Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa by Howard W. French

forgotten these truths, basking instead in the comforting myth of our civilizing mission, but unsentimental memories of Stanley live on with the Congolese, who even today remember him as Bula Matari, or the Stone Crusher, because of the murderous way he drove press gangs to forge roads where there had once been primordial rain forest and immense boulders.
    Sheer greed and a shocking lack of what we might identify today as humanity drove the Belgian enterprise in Congo, like so much of the early European imperial exploitation of Africa, and the more carefully one examines the record of Leopold’s behavior, the more it comes to resemble pure evil.
    In little more than a generation, the Belgian king’s yearning for empire and fortune may have killed ten million people in the territory—half of Congo’s population, or more than the entire death toll in World War I. Even today Japan continues to face international ostracism for its brutal imperial conduct in China, Korea and other parts of Asia in the 1930s, which followed Leopold’s Congo holocaust by a mere two decades. And yet there has never been any remorse in the West over the fallout from Europe’s drive to dominate Africa. Indeed, few have heard these grim facts.
    In view of the vastly larger scale of Leopold’s atrocities, it is worth asking how he escaped remembrance alongside Hitler and Stalin as great criminals of the twentieth century. If Leopold’s legacy had been millions of deaths alone, the impact of Belgium’s takeover of the Congo would have been horrible enough. But the Belgians also created a tragic example of governance, essentially teaching Zairians that authority confers the power to steal. 2 And the practical corollary to this lesson was that the bigger the title, the bigger the theft.
    For an entire generation of Congolese, Mobutu had been the undisputed heavyweight champion of this organized larceny, and although everyone knew what he was up to—a French minister once aptly described him as a “walking bank vault in a leopard skin cap”—he remained the West’s favorite partner in Africa to the bitter end.
    In the image of Leopold, Mobutu looted the copper and cobalt wealth of Shaba Province until industrial-scale mining all but ceased to function. His next El Dorado was the diamond fields of East Kasai. When the famously rebellious East Kasaians entered into a state of near revolt, refusing even to accept a newly issued “national” currency, Mobutu focused his greed on Kilo Moto, the fabulously rich mine in Zaire’s remote northeastern corner that would temporarily slake what had become an unquenchable thirst. Kilo Moto became known as the president’s very own gold mine, and though it does not excuse him to say so, Mobutu was clearly following in the footsteps of his illustrious predecessor, Leopold II, staking out a personal claim to the wealth of an entire region.
    On the morning of our river crossing from Brazzaville to Kinshasa, the memories of troubles on our previous trip seemed almost quaint amid the air of hysteria produced by the rush of foreigners—journalists, doctors and relief officials—all seeking a piece of the action in the Ebola outbreak.
    The word “Zaire” is a corruption of “Nzere,” the name for the Congo River in a local language, which means “the river that swallows all other rivers,” and the moniker could hardly be more appropriate. In the generalized absence of roads, the Congo has always been the country’s lifeline. Three thousand miles from end to end, its watershed covers over a million square miles and includes over seven thousand miles of navigable tributaries. Between Brazzaville and Kinshasa, the world’s closest capitals, the river is as broad as a lake, and though its appearance is leaden, even strangely solid in spots, its currents are notoriously strong. Our own docking maneuvers required heading upstream a good way, taking us well beyond our final berth, past a large fleet of huge