Description:

Abstract: Since the carving and acquisition of the so-called the Congo Free State (CFS) by King Leopold II of Belgium in 1879 as his private fiefdom until today the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which won its “political independence” from Belgium on June 30, 1960, continues to be treated as a free trade zone. In turn, the Congolese people continue to be subjected to various sorts of injustices, including the illegal looting of their country’s immense resources by a network of
predators, that include their own security forces; systematic heinous sexual violence against women and children in eastern DRC; political oppression; violations of fundamental human rights; crimes against humanity; genocide and assassinations with impunity. Global Witness’ (2004) report, e.g., documented these crimes and made the following poignant observations:

THROUGHOUT the past century, irrespective of the governing system or political personalities in power, the human and natural resources of the Democratic Republic of the Congo have been systematically exploited for the economic benefit of a few at the expense of the vast majority of Congolese people. Political and military elites today repeat the patterns of the use of brutal force [established by King Leopold II of Belgium in the nineteenth century] to plunder precious resources. …The DRC’s turbulent trajectory of militarised control over natural resources must therefore be seen as a continuation of historical patterns of exploitation established under Leopold II and Belgian colonial rule. Just as the exploitation of resources by Belgium brought virtually no economic or social benefits to the Congolese people, contemporary resource extraction similarly yields little benefit to the majority of the Congolese people. On the contrary, militant competition over Congo’s natural wealth has been a major contributing factor to the crippling war that has killed over three million people in the past six years.

The situation described by Global Witness then has worsened today, as indicated by lawlessness and grinding poverty in a scandalously endowed land. In this paper I will provide a critical analysis of these predatory economic practices; why they persists; who are involved; and in what respects they are not only criminal, but also have detrimental consequences on the socio-economic development of DRC and the rest of Africa. I will attempt to argue and demonstrate that the failure of the DRC state is the direct result of excessive greed by past and present rulers and their collaborators who have disregarded the lives of the Congolese people with impunity for their own economic interests. This greed explains the inept action by the international community. I will conclude with a set of proposals for reclaiming the destiny of the DRC as an engine for a genuine African renaissance.

Bio: Eyamba Bokamba is professor of linguistics, African languages, and French. He has served Director of the Program in African Languages (PAL) in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) where he has taught and served in various administrative capacities since 1974. Bokamba earned a Ph.D. in theoretical linguistics (1976), with specialization in Bantu syntax, from Indiana University, Bloomington. His research and teaching interests include the Syntax of Bantu languages, Sociolinguistics, and Language Acquisition with particular reference to African language teaching and learning. His sociolinguistics research addresses various aspects of multilingualism, including language planning and policies in public domains in Africa, language spread and variation, code-switching, and varieties of African English. His syntactic work focuses on core Bantu grammar phenomena such as question formation, grammatical agreement, relative clause formation, topicalization, and recently, complementation. Applied areas of interest include forensic linguistics and conference interpretation involving primarily English, French and Lingála.

Bokamba’s studies in his areas of linguistics specialization have appeared as chapters in edited books, in several refereed journals, and in conference proceedings. His recent publications include three books: (1) African Language Program Development and Administration: A History and Guidelines for Future Programs (2002); (2) Tósolola na Lingála: A Multidimensional Approach to the Teaching and Learning of Lingála as a Foreign Language (2004), co-authored with his spouse, Molingo V. Bokamba; and (3) Selected Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference on African Linguistics: African Languages and Linguistics Today (2011) that he coedited with Ryan K. Shosted and Bezza T. Ayalew.