# Congolese History Hub No country has been more thoroughly written about by outsiders and less able to control what was written. Congolese history in this vault is approached through a single organising question: **who has been permitted to profit from what is in the ground, and what has been done to the people standing on top of it.** That question runs unbroken from 1885 to the copper contracts signed in Washington in December 2025. Four arcs, each threading the [[Conflict Minerals Hub]] cluster. --- ## 1. Extraction as a form of government (1885–1960) The [[Congo Free State]] was not a colony in the ordinary sense — it was the personal property of a European monarch who never set foot in it. [[Leopold II]] built a rubber-extraction machine whose enforcement mechanism was hostage-taking and severed hands, and whose profits are documented in the Belgian accounts. The reform campaign that ended it — [[E. D. Morel]], [[Roger Casement]], the Congo Reform Association — is arguably the first modern international human-rights movement. Annexation in 1908 changed the flag and kept the machine. The [[Belgian Congo]] ran on what the historiography calls the colonial trinity of state, missions and companies, with [[Union Minière du Haut-Katanga]] as the largest of the companies and, by the 1950s, one of the largest mining firms on earth. > [!warning] The mortality argument > Estimates of Congo Free State population loss range from roughly **1.2 million to 10 million**, depending on the pre-colonial baseline chosen, how much epidemic mortality is attributed to the regime's forced-movement policies, and whether one accepts the 1919 Belgian commission's finding that half the population had perished. Adam Hochschild's *King Leopold's Ghost* argues the high end; Jean Stengers, Jean-Paul Sanderson and David Van Reybrouck argue much lower. The first census was in 1924. A knowledge base that states any single figure flat will be attacked from one side or the other — carry the range and the method. ## 2. Independence, secession and Cold War capture (1960–1965) Eleven days after independence the province holding the copper seceded, financed by the company that mined it. The [[Katanga Secession]] and the [[Assassination of Patrice Lumumba]] are the two hinge events; [[Moïse Tshombe]] is the figure who connects Belgian capital to African sovereignty and dies in an Algerian cell for it. What the CIA planned, and what Belgian and Katangese hands actually did, are four separable propositions the Lumumba page sets out individually. ## 3. The kleptocratic state (1965–1997) [[Mobutu Sese Seko]] held power for 32 years on roughly $1.4 billion in American support, nationalised [[Union Minière du Haut-Katanga]] into [[Gécamines]], and presided over [[Zairianization]] — the moment the extractive economy was formally handed to a political class. The measure of what followed is not the disputed figure for his personal fortune but Gécamines' copper output, which fell **93% in six years**. ## 4. The war economy and after (1996–present) The [[First Congo War]] and [[Second Congo War]] killed on a scale no one can measure precisely and everyone argues about. What is not disputed is that resource capture became the sustaining logic once the initial security drivers had run their course, and that it has never stopped. [[M23]], [[FDLR]], the Wazalendo and the Congolese army itself all finance through minerals and roadblocks. The [[M23 Offensive of 2025]] put Goma and Bukavu back in rebel hands; the [[Washington Accords for Peace and Prosperity]] and [[US-DRC Strategic Partnership Agreement]] were signed the same December day, and by August 2026 neither peace nor withdrawal had arrived. --- ## Pages in this section [[Congo Free State]] · [[Belgian Congo]] · [[Zairianization]] ## Elsewhere in the vault **Events** — [[Katanga Secession]] · [[Assassination of Patrice Lumumba]] · [[Shinkolobwe and the Manhattan Project]] · [[First Congo War]] · [[Second Congo War]] · [[M23 Offensive of 2025]] **People** — [[Leopold II]] · [[E. D. Morel]] · [[Roger Casement]] · [[Edgar Sengier]] · [[Patrice Lumumba]] · [[Moïse Tshombe]] · [[Mobutu Sese Seko]] · [[Laurent-Désiré Kabila]] · [[Félix Tshisekedi]] **Institutions** — [[Union Minière du Haut-Katanga]] · [[Gécamines]] · [[Democratic Republic of the Congo]] ## See also [[Conflict Minerals Hub]] · [[Conflict Minerals Timeline]] · [[Conflict Minerals Ecosystem]]