of provincial autonomy and close ties with the [West]” at the Round Table Conference in Brussels. By the sham elections of 22 May 1960, Tshombe’s CONAKAT won control of the legislature in Katanga province and began obstructing Prime Minister Lumumba’s efforts to form a national government with accusations of communist and dictatorial tendencies.
On 11 July 1960, the provincial government of Moise Tshombe, a Lunda ethnocentrist, member of one of the most important business families in the region, and founder of Confédération des associations tribales du Katanga (CONAKAT) announced the independence of the province of Katanga.
This particular province held distinction to the economic vitality of the Congo. Nkrumah recounts the immense wealth of the region in his Challenge of the Congo:
“The province of Katanga, in the southern part of the Congo, has immense mineral wealth. Its copper deposits alone are estimated at about 115 million tons. It is the world’s largest producer of uranium and one of the world’s biggest producers of cobalt. It produces zinc, coal, manganese, tin, lead, silver, and cadmium. The manufacture of cement and the generation of electricity must also be noted.”
The Katanga’s secession, instigated by Western interests—afraid of how a Soviet-Congolese relationship would affect their global position—and carried out by a coalition force of Tshombe supporters and the United Nations, could do nothing but destroy any hopes of a self-governing Democratic Republic of Congo.
The neo-colonialist uses tactics to exploit the internal contradictions of Afrikan people to perpetuate imperialism’s control. An ethnocentrism that is ignorant of the direction of African civilization, based on the material conditions of the Maafa, will always be a tool for imperialism, whatever form it takes.
Nehemi’EL Ibrihim-Simms, a descendant of Harlem Garveyites and Jamaican Maroons, is a journalist-educator who currently uses prose to explore the intersection between the grassroots application of Scientific Pan-African Nationalism and the New School of Thought on African Development in order to make sense of the Black Radical Tradition’s mistakes and triumphs, in order to inform contemporary organizing efforts. He is the co-founder of Basimah’s Hands Education LLC (basimahshandsed.org), which is a tutoring organization started in 2020, aimed at promoting literacy as an avenue for power and centering the use of Afrocentric Pedagogy in this endeavor. His inaugural publications entitled “A Treatise on The Modern Application of Traditional African Political Philosophy” and “Serudj Ma’at: Thoughts of a 21st Century Race Man” are forthcoming.