10 - The Troubles

Summary

THE COLONIAL CAMPAIGN against the ivory traders was merely the opening move in King Leopold II's attempt to appropriate the resources of the middle Zaire for his own purposes. Leopold was engaged in a competition for wealth and power on an international scale, and the resources of the Congo were the key to his strategy. Soon after Leopold's Congo Independent State gained international recognition in 1885, it proclaimed its ownership of all land not directly occupied by Africans. Four years later it declared an outright monopoly on all products of the forest between Bolobo and the mouth of the Aruwimi, nearly 1200 kilometers up the Zaire. With ownership of the resources came the legal authority to forcibly expropriate them from the inhabitants as “taxes in kind.”

The abuses resulting from the forced collection of “taxes in kind” led the Belgian government to take over the Congo from King Leopold II in 1908. One of the first reform measures of the new colonial administration was the abolition of the tax in kind, which was replaced in 1910 by a tax paid in Congolese francs. The money tax was adopted not only to increase revenues, but also because it would force the Africans to enter the cash nexus by working for Europeans or producing cash crops. Governor Fuchs stated the proposition in euphemistic terms:

The goal of the native tax is not only fiscal: it is also and above all designed to end their apathy, to push them to work and to improve, by working, their material and moral situation.