Aishwarya Trivedi, Tschikaya’s Ghost (Zanzibar Univ. Press, 2015)
… The 1970s ended whatever fragile prosperity was left to the United Republic of the Congo. Falling oil prices dealt the coup de grace to wells that were already failing due to mismanagement and poor maintenance, and the offshore construction that had begun to great fanfare at the end of the 1960s resulted in great expense and no profit. By 1973, the republic’s foreign exchange had completely dried up, leaving no hard currency for imports.
For the citizens, this was a catastrophe added to the disaster of Hermann Tschikaya’s rule [1], and one that Tschikaya himself did nothing to mitigate. The 1960s had been a time of vast construction and infrastructure spending, all in the service of Tschikaya’s promised Lingala paradise; now, with the money gone, the roads and pipes and power grid were left to fend for themselves. Even the little money that was available went elsewhere: Tschikaya’s paranoia and megalomania were both growing worse, and his security forces and religious cult (which by now had very little Lutheranism remaining) received first priority. This only worsened the slide into poverty, as economic activities which depended on electricity and piped water were no longer possible.
With domestic production in steep decline, smuggling became the only way to obtain many consumer goods, and Tschikaya, true to form, turned misery into profit. His security forces summarily executed any smuggler they caught, but this was more to protect a monopoly than to enforce the law: the soldiers themselves were allowed and even encouraged to smuggle as long as they gave a cut to their officers and ultimately to the god-president. By 1980, Tschikaya’s Congo resembled little more than a mad mafia-run theocracy.
And “mad” was the operative word. Paranoia and megalomania had been part of the Tschikaya regime from the first, but as the nation’s fortunes declined, they became much worse. The 1970s didn’t see the wholesale massacres that had accompanied the expulsion of minorities who refused to assimilate, but killings of real or suspected opponents multiplied, and one might be classified as an opponent for being insufficiently fervent in worshiping the president or simply having something that an official wanted. Tschikaya’s whims struck seemingly at random, resulting in the execution of entire extended families. The killings would usually take place in public at the president’s temples, often by impalement on the nail-studded
nkisi nkondi power figures that symbolized his godhead.
The result was a new stream of refugees. In the 1950s and 60s, the minorities, especially the Bateke, had been driven across the river into the other Congo, and had found homes on the opposite bank and in the capital at Malebo. Now, the refugees were Kongo people who had benefited from the first phase of Tschikaya’s rule but were fleeing the terror state that now engulfed them. Many of them also found their way to Malebo, but most went to live with their coethnics in Bas-Congo province where they would have a profound effect on Kongo nationalism. The Kingdom of Kongo movement during the 1960s had contained many supporters of Tschikaya; by the mid-1980s, these were all but gone, and the movement had become much more conciliatory toward both local minorities and the central government. Much of the movement’s success in the 2000s, including its successful campaign for autonomy, can be traced to the changes wrought by the refugees from Tschikaya’s regime.
But in the meantime, the United Republic itself was coming under siege from without as well as within. For some time, the Teke-led government in exile had petitioned the Court of Arbitration to remove Tschikaya from office, and their effort received support from, among others, Congolese Republic president George Tshilengi. That effort had languished through the 1960s and 70s. Both the court and the powers that supported it were reluctant to intervene in a civil conflict for fear of what that might mean for other nations’ internal sovereignty: although Westphalian norms had softened, they hadn’t reached the point (nor have they still) where governments would allow an international agency to exercise an effectively unlimited supervisory power. The reaction to the Yeke ruling [2], and the general retreat of internationalism under the economic pressures of the 1970s, also made the court unwilling to take action. There was always some reason – dispute over whether a government in exile had international standing, argument over what made a conflict international – but the result was the same.
By the 1980s, though, the tide of economic nationalism was receding amid reforms to international governance, and a new wave of environmentally-driven internationalism was rising. The pressure on the court to act increased, and with the situation in the United Republic growing worse by the year, individual polities didn’t wait to impose sanctions. Demand for oil had risen again, but most potential buyers had embargoed crude oil from Tschikaya’s wells, leading to large profits for smugglers in the neighboring countries but no improvement in the Republic’s living standard. As the decade wore on, even Tschikaya’s elite security forces began to see arrears in pay, and although they had traditionally supplemented their salaries by plundering the population, that well had run dry.
The continuing flood of refugees, combined with growing instability that posed a threat of warlord rule or even invasion, finally prompted the international bodies to act. In 1989, the complaint of the Teke government in exile was joined to a petition, supported by a majority vote of the Consistory, requesting that the Court of Arbitration take action to resolve the threats to peace posed by the Tschikaya regime, the Uele insurgency in the Congolese Republic, and several other civil conflicts. [3] This petition supported a limited expansion of the circumstances in which the Court could act, under which conflicts that caused significant cross-border flow of refugees or armed incursions would be treated as international.
In 1991, after a series of hearings in which a minority coalition of states argued against the Consistory position and in which the scope of the doctrine was debated, the Court issued its ruling. There were varying opinions on the exact limits of the court’s jurisdiction, but a majority of judges found that the conflicts at issue were sufficiently international to fall within it, and that they posed a serious enough threat to peace to warrant the exercise of its police power. Several judges also supported action against the Tschikaya regime on the ground of gross violation of human rights, and although they did not yet command a majority, enough judges supported intervention for other reasons that the final order of the Court declared Tschikaya an outlaw.
Tschikaya, from his largest temple and dressed to appear as a
nkondi, shouted defiance against the Court, but aside from his remaining cultists, there were few who would fight for him. By the time a Kazembe-led international force was mobilized, the United Republic’s army had largely melted away and its government had ceased to function. There was a hard fight in the capital, where Tschikaya was killed during the storming of his palace (whether he resisted heroically to the end or whether he was hit by shrapnel while hiding under a desk depends on the teller), but elsewhere the invasion met only scattered resistance, and the country was under the Court’s effective control within days.
The terms of the Court’s resolution called for international troops to stay and keep the peace until elections were held, but not to take part in governing the country. That proved difficult in a country where the physical infrastructure and government were in ruins and civil society was nonexistent, and in some cases, local commanders became governors by default. Rebuilding was also marred by conflict with remaining elements of Tschikaya’s security forces and by fighting between returning refugees and those who had taken their land. There were several massacres of Bateke who tried to return to their villages and towns, and even many of the later Kongo refugees found it impossible to come home. Possibly a quarter of the United Republic’s former population would settle permanently outside its borders, to add to the quarter that had been killed under Tschikaya’s rule.
Ultimately, with large amounts of international aid, the interim government was able to organize an election, and the voting in 1994 was generally free and fair. By that time, rudimentary infrastructure had been rebuilt, and the oil wells were pumping once more. But real democracy and development weren’t so easy. With no civil society and the population still traumatized, elections were won by local bosses – many of whom had held minor office in the former regime – who could promise protection and division of spoils. Governments tended toward the feudal and authoritarian, albeit not actively murderous, and political parties existed more to institutionalize corruption than anything else.
The United Republic after Tschikaya also suffered from lingering resentment of its neighbors’ greater wealth and its continuing dependency on international aid. The early 2000s even saw a minor resurgence of Tschikaya’s cult, which had nationalist resonance, and there was a scandal when it came out that a few political bosses were using them as enforcers. The publicity was bad enough to lead to a spate of reformist legislation, but the political class had other ways of keeping real opposition from getting organized. Aside from a few minor regional insurgencies and military mutinies, the silence of the United Republic continued.
Today, the land between Gabon and the Congo River is at peace, with no outbreaks of armed conflict for the past seven years, but is still mired in corruption and poverty. Oil production has restored a semblance of normalcy and created an urban middle class, but living standards for most people are lower than they were at independence, the only country in Africa where this is true. But a new generation is growing up that never knew Tschikaya’s terror, and in the cities, the universities and the oil rigs, a civil society and labor movement have begun to take shape. Last year’s street protests over rising food and housing prices were a real challenge to the political class, the first in more than a decade, and the future will tell whether their success will lead to protest on a more systemic level…
Mohammed Binguimale, “Central Africa’s Challenge,” African History Quarterly 68: 30-41 (Spring 2014)
… Ubangi-Shari was as immune as any country could be to the downturn of the 1970s. It was an agricultural society with no industry to speak of, and outside the capital, it was a society of villages and market towns. Its economy was geared for local consumption, and most people still mixed subsistence farming and small-scale cash crop production, so foreign economic events had little impact. The country was poor, but it grew no poorer, and if anything, those who could afford imported consumer goods benefited from lower prices.
The conflicts of the 1970s came instead from within. By the late 1960s, even the remotest villages had the radio, and telephone connections were increasingly common. Labor migration had also grown, both within the country and to its richer neighbors. This meant that petty local tyrants, of the kind that controlled a number of Ubangi-Shari’s cantons, no longer had unchallenged sway over their subjects. The people knew there were different ways to rule, and the energy that had gone to challenging German rule in the 1920s through 40s was now directed against the provincial bosses. And many of the challengers were influenced by radical ideologies: Abacarism, the prophetic Ibadism of Tippu Tip, and populist N'Délé Use Catholicism had always existed in parts of Ubangi-Shari, but radio and roads broadened their reach and synthesis.
This led to protests and sometimes to small-scale wars. Like the Ottoman Empire during the early twentieth century, Ubangi-Shari’s localism shifted civil conflict to the provincial level rather than preventing it altogether. At any given time between 1970 and 1990, at least one canton, and usually more than one, faced an insurgency. By the 1980s, refugees from the Uele insurgency in the northern Congo and from the final stages of the Tschikaya regime also spilled over the border, threatening to bring their conflicts with them.
During the 1970s and 80s, much of the country looked on these events with a shrug. Ubangi-Shari’s federal structure and weak central government had been created precisely to localize conflict, and intervention might bring on the general civil war that everyone feared. The peaceful cantons, most of them governed either by formal democracy or consensus, were busy with their own modernization and development. But as the insurgents grew more sophisticated and formed networks across provincial lines, and as infrastructure construction made it easier for fighting to spread, it became impossible to ignore the conflicts in remote cantons, and some also argued that it wasn’t moral to do so.
The Uele-Tschikaya ruling of 1991 opened the door to assistance from the Court of Arbitration, and later that year, after a contentious debate, Ubangi-Shari’s federal parliament voted to ask the Court and Consistory to mediate between the cantonal governments and the insurgents. The ensuing negotiations took place at the same location but were really several independent peace conferences side by side, and resulted in separate settlements. By late 1992, accords had been reached in all the affected cantons, most often involving power-sharing governments and opening of the cantonal political system.
These settlements would be tested and would sometimes fail, and during the 1990s and 2000s, armed struggles would periodically begin again. But after the experience of the 1970s and 80s, the federal government was more determined to end these outbreaks, and the country as a whole had become more integrated into regional conflict resolution structures. Few of these brushfire wars lasted long, and their endings largely confirmed the local chiefs’ loss of the control they had held since colonial times.
Today, Ubangi-Shari is sometimes cited as the next country to follow the Great Lakes development model: i.e., slow economic growth and limited material wealth combined with good social indicators and a politically engaged population. [4] But it isn’t there yet. Its poverty is more acute than the Great Lakes commonwealths and, although its education and public health systems are much improved, both are still well below developed-world standards, and diseases like Congo fever that have been brought under control in the Great Lakes are still widespread. The political engagement may be hardest of all: the major religions and political movements of Ubangi-Shari all teach solidarity, and the anti-colonial and anti-feudal struggles have created a shared history, but a sense of nationhood and of being part of a community beyond the local level are still far away. As the country continues to modernize, though, all things may be possible…
… The Kamerun Independence Party’s surprising performance in the 1969 election [5] threw the country’s politics into chaos. The establishment parties, collectively, still had a substantial majority, but long-standing factional disputes prevented them from working together effectively. Several short-lived coalitions and minority governments ensued as the governing class maneuvered to keep the Independence Party out, but rivalry finally got the better of one of the factions: in early 1971, the party was invited into the cabinet, just in time for the first stages of the economic downturn.
Using the recession and the resulting popular pressure as a springboard, it took only a year for the Independence Party to become the
de facto leader of the coalition, and in late 1972, it engineered an early general election in which it won a narrow majority. It now had a chance to advance its priorities: economic independence from Germany, and opportunity for the educated provincial population that the governing class had marginalized. In 1973, Kamerun withdrew from the Zollverein and announced an industrial development program and protectionist trade regime, and during the succeeding years, the government embarked on increasingly broad jobs programs for new graduates in the provinces and capital.
The Independence Party saw itself as a regional vanguard, and to some extent this view was justified by the protests that shook Gabon in the mid-1970s and the left-Belloist revolutions that toppled several of the monarchies in the Union of Bamum. But with time, it became clear that the Independence government had overreached. The initial cash infusion from nationalizations was spent quickly, and the initial burst of growth from crash industrialization stalled amid widespread corruption and rising prices, leaving the government unable to afford its employment and infrastructure projects. By the mid-1980s, Kamerun was obviously falling behind the neighboring countries, and the Independence Party’s creeping authoritarianism did nothing to add to its popularity.
Elsewhere, this situation might have led to revolution, but in Kamerun, it was resolved by a
de facto palace coup, with the more pragmatic members of the Independence government winning out over the hard-liners. In 1988, the foreign ministry quietly began to negotiate terms for re-entry into the Zollverein and regional African economic and environmental unions. With Germany eager to regain access to Kamerun’s markets and agricultural products, it was able to obtain good terms, including assumption of all compensation claims arising from the nationalizations.
In the two decades since, Kamerun has preserved the gains made by the Independence government: employment, wealth and political power are distributed much more equitably than during the period immediately after independence, and the provinces are no longer ignored in favor of the capital. Bu despite the new debt-free start the country gained with re-entry to the Zollverein, its economy has struggled and its industries are largely low-end and marginal. Its politics are fractious and unstable, and its governments only intermittently effective. The promise of prosperity and economic independence that swept the youth of 1969 to power are still unfulfilled…
Alexandra Rasonanaivo, A Modern History of Madagascar (Antananarivo: Hiragasy, 2012)
The death of King Randimbisoa in 1990 was greeted with apprehension by many Malagasy, who feared that the transition might reignite the civil conflicts that had raged earlier in the century. But Madagascar wasn’t the same country it had been in those days. Three decades of peace had transformed it into a vibrant albeit idiosyncratic democracy, and its unconventional aspects, including the use of popular songs and poetry as a primary means of political debate [6], engendered a high level of engagement among citizens. There were rules and traditions now by which constitutional questions could be resolved, and legitimacy was on the side of those who used them.
Madagascar was also a country with much more to lose. Since Randimbisoa’s 1964 visit to Malaya and Nusantara, it had become part of the burgeoning Indian Ocean economic and cultural zone. Unlike most other East African countries, its primary connection was to Southeast Asia rather than India or South Arabia, which meant in turn that Nusantaran industrialists had a clear field to invest there. All this resulted in Madagascar being one of the few places to experience steady growth during the 1970s, as money poured in from Southeast Asians who saw the island as their door to African trade. Antananarivo became home to modest Malay, Nusantaran and Hadhrami communities – the last of these making it an endpoint on the vast Hadhrami commercial network – and, via the Malay states, a Chinatown.
The exchange went both ways. The 1980s saw wealthy Malagasy in Singapore, Johor and Batavia, and some Madagascar-based companies traded as far as Polynesia. And the fact that the relationship was billed on both sides as a reunion of Austronesian peoples and a rediscovery of mutual roots meant that it became more than simply commercial; there was great interest in Nusantara about Malagasy styles of oratory and music, and the Malagasy absorbed ancient Southeast Asian stories and looked for details of their own history. The cultural connections also proceeded on a deeper level: there had always been an Islamic minority in Madagascar, but it doubled between 1965 and 1990, and the bulk of the growth was in reformist traditions that favored a broad world-view.
Madagascar in 1990 was thus a more prosperous country and one more connected to the world than it had been as a German protectorate or even immediately after independence, and it was well aware that civil conflict would jeopardize all its gains. So when the royalist and republican parties met to decide whether Madagascar would in fact revert to a republic as had been promised in 1957, a compromise proved easy. The constitutional settlement of 1990 was indeed republican, but it created a republic much like Asante or Indénié: the president would be Randimbisoa’s daughter Rasoherina, and while her powers would be largely ceremonial, she would maintain royal regalia and forms of address. She would be commonly known as Rasoherina II, successor to the nineteenth-century monarch of the same name, and she has been duly re-elected every five years since…
… Madagascar in the 1990s and 2000s has been one of the most politically stable countries in Africa – the post-revolutionary distaste for civil conflict has proved lasting – and has also come to terms with its role as a cultural bridge between Africa and Southeast Asia. During the 1970s, the growing engagement with Asia had led some highland Malagasy to question whether they were African at all, a sentiment with which the western coastal peoples, who had much more prominent African roots, strongly disagreed. By the 1990s, however, most Malagasy had come to realize that their heritage came from both continents – a realization that was aided by increasing intermarriage between highland and lowland ethnic groups – and Madagascar had become a full member of the Central African Accords as well as a partner of the Malay and Nusantaran states. The mix of Africa, Asia and Germany in Madagascar’s food, music and literature is nearly as much of a tourist draw as its unique wildlife.
Madagascar’s prosperity remains moderate by world standards, and it faces the economic and environmental challenges of a growing population: deforestation and erosion have become increasingly serious problems during the past decade, and there is a shortage of jobs for new university graduates. But there is at least a broad consensus about how to confront these problems, and the debates are less likely to involve argument than song…
Friedrich Stitz, Distant Dreams: The Modern Copperbelt (Berlin: Allgemeine, 2011)
… The 1970s hit hard in Kazembe and Barotseland. Copper mining was no longer the primary foundation of their economy, but it was still a significant one, so the copper price crash of 1973 meant a major decline in government revenue and the loss of tens of thousands of jobs. Industry also suffered from loss of demand, particularly in overseas markets that Kazembe had only recently begun to penetrate. Copperbelt industry wasn’t hurt as badly as that in some other African countries, because it was tied to German investment and there was enough local capital to remain competitive, but the structural adjustments necessary to stay in business brought problems of their own: automation eliminated many unskilled and semi-skilled jobs and brought in a new, sharply confrontational era of labor relations.
Some Bazembe, seeing their living standards decline by almost a third from the prosperity of the 1950s and 60s, argued that the Copperbelt states should withdraw from regional economic institutions and protect local jobs as some other countries were doing. This call was given added resonance by the fact that the Zollverein agencies had been captured by industrial interests on a scale never before imagined, and that multinational companies, most of them German-based, were using the customs union’s regulatory system to shut down locally-based or even nationally-based efforts at economic reform. Economic historians would later argue that the process of regulatory capture had begun as early as the 1940s, which was why it had reached a more advanced state than in most other regional organizations, but that it had gone largely unnoticed during the boom years when corporate, governmental and labor interests had coincided. Now, both the multinationals’ economic and political reach seemed beyond the control of any one nation.
But as the majority recognized, withdrawal wasn’t an option for the Copperbelt. Without their customs unions, Kazembe and Barotseland were landlocked, and their economies were closely connected to those of Germany, the Zollverein nations and their African neighbors. Protectionist measures would lead to disaster far greater than what they already faced. Instead, the elections of the 1970s, and the social movements taking place in the background, resulted in an uneasy coalition of government, labor and local capital that reached across borders to retake control of the Zollverein even as they faced off against each other domestically.
Managing this coalition would be the unenviable task of Andreas Mwenya, the former carpenter, trade unionist and mayor of Ndola who became prime minister of Kazembe at the head of a 1974 emergency government. [7] He would spend the next decade and three general elections putting out fires, ensuring that domestic labor disputes and arguments over industrial policy didn’t break the Copperbelt’s unified voice on international matters, building connections to equally fractious labor-government-business alliances in Germany and eastern Europe, and coordinating Consistory diplomacy as well as litigation in the Zollverein’s courts and the Court of Arbitration.
In the short term, this campaign would be only partly successful. The multinationals’ influence over the regulatory agencies was deeply entrenched at the civil service level, which was harder to shift than the Zollverein parliament or the high-level appointed positions, and they were thus able to obstruct many changes in policy. There were powerful opposing forces within the Zollverein countries, including political parties, state governments and labor groups that disagreed with the international strategy, so the insurgents suffered political losses as well as victories. But by the time Mwenya stood down in 1984, the coalition had broken the multinationals’ hold on the elected bodies and policy-making offices, laying the groundwork for the longer-term struggle that continues today, and this campaign also swung the Zollverein countries firmly into the camp that supported greater popular participation in international institutions.
In the meantime, amid much domestic contention, the Copperbelt states’ economies were completing the shift toward high-end industries on the one hand, and services on the other, that had begun in the 1950s. Mwenya’s industrial policy, which Barotseland largely copied, was modeled on that of the northern German states, adapted to local conditions: it favored small to medium-sized companies that focused on high-quality, semi-artisanal production. Most of these companies, building on the physical and educational infrastructure of the 1960s (and, some would say, generations of cultural priming), were in the areas of electronics, precision instruments and aerospace. And the belt of cities in northern Kazembe that had once been wall-to-wall copper mines became home to a growing service and information-technology sector that absorbed many of the semi-skilled workers as well as new university graduates.
By the mid-1990s, this shift was largely complete, and the Copperbelt had more than made up the ground lost during the long recession. At the same time, Kazembe’s computer industry made it the pioneer of Africa’s new media and a center for Africans of all nationalities who wanted to work in programming or communication. The Copperbelt states had never lost their sense of the future – their three-generation-old youth culture played a large part in the emergence of the computer industry and the growth of a new-media aesthetic – and the victories of the 1980s and economic growth of the 1990s gave them back their confidence. Achievements in more traditional fields – Kazembe’s first fully independent satellite launch in 1978, and its participation in the Grand Tour missions and the subsequent outer-system orbiters – would have the same effect…
… The Copperbelt today defies description. Kazembe regularly trades places with the Niger Valley states and the Cape as Africa’s wealthiest nation, with a living standard equal to Romania or metropolitan Portugal, and is expected to catch up to western Europe within thirty years. Both Copperbelt states’ passion for education is equaled only by the Niger Valley and the Belloist polities. The University of Kazembe attracts students from throughout the world – there are more Europeans living and studying in Ndola now than when Kazembe was a German protectorate – and the Copperbelt is Africa’s unquestioned aerospace, electronics and information technology hub. But for all that, Kazembe and Barotseland retain the working-class sensibilities of the mining colonies they once were: they are unafraid to get their hands dirty, and the tinkerers’ markets and Wandervögel encampments are as much a part of their ethos as the high-tech belts that surround their cities.
Kazembe has also become a cultural leader in a way that, even forty years ago, it would never have imagined. Its video games, cinema and planetary romances have drawn inspiration from throughout Africa, and in doing so have created a new mythology: a pan-African mythology that combines the legends and dreams of hundreds of cultures and projects them into the future. With the Copperbelt so prominent in the new media, this mythology has become one of the images of Africa that non-Africans most often see – but more than that, it is how many Bazembe have come to see themselves. Kazembe still has its Luba-Lunda roots, and the German influence on literature, youth culture and ways of working is powerful, but the Copperbelt’s people view themselves as a synthesis of Africa, a culture with an ancient heritage yet fashioned into something new.
What is the Copperbelt’s future? Some Bazembe might complain that this question is far too prominent in their countrymen’s minds: that dreams of the future have cost them their grounding in the present and past. They might say that the Copperbelt has become a creation of its own planetary romances. But the majority would answer that, in a country that went from a feudal agricultural society to a spacefaring one in a single long lifetime, the future is the natural place to look for inspiration, and that Copperbelt dreams have always been waiting in the stars.
_______
[1] See post 6008.
[2] See post 6368.
[3] See post 6393.
[4] See post 6164.
[5] See post 6008.
[6] See post 6008.
[7]
We’ve met him before.
