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Zaire External Pressures
By the late 1800s, new sets of players appeared on the
African
scene, the Arabs in the east and the Europeans in the
west, both
deeply involved in slave-trading activities. The tactical
alliance
between the Luba king, Kasongo Kalombo, who ascended to
the Luba
throne in the 1860s, and Arab traders did little to
prevent the
disintegration of his kingdom. As elsewhere through the
savanna,
externally inspired local revolts accelerated the process
of
fragmentation instigated by competition for the monarchy,
causing
outlying provinces to break away and set themselves up as
more or
less independent political entities.
From the inception of Portuguese penetration into the
old Kongo
Kingdom in the late fifteenth century, and well into the
beginning
of the scramble for colonies in the nineteenth century,
the Kongo
monarchy was a major pawn in international struggles.
These
conflicts pitted the Vatican against the Portuguese crown
for
control of African souls, the Dutch (who began arriving on
the west
coast of Africa in the seventeenth century) against the
Portuguese
for control of the slave trade, and ultimately Spain
against
Portugal for sovereignty over the Portuguese Empire.
The Kongo Kingdom was the first state on the west coast
of
Central Africa to come into contact with Europeans.
Portuguese
sailors under Diogo Cão landed at the mouth of the Congo
River in
1483. Cão traveled from Portugal to Kongo and back several
times
during the 1480s, bringing missionaries to the Kongo court
and
taking Kongo nobles to Portugal in 1485. In the 1490s, the
king of
Kongo asked Portugal for missionaries and technical
assistance in
exchange for ivory and other desirable items, such as
slaves and
copperwares--a relationship, ultimately detrimental to the
Kongo,
which continued for centuries.
Competition over the slave trade had repercussions far
beyond
the boundaries of Kongo society. Slave-trading activities
created
powerful vested interests among both Africans and
foreigners--the
Portuguese and later the Dutch, French, British, and
Arabs. A new
source of instability was thus introduced into the coastal
areas of
Central Africa and its hinterland, which greatly hastened
the
decline of the kingdoms. Nowhere is this more evident than
in the
history of the Kongo Kingdom, which was a centralized
state system
ruled by an absolute monarch.
In the late fourteenth century, a group of Kongo, led
by the
son of a chief from the area of present-day Boma, moved
south of
the Congo River into northern Angola, conquered the
territory, and
established Mbanza Kongo Dia Ntotila (Great City of the
King) as
the capital of their kingdom (the capital was later moved
to São
Salvador). By the middle of the fifteenth century, the
Kongo king
ruled the lands in northern Angola and the north bank of
the Congo.
By the early sixteenth century, the kingdom was divided
into six
provinces, each under a subchief or governor, who also
held a
religious title and authority. The last really effective
years of
the Kongo monarchy were from 1641 to 1661, although the
kingdom
endured into the next century. By the eighteenth century,
however,
most of the kingdom's provinces (Mbamba, Mbata, Mpemba,
and Soyo)
had become self-governing principalities. The king, though
claiming
a divine right to the monarchy, had little authority
beyond his
capital, and internal bickerings that had surrounded his
throne and
further diminished his power also contributed to the
weakening of
the provincial chiefdoms.
The dynamics of internal fragmentation were directly
linked to
commercial activities. Just as the ownership of slaves
became a
major source of wealth and prestige, both in turn made it
possible
for the slave owners to challenge the authority of the
king. Here,
as elsewhere in the savanna, the competition for slaves
introduced
a major source of instability, creating a permanent state
of social
unrest and civil war. The history of the old Kongo Kingdom
encapsulates many of the crises experienced by several
other states
of the savanna in their efforts to cope with the challenge
of the
new economic forces.
The area of the Congo was one of the principal sources
of
slaves to markets in Arabia, the Middle East, and the New
World.
The trade had devastating effects on both Kongo and
non-Kongo
communities for almost 400 years. By the late seventeenth
century,
up to 15,000 slaves a year were sent out of the lower
Congo River
area. The European slave traders were usually the final
link in a
chain of African and Arab merchants who brought slaves
down to
coastal trading posts. The slave trade in the eastern part
of
present-day Zaire was dominated by Arabs and continued
until the
late nineteenth century. All European nations had
abolished the
trade by the mid-nineteenth century, and the end of the
American
Civil War in 1865 extinguished another main market.
Besides the
obvious depopulation, the slave trade in the Congo area
had caused
many local rebellions and increased ethnic warfare.
On the eve of the Belgian conquest in the late
nineteenth
century, Congolese societies had reached a degree of
internal
dislocation that greatly lessened their capacity to resist
a fullscale invasion. Resistance to outside forces was further
hampered
by the devastating raids and civil wars that followed in
the wake
of the slave trade, by the subsequent improvement in the
capacity
of Africans to destroy each other through the use of
firearms, and
ultimately by the divisions between "collaborators" and
"resisters"
and between the allies of the Arabs and the allies of the
Europeans. In addition, a more enduring cleavage had
emerged out of
the varying exposure of Zairian societies to Western
influences and
early trade activities. Long before the conquest of the
vast
hinterland, the coastal communities had had centuries of
contact
with Europeans; by the time the Conference of Berlin began
in 1884,
on the other hand, most of the societies of the interior
had yet to
experience the full impact of European rule. Out of these
different
historical experiences emerged different self-images and
cultural
dispositions. That the Kongo peoples were the first
Zairian people
to challenge the legitimacy of the colonial state is
perhaps not
unrelated to their long and dramatic experience of
European
hegemony.
Data as of December 1993
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