According to the un’s Human Development Index, the Democratic Republic of Congo is just about the world’s worst place to live.footnote^＊ Bad things in Niger, and some very marginal improvements in the drc itself, have recently moved it up from the bottom spot it occupied in 2011, but you get the picture. Not incidental to this dismal ranking was a seven- or eight-year international war in which, according to the Lancet, nearly four million people died.footnote¹ There are reservations to be entered about both of these results: the kind of complex comparisons included in indexes like the undp’s are capricious, with rankings changing according to the relative weight you assign to each of the proxy indicators—life expectancy, education, per capita gdp. The narrow range of the proxies included also conveys a rather stunted idea of what is, at times, the most delightful place. One can imagine that if the Human Development Index had given great pop music, a sense of irony, or antelope stew with sorrel and palm nuts their due, then Congo would have scored rather better. Likewise, it is hard to know what to make of mortality estimates in a region where there has been no census since 1984. Whatever the exact figure, only a small proportion of the deaths during the Second Congo War were caused by direct violence: the majority succumbed to collapses in food production, health systems and wider infrastructure.

While exacerbated by war, these deteriorations can themselves be traced much further back in time, across three decades of economic regression, in which Congolese gdp shrunk to less than a fifth of its former peak and industrial capitalism, however underdeveloped, ceased to be the dominant mode of production.footnote² This essay will examine the origins of the drc’s current malaise and, in the process, take issue with some of the arguments put forward in the burgeoning literature on the country. For though it gets few column inches in Western newspapers, the catastrophic mess that Congo represents has generated an impressive quantity and variety of serious scholarship. The drc is not only the largest country in Sub-Saharan Africa, covering nearly a million square miles, and, at an estimated 67 million, its third most populous (the capital Kinshasa is now a mega-city, its breeze-block sprawl encompassing somewhere between 7 and 9 million souls).footnote³ It is also, symbolically and geographically, the heart of the continent. As the biggest ‘failed state’ in the world, nowhere offers a broader canvas for rumination about the wealth of nations, the failings of the inter-state system or the condition of Africa itself.

The central question at stake here may be posed like this: why have the processes of accumulation failed to produce a consolidation of capital, an economically powerful ruling class and sustained patterns of national investment? The standard explanations—low demographic pressure, reliance on primary commodities, deterioration in the terms of trade, structural adjustment, a violent history, corruption—cannot in themselves explain why the post-independence trajectory of Central Africa diverges so far from that of other late-developing regions. This article will also criticize the two currently most popular, though contrasting, diagnoses: first, that too many restrictions on markets and free enterprise stifle growth; and second, that African forms of clientelism, or ‘neo-patrimonialism’, oblige the ruling class to dissipate resources that would otherwise give rise to capitalist forms of accumulation. These arguments go hand-in-hand with a marked shift in African studies, away from explanations that favour ‘dependency’ and towards those that emphasize ‘agency’. Africa’s problems are, so this story goes, made at home—foreigners are merely used by regional actors as part of indigenous political projects. On this reading, poverty, loan-dependence and violence are political strategies chosen by African elites.footnote⁴ A corollary of the ‘local agency’ approach is the rejection of theories that identify Western capitalism or imperialism as part of the explanation for Congo’s plight. Arguing in part against Congolese conspiracy theories that depict ‘the whites’ as committed to a project of central African balkanization, a majority of Western scholars now tend to argue that the drc’s problems do not have a ‘singular logic’ and interpretations should therefore resist attempts at ‘simplification’.footnote⁵ According to this version of events, the ‘Congo problem’ results from too little Western interest: conflict minerals, or the deals signed by dodgy businessmen, are only the fault of core capitalist countries in a very limited sense—as disinterested sins of omission, committed by rich countries too lazy to engage with the Congo’s complexities and too apathetic to legislate.

This essay goes against these trends. Denying the ‘agency’ of powerful outsiders is even more implausible than denying it to powerful Africans, and urban myths should not be used to discredit all theories of political interference. To be sure, such elites don’t always agree, and don’t always get their way; the social outcomes that result are, as always, not quite what anyone intended. Nevertheless, analysis needs to be clear about which groups have greater leverage. And while there is much to be said for ‘complexity’, there are serious problems with the ways in which this trope is used to explain the Congo’s trajectory since the end of the Cold War while excluding, as causal factors, the (complex!) dynamics of the drc’s integration into international capital circuits and the international state system that defends them. What follows, then, hopes to combine a critique of these prevailing explanations with a disciplined investigation into the drc’s political and economic path since independence. It will pay particular attention to the processes by which integration into the world economy has helped to undermine local capital formation while, overseen by a weak state, the wealth of the country has leaked away abroad. First, however, it will briefly consider the impact of pre-colonial conditions of instability and coercion, and the developmental legacies of the late colonial state.

An influential account of central Africa’s history focuses on the problems that land abundance and low population pose for the consolidation of political power. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Congo basin, much like Western Europe, underwent an increase in both economic activity and war. But while for some European states internal and external conflicts were a laboratory for new and more productive forms of debt financing, African leaders tended to raise the capital needed to finance authority by selling the means of production, both human and ecological. Historians have located the origins of this strategy in Africa’s relative labour shortage: unable to control subordinates who could easily disappear into the vast tracts of unoccupied land when things got tough, rulers saw forms of ‘outsourced exploitation’, notably the transatlantic slave trade, as an attractive alternative.footnote⁶ There is substantial empirical evidence in favour of such a hypothesis: labour was clearly the pre-eminent factor of production in these low-tech, agrarian societies; a significant part of a population that was relatively sparse to begin with, and already severely affected by the epidemics and low fertility caused by European encroachment, was sold on to obtain imported currency objects—bolts of cloth, muskets, copper wire, cowries, etc. The other trade goods that capitalism demanded of African modes of production, like ivory or rubber, were reliant on the harvesting of natural systems until their collapse.footnote⁷

In this way central African social formations do appear to have become locked into a dynamic, reinforced by European merchants, where individual prosperity—conceived of as rights in people and theatrical dispersals of wealth over retinue—became dependent on aggregate impoverishment, by exporting, or pushing beyond breaking point, the means of production. These factors seem to have produced an instability that has permeated wider aspects of social life. Thus the frantic fluidity, inventiveness and creativity of Congolese cultural forms, social structures and political formations—but also their incessant tendency towards fragmentation and division—reflect desperate attempts by people to control or remain attached to networks of patronage; patronage that is always leaking out of the region, networks that are themselves constantly in the process of being violently disrupted. But while demographic explanations provide important parameters, low populations on their own explain little. Indeed, densely populated Rwanda and Burundi suggest the opposite conclusion. Since independence, these ‘false twins’ have been open sores of violence and Malthusian poverty, with genocides and mass migrations repeatedly destabilizing their neighbours—above all the Congo itself—though neither has been subject to the features generally invoked as the ‘deep’ causes beneath central Africa’s current woes: spared the worst incursions of the European or Arab slave trades, both have fertile soil and a relatively old state tradition.footnote⁸ The relationship between earlier trajectories and the present problems of the drc or the wider region are not straightforward. The violence of economic extraction and the low populations in the nineteenth-century Congo basin are part of the story, but their impact cannot simply be read off in the politico-economic situation of today.

Violent extraction reached its apogee under the Belgians, following the establishment of King Leopold ii’s Congo Free State in 1885, gifted by the European powers assembled at the Congress of Berlin. Seeking to generate a fast profit, the ‘Free State’ began to exploit commodities that required little investment. Principal among these was rubber, for which industrial demand had soared after the invention of ‘vulcanization’, a process that rendered it heat-resistant. It was initially harvested from the wild, extracted as sap from a variety of tropical plants, trees and creepers found in remote, rainforest regions. Most of those involved in the harvesting of wild rubber—the inhabitants of the tropical forests of the Congo and Amazon basins—were not fully integrated into the capitalist system and could only be persuaded to meet the rapidly growing demand through a series of ever more violent impositions: Leopold’s ‘Free State’ was a paradigmatic Raubwirtschaft (predatory economy). Adding economic urgency to this coercive dynamic was the fact that rubber-tree plantations had been established in Malaya and elsewhere and it was apparent that the high price of wild rubber was not going to last forever.