http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/295/DRC_collage.jpgProfessor Wamba dia Wamba presents a critical analysis of the concept of democracy in the age of globalisation, which equates with Western political democracy. He provides historical context to the recent elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which outside influences continued to play a large part in the outcome of the elections, and concludes with reflections about the future of the democracy project in the DRC.

1. The World context: how do we orient our thinking about democracy?

Democracy, or more accurately democratic materialism, has become the dominant ideology. It is increasingly obligatory to be a democrat. It has almost become the single political thought. Democratic materialism asserts that there are only bodies marked by languages, and nothing else. There is only one market, one politics, one economy. In brief, there is only one order of things. That is all there is and that is how it is (Alain Badiou, 2006). There is no exception, unless it is to be totalitarian or terrorist. Bodies are interchangeable, and languages and opinions are equivalent. Anything unlike the only order of things is effectively and intrinsically anti-democratic. Democracy equals the Western political order of things. It is compulsory to have Western style democracy.

Is there a political truth? How do we give an account of it? We are in the epoch of a democratising mission, following the old civilising mission. Like the latter, set to impose, by force if need be, democracy on other countries. At the beginning of the war in Iraq, some people in the US were wondering whether or not one country can build democracy for another country. Whether or not the people of a country knew how to build democracy for other countries. There were no conclusive answers to those crucial questions. Democracy has become a package of 'techniques' — constitutions, electoral mechanisms, management systems — to be exported or imposed, top-down, on Third World countries. In these countries, the demos has been reduced to voters who are passive, without civic education. How is this a break from the liberal world: responsible for Atlantic slavery, colonialism and neocolonialism; a world created by slavers, colonialists and neocolonialists?

It is also true that the nation state as the horizon of political revolution, or a state policy of war — in the sense of war as the continuation of state policy through other means, and thus of a short duration — to get another other nation state to agree, is no longer possible. Ultra-liberalism or neoliberalism is opposed to nation states, and promotes weak states to which are assigned minimal functions of keeping order, to allow people to buy into its consumer governance. War is now conceived as opposing good and evil, waged to eradicate evil. Such conception calls for the intervention of law and crime. Proxy figures are identified as being responsible for crimes: Saddam Hussein, Milosovic, Interahamwe, Bin Laden. Some Cold War crusaders have suddenly become proxy figures. War against evil tends to be very protracted, even when the axis of evil is identified. It is not clear what victory in this war consists of. Is it imposed democracy? Is it the elimination of the criminal figure: the hanging of Saddam Hussein, for Iraq? Is it the destruction of a nation state and its people, or the grabbing of its strategic resources? The world becomes divided in a Manichean manner: good democracy versus bad democracy (the recent experience of the Palestinians); good Muslim versus bad Muslim (Mamdani 2004); good states versus rogue states; democrats versus terrorists. And are these the fuelling dynamics of globalisation?

Democracy is reduced to a certified formality. It is rare that protests against the democracy of covered fraud and buying votes, promoted through unjust laws, are taken seriously. It does not matter whether or not voters have seen or read the basic texts of the constitution or electoral laws. Especially since voting is the sole way, for most voters, of having access to some resources. Has being an observer not become a very satisfying activity? Electoral campaigns have ceased to be a way of debating different visions of 'national interest', instead becoming a way of distributing things (T-shirts, foods, appliances, etc.), and money. When you have nothing to wear, you capitalise on collecting t-shirts. When you have nothing to live on, you sell your vote for money. Is the one who buys your vote your representative in the institutions?

On the other hand, the national liberation mode of politics which opened up with the independence of India, died with the assassination of Salvador Allende and Amilcar Cabral in 1973. That was the most active period of transformative politics the world has seen — with leaders such as Ghandi, Mao Tse-tung, Fidel Castro, Frantz Fanon, Ho Chi Minh. The imposition of draconian structural adjustment programmes on impoverished countries, and the recent very aggressive imperial interventions — in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Lebanon, and the protracted resistance of people in those countries, are reawakening hope for other active, transformative politics in the world. Qualitatively different democratic elections have been taking place in Latin America, for example. The protracted character of resistance in the Middle East is exposing the bankruptcy of the dominant ideology of democracy. Will democracy cease to be closely tied up with a package of conditionalities?

Different experiences of democratic constructions could be identified in the history of democracy. Each has had specific obstacles, targets and concrete results. The US experience, for example, was born out of the genocide of indigenous people, the enslavement and discrimination of black people, the civil war, white Anglo-saxon supremacist bigotry, imperial new-frontierism, male chauvinism. The Indian experience has confronted the caste system, the external imperial pressures and colonial heritage, active religious differences. Today, most of Western European democratic experiences still confront the colonial heritage, the effects of neocolonial interventionism; the 'multinationalisation' of their nations, worsened by a refusal to deal correctly with the so-called ‘sans papiers’ or immigrants: foreign born workers. The new-frontierist US has gone as far as to build a wall to keep potential immigrants out. Most of these democracies, refusing to count every person as being worth one, no more or no less, cannot really be said to be truly democratic. There may be good cases of rules of laws — with some unjust laws, of course - but, they are not democracies, respecting the rights of the uncounted marginalised groups. Should it actually not be the excluded people of those democracies that may help us orient our thinking about democracy?

2. The imported democratic project of the DRC

Is there a Congolese project of building democracy in the DRC? No serious debate has really dealt with the question. Building democracy should, normally, focus on the formation of the demos, the empowerment of its capacity to make sound choices, its mastery of the crucial issues of what a good democratic state would be like.

From the very beginning, with the precipitous granting of independence on 30 June 1960 by Belgium, the Congolese have never had a chance, by themselves and without external interference, to debate the parameters of the definition of the crisis they have protractedly been facing since the crusaders of the Cold War dismantled the nationalist regime and assassinated Patrice Lumumba. Even the so-called Sovereign National Conference (SNC), singling out Mobutu as the cause of every evil, ended up failing to grasp the significance of the impact of the Cold War on the country. It finally adopted a proposal by Herman Cohen — a former US under secretary of state for African Affairs — to keep Mobutu in power and reduce only his powers. Such a solution, later on, turned into a farce.

New rebellions could not have been avoided. These claimed to seek solutions to the crisis. Each time, proposals of solutions came from without, often offered as necessity for the democratic project. Once in power, AFDL, for example, kept postponing the implementation of its so-called democratic project. Another rebellion, claiming to be more committed to implement its democratic project emerged. This time also supported by African regional states and great personalities.

What appeared up to the signing of the Lusaka Accord (July-August 1999) to be an exclusively African initiative for the resolution of the crisis that often led to civil wars, rebellions or external armed interventions, got hijacked by the forces of international community. These, according to the late Mwalimu Nyerere, were responsible for imposing a bad solution in the person of Mobutu, who eventually destroyed the country. The financial package required to implement such a 'solution', could only to come from the international community; the African states could not afford it.

Each time an occasion to confront such a crisis arose, the Congolese were led to shift their focus, as demanded by interests of other forces: from the necessity of an organised people’s palaver to unearth the roots of the crisis, to power-sharing as a way of achieving peace by rewarding proportionally those with a capacity to threaten peace and continue the war. Warlords, being so rewarded, were transformed into democrats responsive to the needs and aspirations of the victimised and impoverished masses. Democracy built on that basis cannot but favour the same people.

What was supposed to be an Inter-Congolese Dialogue practically became UN-type conflict resolution in which the facilitating process becomes the initiating or imposing process. 'Dialogue' becomes technical and hierarchical. It ended up with CIAT almost getting power of veto over the transition. Without this external pressure, no objective of the transition could have been achieved. When crisis deepeners and crisis alleviators or pro-change people for the best and pro-status quo people are put on equal footing, it becomes difficult to reach consensus about where to begin and where to end — the main task of the transition. Mistrust among the actors was rampant. Of the five retained objectives of the transition, only two could be said to have been fulfilled: the setting up of the transitional institutions, and the rushed electoral organisation. All the others were either half done, or not done at all. National truth and reconciliation, for example, hardly took off.

The process of drafting of the constitution was fundamentally withheld from the-would-be Congolese demos. Senatorial consultations with targeted social categories were either rushed or very abstract — asking people to make choices on concepts they barely understood - form of the state, semi-presidential regime, federalism. Senators refrained, supposedly to not influence the results, from explaining things. Two days before the referendum vote, only 500,000 copies of the constitution were printed for 25,000,000 or so voters. Of those actually in circulation, four different texts of the constitution could be identified. This explains the frustrations of the lady who was asking for the picture of 'Mister Referendum' to help her decide how to cast the vote.

A necessary educational debate over the drafting of the constitution did not take place. The basic issues needing to be addressed by the constitution were hardly debated, namely: what sort of state are we in, and what do we want it to be in the future? What sort of relations do we want to have with the outside world? How should power be organised for it to be responsive to the basic needs and aspirations of the large majority of the people, in the present, and in the future? How can we empower the people to control the institutions? Debates on the variant experiences of constitutionalism were not entertained, except for the desire to copy the constitutions of others, on the ground that modernity can only come from elsewhere. The most creative experiences were hardly identified or discussed to help us draft a better constitution.

Because of the scarcity of fundamental debates involving all strata of society, laws tended to be tailored according to known possible candidates rather than for the entire foreseeable future. Crucial elements, such as levels of education, moral integrity, capacity for leadership, were not considered in a country torn apart by negative values and the exclusion of competency and workmanship. Looters and people who have become rich for being close to the treasury dominated the institutions. High financial fees were required, by law, to be paid by standing candidates, which excluded decent fellows, who did not have a chance to loot.

Although laws required that debates were part the electoral campaigns, no serious debates took place. A national consensus over what situation our country was in, what must be done to get it out of it, with whom to work, and the kind of leadership capacities to promote, was not achieved. The fact that our country is in a catastrophic and urgency situation, an exceptional situation calling for an exceptional response, was never addressed. Elections were an occasion for each person to display as much financial capacity as possible to get a post in a scheme of power sharing. Some people who could afford it got themselves elected to different posts. More accurately, they bought themselves different posts, and placed their relatives or clients in them.

It was not possible, due to the way the transition was unfolded, for the formation and development of a Popular National Democratic Coalition (PNDC) to be created. Such a coalition could have been the vehicle to promote necessary debates on pertinent issues. Etienne Tshisekedi’s UDPS, still suffering from oppositional politics — ‘what those in power are doing is no good, when we get in power, things will be better’ -, could not help organise such a coalition. To its credit, it did call for the need to have consultations at the summit to agree on the best way of organising the elections to everybody’s satisfaction. But nothing came out of it, and UDPS stayed away from participating in the elections.

The elections were organised mostly on the basis of external financing. This gave external forces the leverage to control the process, its pace, scope and order of priorities. Ascendancy to their preferences made a mockery of national sovereignty in the elections: of the democratic project as a whole. Almost no funds were allocated to the crucial task of civic education for the electorate. Diaspora Congolese, among the most informed, and in some cases people living in democratic countries, were excluded from the process, on the dubious grounds of costs. Congolese in the security forces were not allowed to exercise their democratic right, as part of the electorate, for 'security reasons'. Violating the constitution, under the pretext of security, is arguably equivalent to a coup d’Etat. From the ICD, through the transition, up to the elections, no national consensus was reached about what constitutes the national cause. It was taken from the suggestions of the external forces that the organisation of free, fair and credible elections could be such a cause. Yet there was no real internal social process of popular self-organisation to ensure that those elections would actually be free and fair.

The attempt, by the Catholic Church, to do so fell short. The Union for the Congolese Nation (UN), formed around the second round contending presidential candidate, Jean-Pierre Bemba, failed to properly provide a national leadership to rally all the national forces interested in a transparent electorate process. The monitoring process which it set up was weakened from within — giving the impression of a lack of commitment or clear vision.

An important political space opened when it became obvious that the second round presidential elections results were fraudulent. Instead of organising a big protest against such fraud leading up to a great gathering around the Supreme Court of Justice, and requiring from the latter just justice, the leadership vacillated and finally gave in, on grounds of saving human life and salvaging peace — an unjust peace and saving a dying human life (about 1800 Congolese people die everyday). There was no space for the rise of a radical transformation. This would be a question of vision, aims and style of leadership. The latter seemed to have been trapped in the politics of power sharing after the electoral victory, not sticking to the two demands of the masses of people: to liberate the country from too heavy control by external forces, and to put in place a regime that would be responsible to the people and responsive to their needs and aspirations. It remains to be seen whether the promise of organising a rigorous and republican opposition, by J-P.Bemba, will achieve those demands.

Six provinces out of eleven voted against the incumbent president because they felt that he was too dependent on external forces. He was also accused of selling out on the country. He was for the most part unresponsive to the basic needs of the majority of the impoverished population. Bemba’s MLC’s programme, too lenient on liberalism in the epoch of ultra-liberalist globalisation, would not have realised those demands either. This may explain why the MLC was unable to genuinely lead the masses of people gravitating around the UN. Once again, the question of the relationship between fundamental changes and the leadership came to the fore. It is the actions and ideas of the rebelling masses of people that bring change; yet the popular masses credit the leadership for the changes. Their blind faith in the leadership is, very often, eventually betrayed. The same faith makes the people fail to be vigilant, and actually deal with the task of how to control the leadership so that it will not betray them. There was no way and no structure within the UN to control Bemba, for example, in his dealings with various people — including his meeting with the incumbent President, at a critical moment. Most often, the so-called ‘Political Council’ of the UN he presided over, meetings of which he was the only one to call for, did not meet.

Money and promises or hopes of big institutional posts were the only motives of the so-called Alliance of the Presidential Family. Its victory, which underlines the fact that we are in a 'corruptocracy' rather than a democracy, has made that camp suffer from what could be called ‘political drunkenness’ that makes them blind to see that legitimacy is not just a question of legal victory, but, more importantly, the capacity to rally everyone and thus generate mass enthusiasm for the new regime. Instead of working out a concrete policy to deal with those who voted against the Presidential camp, by rallying them around a convincing programme, the camp has tended to discriminate against them; in fact, an attitude of revenge has characterised the presidential camp. This attitude explains also why political matters have been increasingly assigned to police and military forces to treat them. Arbitrary arrests and even the Kongo Central massacre (31 January 2007— 1-3 February 2007) could account for much of that. The rumours according to which the President had said that he would reserve only two places - the prison and the cemetery - to the Bakongo who did not vote for him, appeared aposteriori to be credible.

Very briefly, the so-called democratic project has been, in the DRC, another process of grafting a Western experience of democracy, reduced to a 'universal model', on to an ill-prepared and un-attendant Congolese political soil, justified, aposteriori, as a necessary consequence of globalisation. No lesson seems to have been learned about the process of grafting from the history of the colonial state in the Congo; which although now decomposed and fragmented, still operates like a Western Trojan horse. Such a state readily represses the people rather than responding positively to their basic needs and aspirations. The newly 'elected' President is still surrounding himself with a militia that hardly is aware that in a democracy, the army is supposed to serve the people, and not harass them for its enjoyment. Western democracy experts - our democratic teachers - come and go, and democracy does not seem to be growing deeper roots. Goodwill is often found wanting.

The permanent paradox faced by the so-called Congolese elite remains. They want to lead the people, from whom they are culturally and socially detached. They claim to ‘liberate’ the country from the extended control of external forces, to which they are culturally and socially attached. While capable of producing a constitution and a nationality law that forbids holding dual-nationality concurrently, some members of the elite do actually hold dual-nationality. Those who genuinely believe that they can solve the fundamental problems facing the Congolese people — and who claim to have worked out some solutions — spend most of their time struggling to survive by devoting their time to reinforcing the very system that causes those problems. Change is always a task for tomorrow.

3. By way of conclusion: what future for democracy in the DRC?

The country remains divided on the issue: some have voted enthusiastically for the presidential camp that enticed them financially to vote, and are now marked by a sense of victorious crowing — forgetting that the strategic aspect of democracy is the protection and defence of the rights of the minority. Those who, around the UDPS, did not participate in the electoral process, and so far unclear about what type of oppositional position they are going to assume. Those who supported the UN camp have been mostly disappointed with J-P. Bemba, frustrated by the turn of events. The massacre of people in Kongo Central, the only place where a very active opposition against the corrupting democratic process took place, did not galvanise the various opposition forces into a movement. If if is the case that the Bakongo nation consisted of all the consistent anti-colonialists from 1921 (with Kimbangu’s Kintwadi) up until to 1959 (January 4th uprising), the core of the Congolese nation struggling for national independence,as F. Fanon and A. Cabral asserted, one should not be surprised that some of their descendants are leading the struggle against corrupting democracy.

Will the use of force or threat of force succeed in silencing the protests? The stability of the cemetery can not lead to a genuine construction of democracy. Dealing with the catastrophic and urgency situation with repression will not last as long as it did under Mobutu. Not only will more protests take place, political implosion is likely. The ways things are going, the next five years might turn out to be very rough indeed.

This piece was originally a lecture given at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on 9 February 2007.

* Professor Ernest Wamba dia Wamba is a Senator, and was the vice president of the Senate Permanent Commission on Legal and Administrative Matters of the transitional administration of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

* Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org

I would like also to communicate to you what has been happening in the province of Kongo Central (Bas-Congo). On 31 January, the police fired at a house presumed to be the one to house Ne Muanda Nsemi, leader of the Bundu dia Kongo. He had already called for a ville morte (people to stay home) for 1 February. He was not in the house as he had returned to Kinshasa for the funeral of his sister. Between 1-3 February 2007, in most of the cities of the province, people marched to protest the rampant corruption over the elections of Senators and Governors.

Our country is divided between a minority that has become rich due to being close to the treasury and the large majority that is over impoverished. The minority in the elections have been buying everything. The Presidential guards fired on the marchers. The causalities are now put at 750 dead, many wounded and many have been arrested. The official number is put at 87 dead. The MONUC, that apparently participated also, puts it at 134 dead. Since then, the president has said nothing. One of his advisers has said that the president having received the Bakongo notables of his obedience, why should he speak again? The UNSG has asked for an enquiry into the massacre. A rocket was used, at Moanda, to attack a BDK church where women and children went hiding. Those arrested are not being given a due process trial. An attorney, at Mbanza Ngungu, has suggested to try them in jails to avoid publicity! There is a plan, we are told, to kill the leader of BDK. Please do whatever you can to expose what is happening.

The Democratic Republic of Congo has just held its first democratic elections since the country’s independence in 1960. On the basis of electoral fraud charges, Jean-Pierre Bemba and his coalition have rejected the run-off presidential election which gave the incumbent, Joseph Kabila, 58.05 percent of the vote and Bemba 41.95 percent. But Professor Wamba dia Wamba argues that it is unlikely that the country will return to war. This is the transcript of the podcast published by Pambazuka News this week.

Prof Ernest Wamba dia Wamba is a Senator, and the vice president of the Senate Permanent Commission on Legal and Administrative Matters of the transitional administration of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Previously, he was Chairman of the Kisangani faction of the rebel group ‘Rally for Congolese Democracy’ during the Second Congo War. He is also a prominent African academic and political theorist.

Pambazuka News: It’s reported that about 25 million people registered for these elections. I believe these are the first democratic elections since the country’s independence in 1960? How important are these elections to the Congolese people?

Prof Wamba dia Wamba: Congolese people saw these elections as an opportunity to express their political views, as well as an opportunity to influence the political decision as to which the direction the country should take.

Pambazuka News: It’s often said that the Sun City Agreement that led to these elections favoured the warlords over the people. Is there any element of truth in that?

Prof Wamba dia Wamba: The peace negotiation mechanisms encouraged by the UN and other international agencies are structured in such a way that they favour those who have the means to threaten peace over the weak and poor. So, yes during the negotiations the warlords’ demands were given first priority. Peaceful organisations were marginalised and ignored, simply because they were viewed as powerless and therefore not a threat.

Pambazuka News: How do you see the South African role in the DRC?

Prof Wamba dia Wamba: In my opinion it is based on a number of mistakes. For example, they approached the DRC situation the same way they approached the apartheid regime. They assumed that, like in apartheid South Africa, there is a mission to be solved and that there is a state. In DRC there is no mission to speak of, and further, the state is fragmented. Another thing is that the South Africans usually talk with those in power, they have no regard for those on the ground.

Pambazuka News: Would it be a fair assessment to describe the DRC as basically a state that is responsible for guaranteeing the basic physical and legal security of investors in the mining sector and other business sectors?

Prof Wamba dia Wamba: In South Africa, big businesses like Anglo American impose on the society a type of economy that is based on extraction of country’s resources and of selling those resources on the international markets. The same kind of economy is envisaged for the DRC.

Pambazuka News: Jean-Pierre Bemba has been quoted as saying that he will not return to war if he loses in the elections. President Joseph Kabila has made similar promises, I believe. Do you think these are empty promises?

Prof Wamba dia Wamba: Personally, I think the DRC will not go back to war. I do not see either of them going back to war.

Pambazuka News: Could you tell us about Kabila, Bemba and Joseph François Zanga’s politics?

Prof Wamba dia Wamba: President Kabila is surrounded by people who are only concerned about enriching themselves. There have been a lot of allegations of corruption against some of these people. For example, there is a parliamentary report revealing that certain contracts give permission to businesses to operate in the DRC for up to 25 years without paying taxes.

Also, Kabila is known for helping himself to money from the national treasury. In addition, he is not well known for respecting the constitution. There are cases where decisions have been taken without any regard for the constitution. For instance, soldiers have been appointed to government positions, whereas the constitution states clearly that soldiers are not to occupy any governmental positions.

Bemba has been the president of the economic and financial commission, whereas he can be linked to the corrupt regime of Mobutu. However, in these elections he has been trying to get all the organisations that are not part of the transition to be included in the process. So, it can be said that he believes in the union which is based on the premise that the unity of the country concerns everybody and not just the majority of the country. This contradicts the presidential majority which views the unity of the country as concerning only the majority of the country with the president at the helm.

Zanga is not known for practical politics. Some people seem to think that his father, Mobutu, was a great statesman. Zanga exploits that and as a result his political camp mainly consists of these individuals. During the campaign, he did not have much to say about what his political plans entailed for the country. He did point out; however, that he was for foreign investments.

Pambazuka News: President Joseph Kabila did not manage to get the 51% vote needed in the first elections to avoid the presidential run-off elections. I believe that Kabila won 44.8% of the vote in first round of the July elections against Bemba’s 20%. How would you interpret these figures?

Prof Wamba dia Wamba: Firstly, these figures reveal that 56% percent of the Congolese people did not vote for Kabila and so are opposed to Kabila’s governance. Secondly, most of the people who make up the 44.8% of his vote are from the East where there were lots of reports and allegations of fraud and irregularities. The point here is that the majority of Congolese people voted against Kabila.

Pambazuka News: Do you think the new government will have legitimacy and support? Do you think it will re-negotiate the business agreements it might have made with countries like South Africa?

Prof Wamba dia Wamba: There were a lot of irregularities and not enough transparency around the voting process and the elections generally. And the Congolese people have made it clear that if the new government is based on fraud, they are not going to accept it.

If Kabila wins the elections, the business agreements will remain as they are. However, if Bemba wins the elections, he has said that the business contracts will have to be re-negotiated on the basis of equal partnership and mutual understanding.

• Interview conducted by Mandisi Majavu.

• Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Thanks!

Since the unexpected arrival of the Portuguese traveler Diego Cao at the mouth of the Congo river in 1482, the peoples of the area to become the Congo had their lives more and more determined by processes started from far away and of which they had less and less control. At the time, they were hardly aware of the fact that in the world yonder, the need for peoples experienced in tropical agriculture would be forcefully satisfied by their best sisters and brothers being captured, kidnapped, shackled and shipped to America.

The resulting Atlantic slave trade, one of the cornerstones of globalisation, over determined irreversibly the lives of the peoples of the area. Even their very survival depended on the evolution of remote processes assigning changing roles to the area. Suffering and modernization would become almost two faces of the same coin marking their lives. The Atlantic slave trade was the first phase of globalisation, laying the foundations of the world market whose evolution would shape the adjustment and re-adjustment of parts of the world around an evolving center.

Three processes are involved when we are looking at globalisation: The first is the historical process of effective transition to capitalism in each country. This involves the transformation of a double articulation of relations and forces of production. This is the long process of transformation or destruction of the specific form of the African commune through the slave trade and colonialism to the present neo-liberalist structural adjustment programmes and poverty accumulation based epoch.

The second process is the historical formation and transformations of anti-colonial (in the broad sense including anti-Atlantic slavery struggles for life) 'mass' movements into more and more organized struggles for the recovering of land, bodies, psyches (selves) and cultures. This deals with the story about the changes of the agencies of struggles: their historical formation and transformations, their social character, their strategies, their programmes, their theories, prescriptions, dreams, ideologies of politico-social emancipation up to the conscious anti-globalisation civil society. In this process, we can only hail partial victories, mostly through accommodation rather than breaks from the commands from the centres.

Thirdly, the 'external domination' in Africa (or forced or willing incorporation of Africa in the outside originating processes) is what is often thought of as globalisation. It involves:
- Obstacles to national liberation/independence and local/national self-determination, self-reliance, South-South initiatives and pro-people developments;
- Imperialist domination and regional expansionism;
- Forms taken by super-power struggles for world hegemony inside and around certain countries in relation to conditions of accession into and character of their independences;
- The transnationalization process through multinational corporations and international economic organisations up to the ultra-liberalist destruction/reduction of the nation/state and the pursuit by the US of the politics of pure super-power, linking tightly politics to war and the US dream of becoming the present-epoch-Roman Empire;
- A world system of a political economy of crime (money laundering, drug and arm traffic, new forms of labour/sex enslavement, private or super-power State terrorism, etc.) develops and comes along. High and low intensity warfare, through regional relationships of forces of super-powers' proxies, continues.

Thus we differentiate three phases of globalisation: the first phase is based on the Atlantic slave trade (sometimes viewed as a pre-globalisation phase), the second phase was the integration of Africa through colonization and the third phase began in the late 1980's and continues up to now. The peoples who became known as the Congolese from the second phase, miraculously survived the first two phases. While the population was being drastically reduced by the slave trade, people took sometimes self-defeating forms of resistance. Some preferred to commit suicide rather than be enslaved and for a long time women were refusing to bear children for the slave trade. Communal forms of resistance and more advanced forms of capitalist opposition to the slave trade helped people survive, but only to be militarily conquered for domestic colonization. The forgotten holocaust (Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost, 1998), during the so-called King Leopold's Congo Free State, the most brutal integration of the area into the world economy, reduced the population estimated at 20 million to a mere 8 million in less than 30 years. It has not been possible to completely heal the effects of the accumulated traumas strongly influencing the forms, styles and sometimes content of the diverse cultures of our country. The continuing replay of those effects not only organize the submissive and docile character of public consciousness, but the regular violent outbursts that mark the bloody history of the Congo. Is the prevalence of the song a form of healing?

The international civilizing agents of globalisation initially behaved in a way that made the country become what one of the most honest of them described as Heart of Darkness. The colonialist attitude was more concerned about How much did the Congo cost Belgium (Jean Stengers, 1957) rather than how much did Belgian colonialism cost the Congo. Each attempt at trying to recast the relationship between the Congolese and globalisation psychologically (radical prophetism as healing - Simon Kimbangu and others), politically (P.E. Lumumba and others), militarily (P. Mulele and others), etc., unleashed the most barbaric forms of violence to infinitely discourage the possible resumption of similar attempts. Kimbangu was condemned to death and then to a life sentence (he died in jail, 1921-1951), Lumumba and his companions' remains were dissolved in acid. Mulele's body, cut into pieces, was put in a bag and thrown into the Congo river joining in the Ocean the bones of the rebelling slaves on the way to America. That was only the tip of the iceberg; how the less known ones were treated is not known.

Throughout its various phases since European contact, Africans have been forced into relationships imposed from outside, with catastrophic consequences for the majority. The transitions which took place - whether from slavery to abolition, from "discovery" to occupation, from negation to acceptance of Civil Rights (1866-1966), (W.E.B. DuBois, Reconstruction), from colonial status to Independence, from the Cold War to re-Globalisation – have generally had a negative impact on the relations between people in the Congo and between the Congolese people and others (J. Depelchin, 2003). Globalisation involves relationships to diseases, to means of death (traffic of arms), to the ecology, to the economy of crime (money laundering, drugs, sexual slavery), to the economy dominated by the dynamic of extraction of natural resources whose market is outside the country and thus also of looting, to world hegemony, to sexuality, to God, to peoples' psychology and cultures generally.

Pan-Africanism, independence or freedom and (racial) equality have characterized the consciousness of the Black man facing the various phases of globalisation. From the anti-slave revolts up to the independence of Haiti in 1804. From the first Negritude calls (Brazil) to the US-initiated Pan-Africanist Congresses. From anti-colonial struggles to national liberationist movements and independences in crisis. The anti-slave question, the anti-racialist question, the Pan-Africanist or African Unity question, the national question, the democracy question, the social question, the question of the protracted demand for compensation for slavery and for the equality of humanity, etc: all are so many calls from the struggles against globalisation.

Pro-globalisation consciousness often opposes those calls and celebrates calls for submission to and docility vis-à-vis the grossest forms of denial of the right to reclaim history and above all, as Cabral said, to assert the right of African people to make history: "The foundation of national liberation lies in the inalienable right of every people to have their own history." (A.Cabral, Unity and Struggles: Speeches and Writings, 980). To deny that right absolutely, the very existence of History is now being denied: History is globalisation made by everybody! Victims and victimizers are made equally responsible for the havoc that befalls on humanity. The world is said to have become a village, never mind the fact that movement of people from some parts of that village to other parts is extremely selectively restricted. When history of our people is allowed to be told, it is mostly done by historians acting as organic intellectuals of globalisation.

The Congo, without the willingness or consent of the Congolese, has been drawn into processes of mass destruction. In the 1940's the uranium which the USA used to execute its nuclear genocide of millions of Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, came from the Belgian Congo. The USA responsible for 60% of world pollution, is refusing to endorse the Convention on the conservation of Nature, it sustains that irresponsible posture thanks to the deep and wild Congolese forest that minimizes pollution's impact on the whole world. But does the West responsible for most of world pollution, care about helping the Congolese protect and reproduce the forest? Each time a major virus threatening humanity's health appears, the Congo is pointed out as a possible origin of the virus. What is done to equip the Congo to avoid those possibilities? Nothing of some importance has taken place in the Congo since its creation by Berliner powers (1884-1885), without the involvement of external, generally Western, forces.

It is on this basis that the current situation of the Congo in the context of globalisation should be examined if we are going to be able to throw some light on this crucial and vital issue for the next generation of combatants for real freedom.

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