LEOPOLD, King of the Belgians, actually bought the Congo as his personal
property in 1885. The ensuing 123 years haven’t been pretty.

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness said it all: “The horror, the horror!” It was run pretty much as a slave camp, but eventually, the Belgians gave it the best road and primary school education systems in Africa.

Next came the drum roll of independence throughout Africa in 1960.

There were eight college grads in the Belgian Congo but Brussels with abandon turned the land, as big as western Europe, over to a small elite there that promised to sustain European mineral rights in rich Katanga province. The Belgians saw to the election a president of a locally based tribal leader named Kasavubu.

But the tide of independence swept to power—as prime minister—the legendary Patrice Lumumba, hitherto a Coca-Cola delivery truck driver.

At one point, Kasavubu deposed Lumumba, whereby Lumumba deposed Kasavubu.

When the Union Miniere, the Belgian- French company that controlled the diamond and other mines of Katanga, saw their interests threatened, and with the possible complicity of the United Nations and the irrefutable collaboration of the CIA, it put him to death early in 1961.

After a couple years of see-sawing between contenders, the UN intervened and tried to stabilise the massive state.

A corporal named Désiré Mobutu put guns at a number of heads—in - cluding my late colleague Robert We s t ’s, who was ordered to run the whole economy — and took over the reins of power.

He renamed the country “Zaire”, which stuck until he died 11 years ago. Of course he went up the army ranks rather quickly thereafter, though he didn’t declare himself a field marshal.

Now he took it over as his personal property, until he died of cancer. Plus ca change, plus ca la meme chose.

Even his stolen billions were mostly squandered by the time of his death.

He’d maintained power by letting the roads go to hell so that his oft-rotated governors couldn’t communicate one with another, let alone anyone else.

Nothing had really changed except the continual degradation of the huge territor y.

I remember how a student of mine in Boston from Goma, on its east, centre of the current fighting, tried desperately to get a simple envelope of penicillin to his dying mother back home. Of course, there was a war then too, and he failed and she died.

In 1994, there was a genocide in next-door (also former Belgian) Rwanda, where the “smaller” and majority Hutu killed off almost a million of the taller Tutsi in a few months, in proportion to population, a genocide worse than Hitler’s “f inal solution”.

When the Tutsis came back to power, they also wanted to ensure that it could never happen again. They thus maintained an unofficial army right over the Congolese border.

As the urbane and articulate Rwandan president Paul Kagame put it at a Washington dinner five years ago, “why should we give up our only guarantee that ‘it’ will never happen again!” It was the same argument leading to the creation of Israel.

Things are a bit more complicated.

Gold and diamonds were not just the object of European rapacity. Eight African countries became embroiled in what became known as the Great War of Africa, the largest conflict in the continent’s history — and the wo r l d ’s deadliest since World War 2.

It is five-and-a-half million victims and counting.

A charismatic Congolese general named Laurent Nkunda in 1998 began a rout of the Congolese army, and to this day maintains a vast army — the “secur ity” for Rwanda’s still frightened minority (but governing) Tutsis. Not surprisingly, Nkunda is a Tutsi himself. Borders are rather porous in Africa.

With the death of Mobutu after 35 years of misrule, good governance wa s n ’t in the Congolese genes any more, if it ever had been. Coups and counter-coups were the order of the day. The UN tried anew, sending its largest force in the world today, 17,000 troops, to try to restore order.

Monuc, though, is spread so thin it can’t even take defensive action, let alone offensive.

Does it sound confusing? Well, try going around in a country with no roads. It doesn’t help to try to communicate by plane. Some private companies set up shop to enhance efficiency but they cannibalised the existing air force for spare parts.

In 1962, the German ambassador found it so bewildering he took to swimming in the Congo River in the middle of the capital, Léopoldville (renamed Kinshasa by Mobutu).

A crocodile had him for lunch.

Former British and French colonies may resent their masters.

But at least London and Paris established sound bureaucratic and educational systems and tried to facilitate politics of a sort. And in Asia, there were sound traditional foundations on which to build. Congo got none of that.

There won’t be peace in Congo anytime soon. You don’t pull a wellgoverned multi-ethnic nation out of thin air.

It doesn’t make things easier that Congo is surrounded by eight other countries, with ethnic groups all around the border that have larger numbers in the neighbouring states.

That makes for nibbling — by the neighbours — which is what the current war is all about, when it isn’t about uranium and diamonds, which all the contenders deal in.

This essay isn’t going to help you sort out the current mess. At least it tells you that the current crisis, the War for Africa, which is centred in Congo, comes by its roots legitimately.

“Then I saw the Congo, creeping through the black, boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom.” (Vachel Lindsay, 1917.)