Chapter 19: The Ruling Elite: Out of the Congo

 

Chapter 19: The Ruling Elite: Out of the Congo

 

Out of the Congo

On April 12, 1799, Deacon Phineas Pratt, a goldsmith and clockmaker, residing in the Potapoug Quarter,

in Connecticut, patented a hand-powered machine that facilitated the mass production of ivory items such as ivory combs, small boxes and other items, which started the commercialization of ivory and the world trade in that commodity. Previously only the wealthy could afford the handcrafted ivory pieces. Now, the middle-class could also own handcrafted ivory pieces resulting in an accelerated consumption of ivory. Ivoryton and Deep River, Connecticut became home to numerous businesses and ivory cutting shops.[697] At least 75% of the thousands of tons of ivory that came out of Zanzibar ended up in Connecticut, America’s ivorymanufacturingcenterforalmostacentury.[698] I“inherited”somesmallivorypiecesanduntilrecently did not consider the cost, both human and animal, behind the family artifacts.

Deep River, home to early slavers and abolitionists, was also home to numerous ivory bleach houses, constructed to transform elephant tusks into piano keys, billiard balls and popular Victorian ornaments. Human slavery ended in the U.S. following Lincoln’s War. To be more accurate, debt slavery replaced slavery after the war. However, the traders, who still used hundreds of slaves elsewhere, were not about to relinquish a productive labor system in Africa. Slaves performed all of the backbreaking work involved in the lucrative flow of ivory. Each year, tens of thousands of Americans purchased pianos with beautiful ivory keys, cool and smooth to the touch. Manufacturers made billiard balls exclusively from the tusks of female elephants due to their unique composition, which produced a well-balanced ball. Elephants live in close matriarchal family groups of related females. Sadly, the traders valued the tusks of the older female elephants that, in addition to their tusks, also have the inherent experience and wisdom to know exactly how and where to find food and water for the benefit of the entire herd. Therefore, slaughtering older elephants threatens the stability and the lives of the entire herd, especially the vulnerable young.[699]

King Leopold II, Belgium’s king became intrigued with the profitable possibilities of the

Congo after he heard about Henry Morton Stanley’s expedition across central Africa, a hot humid climate, local resistance, the rainforest, swamps, and the accompanying diseases like malaria and sleeping sickness. The Congo was not an inviting environment for Europeans. Yet, Leopold II, seeking opportunities for foreign colonization and for profitable resource seizure, was interested in the largely unexplored and unclaimed Congo. Leopold, a ruthless tyrant, had previously been unable to secure any exploitable territory in Asia and therefore hoped to expand his interests into Africa. He was anxious to determine the quantity and value of the resources he could exploit in Africa. In 1876, he initiated secret explorations under the auspices of the International Association for the Exploration and Civilization of Africa, purportedly a scientific and humanitarian organization. Between 1878 and 1884, Leopold worked through his Comité d’Etudes du Haut Congo, which developed into the International Association of the Congo. He paid Stanley to visit the Congo basin to establish links and make treaties with prominent chiefs. Stanley returned to Belgium in 1884 with over 400 treaties ceding the rights of sovereignty for most of the Congo basin to Leopold’s allegedly humanitarian International Association.[700]

Leopold’s duplicitous strategy enabled him to gain recognition and the European endorsement for the creation of the Congo Free State, about 900,000 square miles, at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885. Leopold, with his treaties, totally controlled the Congo Free State. The charter embodied four principles, freedom of trade and navigation by all (including Africans); neutrality in the event of war; the abolition of the slave trade; and a general improvement in the “moral and material conditions of the indigenous population’s.” Leopold thoroughly and deliberately disregarded these principles.[701]

Leopold opened the fertile Congo to European entrepreneurs who purchased exploitation rights for rubber, ivory and other resources. Leopold, for granting monopoly rights, got 50% of the profits. In some areas, Leopold demanded annual production and labor quotas from the indigenous population. White managers, like Emile Francqui, brutalized the Congolese tribes within an area of almost 1,000,000 square

miles. Leopold perpetuated a genocidal plunder of the Congo for over two decades. Through his agents, he brutalized its people and ultimately decimated the population by as many as 10,000,000 people, while deceptively portraying himself as a generous humanitarian, an example his associates adopted for use in their own plunder operations.

Without a census of the area, it is impossible to determine the population loss in the Congo during that period. In 1904, British diplomat Roger Casement determined that Leopold’s thugs slaughtered at least 3,000,000 people during his twenty- year reign. Investigative reporter and author Peter Forbath thought the total was more like 5,000,000 deaths. Adam Hochschild, American author and journalist, estimated at least 10,000,000.[702]

Ivory hunting flourished in the poorly governed areas of Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. King Leopold systematically stripped the resources from the Congo basin. Beginning in the 1890s, he was intent on seizing every bit of ivory available. Adam Hochschild wrote, “Congo state officials and their African auxiliaries swept through the country on ivory raids, shooting elephants, buying tusks from villagers for a pittance, or simply confiscating them. The indigenous people of the Congo have been hunting elephants for centuries, but now they are forbidden to sell or deliver ivory to anyone other than an agent of Leopold.”[703]

American consuls, apparently without any consideration for the environment and the matriarchal elephant herds, helped to secure the lucrative, unregulated ivory trade that threatened to destroy the majority of the great majestic animals in the Sub-Saharan that people brutally sacrificed just to supply the ivory market. Walter Dalrymple Maitland Bell, considered a highly successful elephant hunter (predator), recklessly slaughtered more than 1,000 elephants before he retired in the 1930s. He purchased a large estate and an eighty-foot yacht with the money he made slaughtering elephants. After an individual stalked and shot an elephant, it took long tedious hours for seized African slaves, using hand axes to desecrate the animal and chop out the two tusks. Then, slaves carried the heavy tusks to Zanzibar’s infamous ivory market.[704]

The most lustrous, softest, easiest-to-carve ivory is from the two front incisors of the African elephant, once plentiful in eastern and central Africa. One elephant tusk typically weighs as much as eighty pounds or more. Transporting the tusks from the killing grounds to the coastal trading areas presented a huge challenge because a rail system was nonexistent so the traders relied on slave labor. Because of the climate, the tsetse fly was pervasive in the area. The fly transmits a deadly parasitic disease, called trypanosomiasis, which eliminated the use of highly susceptible pack animals to transport the tusks. Therefore, the traders used people in the place of pack animals. David Shayt, a Smithsonian curator, estimated that between 1884 and 1911, the slaves transported approximately 10,000,000 pounds of ivory to the African coast, which traders ultimately shipped into America’s ports. The New York market price ranged from $1.80 to $4.00 per pound, which amounted to a minimum of $18 million, which totals about $310 million in today’s currency.[705]

The ivory trade, merely to satisfy men’s vanity destroyed the lives of Africans and lasted for approximately eighty years. Slavers and traders exploited the African tribal people who suffered tremendously as slavers seized the strongest members of African families and then torched their villages as they carried away their captives, enslaved and shackled together. They seized the strongest Africans in the villages, usually the subsistence farmers, while those who remained behind frequently faced starvation. The traders forced their captives to carry heavy tusks upon their backs for as many as 1,000 miles, from the continent’s interior all the way to the coast. Many slaves perished en route. The English missionary, Alfred J. Swann who lived by Lake Tanganyika, Africa’s great lake, the second most voluminous freshwater lake in the world, reported what he saw in the ivory caravans in Africa in the 1880s, “... Feet and shoulders were a mass of open sores, made more painful by the swarms of flies,

which followed the march and lived on the flowing blood. They presented a moving picture of utter misery...they were covered with the scars of the chikote, a leather whip.”[706] Swann later wrote the book, Fighting the Slave Hunters in Central Africa: A Record of Twenty-Six Years of Travel and Adventure Round the Great Lakes, published in 1910.

Dr. David Livingstone came upon an ivory caravan in southeastern Africa in 1858, and reported, “...A long line of manacled men, women and children, came wending their way round the hill and into the valley, on the side of which the village stood. The black drivers, armed with muskets and bedecked with various articles of finery, marched jauntily in the front, middle, and rear of the line; some of them blowing exultant notes out of long horns.” The guards fled when they saw Livingstone’s group who began cutting the women and children free. It was harder with the men who had their necks riveted by an iron rod across their throats.[707]

The traders had chained together between forty and fifty slaves in a line to make the lengthy trip from the interior with the burdensome ivory. Those who survived the trip were little more than emaciated skeletons.[708] Joseph Conrad, in Heart of Darkness, described the ivory porters that he witnessed in King Leopold’s État Indépendent du Congo. He wrote, “Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced with the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment and despair...They were dying very slowly – it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now – nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom.”[709]

Africa may have been the only place ivory tusks ever served utilitarian purposes. The residents used the tusks for animal stockades, doorposts and roof beams, and carved them into the tools of daily life, such as mortars and pestles. Stanley also saw tusks surrounding the gravesites of chieftains. The people used the elephant for food and some tribal cultures thought the elephant had a special spiritual dimension that they represented in their art. The African relied on the elephant for reasons other than for decorative purposes. People in the West interpreted the African’s use of the elephant as hard evidence of their ignorance. Africans, like other indigenous peoples, with respect for natural resources, did not carelessly decimate the elephant as the profit-driven American traders did.

In the 1870s, people discovered diamonds in South Africa, a country where the black people were economically independent of the white settlers. They farmed and raised herds of cattle and even supplied the miners with meat. Then, miners associated with Kimberley discovered a large deposit of diamonds in the dry plateau east of the Orange River. The Africans worked in the mines just to obtain the money to buy guns and other items. When they had earned sufficient money, then they quit and returned to their farms. In July 1876, the mine owners attempted to cut wages by 50% and 4,000 black workers left the mines and returned to their farms. Since the Africans used the bartering system, money was not essential to their existence. Therefore, De Beers had no control over the black workers.[710]

The government, in collaboration with De Beers, imposed a tax on the Africans that was only payable in cash. This forced Africans to leave their farms to work in the mines in order to pay the tax.[711] Corporations used this tactic in other countries, like America, following what people refer to as the Civil War, where corporate interests attempted to further strip people of their independence and transform them into debt slaves. Cecil Rhodes, financed by the Rothschilds, developed the diamond and gold monopoly in South Africa under the name of De Beers Mining Company, founded in 1880 and it successor, De Beers Consolidated Mines, founded in l888.

Both the white and black workers saw nothing wrong with retaining and selling some of the diamonds that they found. Mine owners naturally opposed “their” stones going into an “illegal” distribution system they did not establish. Consequently, in 1883, per government sanction, they began physically searching their

employees on a daily basis. The company forced the black workers, but not the white workers, to wear “mealie flour sacks” which had no pockets. In 1884, the white workers refused to undergo the daily searches and went on strike. Black workers, sympathizing with the whites, also went on strike. The company forcibly ended the strike and in the process killed six white workers. Afterwards, the whites did not have to endure the searches. This justifiably caused resentment among the black workers who were still subject to the dehumanizing daily searches.[712]

In 1882, Cecil Rhodes proposed that De Beers should house all the black workers, but not white, in barracks when they were not working. In July 1886, according to Janine Roberts, De Beers confined 1,500 of their black workers into barracks. By 1889, they had all 10,000 black workers confined in what resembled prisons, a place where their families could not join them. Thereafter, to save money and maximize their labor force, De Beers used convicts as part of its labor force. Between 1884 and 1932, De Beers, with the obvious cooperation of the state, compelled thousands of convicts to work in their mines and paid minimum wages to the state. Many of those convicts were people who had traveled to the mines seeking employment but they had failed to secure a pass from the government to travel. In 1889, De Beers proclaimed, “No native shall work or be allowed to work in any mine, whether in open or underground mining, excepting under the responsible charge of some particular white man as his master or ‘baas.’” De Beers, using a divide-and-create-animosity tactic, had institutionalized Apartheid.[713]

In 1886, prospectors discovered gold on the Witwatersrand. In 1902, Sir Ernest Oppenheimer (1880- 1957), from Germany, moved to South Africa to join his brothers on a diamond farm. He began as a diamond sorter and ultimately grew to own and operate the world’s biggest and most influential diamond mining, along with a distribution company. Oppenheimer controlled De Beers and in 1917, founded the Anglo American Corporation of South Africa to exploit the gold deposits east of Johannesburg.[714] In 1927, Oppenheimer wrested control of Cecil Rhodes’ De Beers business. He consolidated the company’s global monopoly over the world’s diamond industry and controlled this empire until his retirement.

Like De Beers in the Congo, Oppenheimer, under the Consolidated Diamond Mines (CDM) operated in a very similar manner in South West Africa (currently Namibia). He imported cheap labor from Botswana. Janine Roberts, according to her research, states that by 1923, “over half the labor force of 5,000 consisted of outside recruits from northern Botswana who suffered a high mortality rate...with scurvy or tuberculosis.” Others perished from “dehydration and exhaustion” because Oppenheimer supervisors compelled them to search the desert sands for diamonds.[715]

Oppenheimer established a company town, Oranjemund that provided living quarters for all contracted workers – married white workers and “single sex hostels” for black workers who could not bring their families to the area. Oppenheimer owned all the facilities in the town – the retail stores, the theaters, and the clubs – from all of which they barred the black workers. They even segregated the post office and black workers had to go to the back of the supermarket to have someone wait on them. White workers received 767 Rand and black workers received 61 Rand a month for the same work. In 1972, workers struck in mass against the conditions at the mine, their prison-like housing, severe food shortages, and the contract system that had changed their homeland into “a slave labor market.” The Ovamba compounds, the living quarters, had only one entrance, sharp shards of glass embedded in the top of the walls surrounding the compound, and concrete beds that crippled the residents.[716]

The miners suffered from poor or insufficient food, low salaries, and an absence of privacy in the hostels that housed ten men in a prison-like chamber where their “guards” controlled the electric lighting so they could not stay up at night. The workers had no dining halls and, because of the lavatory conditions, people had to defecate in public. Oppenheimer imposed these conditions in both his diamond and gold mines. While Ernest Oppenheimer claims to have converted to Christianity, there is insufficient evidence, given

the conditions he initially instituted, to sustain such a claim. In March 1976, according to an internal memo, workers complained, “We live like animals in the compounds without our wives...The life we lead here is worse than slavery or the life of a beast of burden.”[717]

In 1947, diamond dealers and their supporters created the World Federation of Diamond Bourses (an exchange, especially one in a European city) in order to provide common policies for trading rough and polished diamonds and precious stones among its twenty-nine members. Their headquarters are in Antwerp. The World Federation of Diamond Bourses (WFDB) is composed of independent diamond bourses in major cutting centers such as Tel Aviv, Antwerp, Johannesburg and other cities across the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Some of the largest deposits of gold, diamond, copper and platinum are in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire, home to approximately forty-four million people. Despite the tremendous natural wealth of the country, the average annual income is usually less than $250. There is rampant corruption and administrative mismanagement of the nation’s resources. Because of the poverty, the typical life expectancy is less than fifty years. Foreign powers and corporations continue to exploit the resources, amass huge fortunes, while the people are forced to labor for those powers. Mobutu Sese Seko (1930- 1997), the former president, from 1965 to 1997, also accumulated a massive fortune, about $5 billion, by developing favorable relationships with the foreign corporations and acquiescing to their demands while they exploited the mineral and human resources. He appreciated the philosophy of Niccolo Machiavelli.

The country is largely undeveloped, with a critical lack of infrastructure, and a few opportunistic foreigners extract the minerals in order to acquire immediate personal wealth. Because they have no interest in the country, they do not invest in the modernization of the nation, as it would be incompatible with their interests. These people sell the gold or diamonds, usually for Federal Reserve notes, the international currency.[718]

In 1958, Patrice Lumumba (1925-1961) helped found the broad-based Mouvement National Congolais (MNC), which embraced Pan-Africanist beliefs. In October 1959, Belgian officials arrested Lumumba for purportedly provoking an anti-colonial riot in Stanleyville, the capital and center of the secessionist independent state of the Republic of Congo. During that riot, the police killed thirty people. The MNC, despite Lumumba’s incarceration for six months, won a majority of the votes in the elections in December 1959. Belgian officials scheduled a conference in Brussels to discuss the future of the Congo. Delegates who were to attend the conference from the Congo expressed outrage over Lumumba’s incarceration and demanded his immediate release. They released him and he attended the conference, January 18-27, 1960. Conference attendees decided to grant Congolese independence and the country could hold national elections from May 11-25, 1960 with their official independence beginning on June 30, 1960. The Congolese people elected 34-year-old Lumumba, announced on June 23, 1960, as the Prime Minister and Joseph Kasa-Vubu as the president of the Republic of the Congo. Lumumba and the MNC could now form a government.

The people of the Congo celebrated Independence Day on June 30 in a ceremony attended by many dignitaries including King Baudouin, of Belgium (1951-1993) and the foreign press. Patrice Lumumba, the new Prime Minister, gave an independence speech even though officials excluded him from the event program. King Baudouin, in his speech praised the progress the country had made under colonialism. He referred to the “genius” of his great-granduncle Leopold II, while briefly mentioning the atrocities they implemented during the Congo Free State. The King said, “Don’t compromise the future with hasty reforms, and don’t replace the structures that Belgium hands over to you until you are sure you can do better.” Lumumba responded by telling the audience that the people had fought hard for the Congo’s independence. Belgium did not magnanimously grant it but resisted it.

Lumumba said, “For this independence of the Congo, even as it is celebrated today with Belgium, a friendly country with whom we deal as equal to equal, no Congolese worthy of the name will ever be able to forget that it was by fighting that it has been won, a day-to-day fight, an ardent and idealistic fight, a fight in which we were spared neither privation nor suffering, and for which we gave our strength and our blood. We are proud of this struggle, of tears, of fire, and of blood, to the depths of our being, for it was a noble and just struggle, and indispensable to put an end to the humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force.”[719]

According to Dr. D’Lynn Waldron, a foreign correspondent covering Patrice Lumumba, the people of the Congo loved Lumumba. Waldron also states, “Belgium and the banking and mining interests were arranging for the coming Independence to disintegrate into chaos so they could take back Katanga with its gold, uranium and copper, and the Kasai with its industrial diamonds, while dumping the unprofitable remainder of the Congo.” His opponents, corporate interests supported by big government, claimed that Lumumba was a Communist in order to vilify him and justify their actions.[720] Just ten weeks later, opponents, probably supported and trained by the CIA, deposed the Lumumba government during a coup that people refer to as the Congo Crisis. Subsequently, his enemies imprisoned him and the CIA in collaboration with Belgium murdered him.[721]

Currently, 1,200 Congolese die each day because of war and its consequences, disease and malnutrition. By 1996, even before war overwhelmed the Congo, the country was one of the world’s biggest producers of cobalt, copper, coltan and industrial diamonds. However, more than 75% of the population lives on less than a dollar a day. A quarter of the population, 15,000,000 people, must subsist on one meager meal per day. Deprivation and poverty should not exist in a resource-rich country. Those elite and their self- serving local agents and enforcers who actually control the county’s resources have created another third- world country.

THE FOUNDERS, ECONOMICS AND WARFARE Doctrine of Discovery

On April 12, 1799, Deacon Phineas Pratt, a goldsmith and clockmaker, residing in the Potapoug Quarter,

in Connecticut, patented a hand-powered machine that facilitated the mass production of ivory items such as ivory combs, small boxes and other items, which started the commercialization of ivory and the world trade in that commodity. Previously only the wealthy could afford the handcrafted ivory pieces. Now, the middle-class could also own handcrafted ivory pieces resulting in an accelerated consumption of ivory. Ivoryton and Deep River, Connecticut became home to numerous businesses and ivory cutting shops.[697] At least 75% of the thousands of tons of ivory that came out of Zanzibar ended up in Connecticut, America’s ivorymanufacturingcenterforalmostacentury.[698] I“inherited”somesmallivorypiecesanduntilrecently did not consider the cost, both human and animal, behind the family artifacts.

Deep River, home to early slavers and abolitionists, was also home to numerous ivory bleach houses, constructed to transform elephant tusks into piano keys, billiard balls and popular Victorian ornaments. Human slavery ended in the U.S. following Lincoln’s War. To be more accurate, debt slavery replaced slavery after the war. However, the traders, who still used hundreds of slaves elsewhere, were not about to relinquish a productive labor system in Africa. Slaves performed all of the backbreaking work involved in the lucrative flow of ivory. Each year, tens of thousands of Americans purchased pianos with beautiful ivory keys, cool and smooth to the touch. Manufacturers made billiard balls exclusively from the tusks of female elephants due to their unique composition, which produced a well-balanced ball. Elephants live in close matriarchal family groups of related females. Sadly, the traders valued the tusks of the older female elephants that, in addition to their tusks, also have the inherent experience and wisdom to know exactly how and where to find food and water for the benefit of the entire herd. Therefore, slaughtering older elephants threatens the stability and the lives of the entire herd, especially the vulnerable young.[699]

King Leopold II, Belgium’s king became intrigued with the profitable possibilities of the Congo after he heard about Henry Morton Stanley’s expedition across central Africa, a hot humid climate, local resistance, the rainforest, swamps, and the accompanying diseases like malaria and sleeping sickness. The Congo was not an inviting environment for Europeans. Yet, Leopold II, seeking opportunities for foreign colonization and for profitable resource seizure, was interested in the largely unexplored and unclaimed Congo. Leopold, a ruthless tyrant, had previously been unable to secure any exploitable territory in Asia and therefore hoped to expand his interests into Africa. He was anxious to determine the quantity and value of the resources he could exploit in Africa. In 1876, he initiated secret explorations under the auspices of the International Association for the Exploration and Civilization of Africa, purportedly a scientific and humanitarian organization. Between 1878 and 1884, Leopold worked through his Comité d’Etudes du Haut Congo, which developed into the International Association of the Congo. He paid Stanley to visit the Congo basin to establish links and make treaties with prominent chiefs. Stanley returned to Belgium in 1884 with over 400 treaties ceding the rights of sovereignty for most of the Congo basin to Leopold’s allegedly humanitarian International Association.[700]

Leopold’s duplicitous strategy enabled him to gain recognition and the European endorsement for the creation of the Congo Free State, about 900,000 square miles, at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885. Leopold, with his treaties, totally controlled the Congo Free State. The charter embodied four principles, freedom of trade and navigation by all (including Africans); neutrality in the event of war; the abolition of the slave trade; and a general improvement in the “moral and material conditions of the indigenous population’s.” Leopold thoroughly and deliberately disregarded these principles.[701]

Leopold opened the fertile Congo to European entrepreneurs who purchased exploitation rights for rubber, ivory and other resources. Leopold, for granting monopoly rights, got 50% of the profits. In some areas, Leopold demanded annual production and labor quotas from the indigenous population. White managers, like Emile Francqui, brutalized the Congolese tribes within an area of almost 1,000,000 square

miles. Leopold perpetuated a genocidal plunder of the Congo for over two decades. Through his agents, he brutalized its people and ultimately decimated the population by as many as 10,000,000 people, while deceptively portraying himself as a generous humanitarian, an example his associates adopted for use in their own plunder operations.

Without a census of the area, it is impossible to determine the population loss in the Congo during that period. In 1904, British diplomat Roger Casement determined that Leopold’s thugs slaughtered at least 3,000,000 people during his twenty- year reign. Investigative reporter and author Peter Forbath thought the total was more like 5,000,000 deaths. Adam Hochschild, American author and journalist, estimated at least 10,000,000.[702]

Ivory hunting flourished in the poorly governed areas of Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. King Leopold systematically stripped the resources from the Congo basin. Beginning in the 1890s, he was intent on seizing every bit of ivory available. Adam Hochschild wrote, “Congo state officials and their African auxiliaries swept through the country on ivory raids, shooting elephants, buying tusks from villagers for a pittance, or simply confiscating them. The indigenous people of the Congo have been hunting elephants for centuries, but now they are forbidden to sell or deliver ivory to anyone other than an agent of Leopold.”[703]

American consuls, apparently without any consideration for the environment and the matriarchal elephant herds, helped to secure the lucrative, unregulated ivory trade that threatened to destroy the majority of the great majestic animals in the Sub-Saharan that people brutally sacrificed just to supply the ivory market. Walter Dalrymple Maitland Bell, considered a highly successful elephant hunter (predator), recklessly slaughtered more than 1,000 elephants before he retired in the 1930s. He purchased a large estate and an eighty-foot yacht with the money he made slaughtering elephants. After an individual stalked and shot an elephant, it took long tedious hours for seized African slaves, using hand axes to desecrate the animal and chop out the two tusks. Then, slaves carried the heavy tusks to Zanzibar’s infamous ivory market.[704]

The most lustrous, softest, easiest-to-carve ivory is from the two front incisors of the African elephant, once plentiful in eastern and central Africa. One elephant tusk typically weighs as much as eighty pounds or more. Transporting the tusks from the killing grounds to the coastal trading areas presented a huge challenge because a rail system was nonexistent so the traders relied on slave labor. Because of the climate, the tsetse fly was pervasive in the area. The fly transmits a deadly parasitic disease, called trypanosomiasis, which eliminated the use of highly susceptible pack animals to transport the tusks. Therefore, the traders used people in the place of pack animals. David Shayt, a Smithsonian curator, estimated that between 1884 and 1911, the slaves transported approximately 10,000,000 pounds of ivory to the African coast, which traders ultimately shipped into America’s ports. The New York market price ranged from $1.80 to $4.00 per pound, which amounted to a minimum of $18 million, which totals about $310 million in today’s currency.[705]

The ivory trade, merely to satisfy men’s vanity destroyed the lives of Africans and lasted for approximately eighty years. Slavers and traders exploited the African tribal people who suffered tremendously as slavers seized the strongest members of African families and then torched their villages as they carried away their captives, enslaved and shackled together. They seized the strongest Africans in the villages, usually the subsistence farmers, while those who remained behind frequently faced starvation. The traders forced their captives to carry heavy tusks upon their backs for as many as 1,000 miles, from the continent’s interior all the way to the coast. Many slaves perished en route. The English missionary, Alfred J. Swann who lived by Lake Tanganyika, Africa’s great lake, the second most voluminous freshwater lake in the world, reported what he saw in the ivory caravans in Africa in the 1880s, “... Feet and shoulders were a mass of open sores, made more painful by the swarms of flies,

which followed the march and lived on the flowing blood. They presented a moving picture of utter misery...they were covered with the scars of the chikote, a leather whip.”[706] Swann later wrote the book, Fighting the Slave Hunters in Central Africa: A Record of Twenty-Six Years of Travel and Adventure Round the Great Lakes, published in 1910.

Dr. David Livingstone came upon an ivory caravan in southeastern Africa in 1858, and reported, “...A long line of manacled men, women and children, came wending their way round the hill and into the valley, on the side of which the village stood. The black drivers, armed with muskets and bedecked with various articles of finery, marched jauntily in the front, middle, and rear of the line; some of them blowing exultant notes out of long horns.” The guards fled when they saw Livingstone’s group who began cutting the women and children free. It was harder with the men who had their necks riveted by an iron rod across their throats.[707]

The traders had chained together between forty and fifty slaves in a line to make the lengthy trip from the interior with the burdensome ivory. Those who survived the trip were little more than emaciated skeletons.[708] Joseph Conrad, in Heart of Darkness, described the ivory porters that he witnessed in King Leopold’s État Indépendent du Congo. He wrote, “Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced with the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment and despair...They were dying very slowly – it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now – nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom.”[709]

Africa may have been the only place ivory tusks ever served utilitarian purposes. The residents used the tusks for animal stockades, doorposts and roof beams, and carved them into the tools of daily life, such as mortars and pestles. Stanley also saw tusks surrounding the gravesites of chieftains. The people used the elephant for food and some tribal cultures thought the elephant had a special spiritual dimension that they represented in their art. The African relied on the elephant for reasons other than for decorative purposes. People in the West interpreted the African’s use of the elephant as hard evidence of their ignorance. Africans, like other indigenous peoples, with respect for natural resources, did not carelessly decimate the elephant as the profit-driven American traders did.

In the 1870s, people discovered diamonds in South Africa, a country where the black people were economically independent of the white settlers. They farmed and raised herds of cattle and even supplied the miners with meat. Then, miners associated with Kimberley discovered a large deposit of diamonds in the dry plateau east of the Orange River. The Africans worked in the mines just to obtain the money to buy guns and other items. When they had earned sufficient money, then they quit and returned to their farms. In July 1876, the mine owners attempted to cut wages by 50% and 4,000 black workers left the mines and returned to their farms. Since the Africans used the bartering system, money was not essential to their existence. Therefore, De Beers had no control over the black workers.[710]

The government, in collaboration with De Beers, imposed a tax on the Africans that was only payable in cash. This forced Africans to leave their farms to work in the mines in order to pay the tax.[711] Corporations used this tactic in other countries, like America, following what people refer to as the Civil War, where corporate interests attempted to further strip people of their independence and transform them into debt slaves. Cecil Rhodes, financed by the Rothschilds, developed the diamond and gold monopoly in South Africa under the name of De Beers Mining Company, founded in 1880 and it successor, De Beers Consolidated Mines, founded in l888.

Both the white and black workers saw nothing wrong with retaining and selling some of the diamonds that they found. Mine owners naturally opposed “their” stones going into an “illegal” distribution system they did not establish. Consequently, in 1883, per government sanction, they began physically searching their

employees on a daily basis. The company forced the black workers, but not the white workers, to wear “mealie flour sacks” which had no pockets. In 1884, the white workers refused to undergo the daily searches and went on strike. Black workers, sympathizing with the whites, also went on strike. The company forcibly ended the strike and in the process killed six white workers. Afterwards, the whites did not have to endure the searches. This justifiably caused resentment among the black workers who were still subject to the dehumanizing daily searches.[712]

In 1882, Cecil Rhodes proposed that De Beers should house all the black workers, but not white, in barracks when they were not working. In July 1886, according to Janine Roberts, De Beers confined 1,500 of their black workers into barracks. By 1889, they had all 10,000 black workers confined in what resembled prisons, a place where their families could not join them. Thereafter, to save money and maximize their labor force, De Beers used convicts as part of its labor force. Between 1884 and 1932, De Beers, with the obvious cooperation of the state, compelled thousands of convicts to work in their mines and paid minimum wages to the state. Many of those convicts were people who had traveled to the mines seeking employment but they had failed to secure a pass from the government to travel. In 1889, De Beers proclaimed, “No native shall work or be allowed to work in any mine, whether in open or underground mining, excepting under the responsible charge of some particular white man as his master or ‘baas.’” De Beers, using a divide-and-create-animosity tactic, had institutionalized Apartheid.[713]

In 1886, prospectors discovered gold on the Witwatersrand. In 1902, Sir Ernest Oppenheimer (1880- 1957), from Germany, moved to South Africa to join his brothers on a diamond farm. He began as a diamond sorter and ultimately grew to own and operate the world’s biggest and most influential diamond mining, along with a distribution company. Oppenheimer controlled De Beers and in 1917, founded the Anglo American Corporation of South Africa to exploit the gold deposits east of Johannesburg.[714] In 1927, Oppenheimer wrested control of Cecil Rhodes’ De Beers business. He consolidated the company’s global monopoly over the world’s diamond industry and controlled this empire until his retirement.

Like De Beers in the Congo, Oppenheimer, under the Consolidated Diamond Mines (CDM) operated in a very similar manner in South West Africa (currently Namibia). He imported cheap labor from Botswana. Janine Roberts, according to her research, states that by 1923, “over half the labor force of 5,000 consisted of outside recruits from northern Botswana who suffered a high mortality rate...with scurvy or tuberculosis.” Others perished from “dehydration and exhaustion” because Oppenheimer supervisors compelled them to search the desert sands for diamonds.[715]

Oppenheimer established a company town, Oranjemund that provided living quarters for all contracted workers – married white workers and “single sex hostels” for black workers who could not bring their families to the area. Oppenheimer owned all the facilities in the town – the retail stores, the theaters, and the clubs – from all of which they barred the black workers. They even segregated the post office and black workers had to go to the back of the supermarket to have someone wait on them. White workers received 767 Rand and black workers received 61 Rand a month for the same work. In 1972, workers struck in mass against the conditions at the mine, their prison-like housing, severe food shortages, and the contract system that had changed their homeland into “a slave labor market.” The Ovamba compounds, the living quarters, had only one entrance, sharp shards of glass embedded in the top of the walls surrounding the compound, and concrete beds that crippled the residents.[716]

The miners suffered from poor or insufficient food, low salaries, and an absence of privacy in the hostels that housed ten men in a prison-like chamber where their “guards” controlled the electric lighting so they could not stay up at night. The workers had no dining halls and, because of the lavatory conditions, people had to defecate in public. Oppenheimer imposed these conditions in both his diamond and gold mines. While Ernest Oppenheimer claims to have converted to Christianity, there is insufficient evidence, given

the conditions he initially instituted, to sustain such a claim. In March 1976, according to an internal memo, workers complained, “We live like animals in the compounds without our wives...The life we lead here is worse than slavery or the life of a beast of burden.”[717]

In 1947, diamond dealers and their supporters created the World Federation of Diamond Bourses (an exchange, especially one in a European city) in order to provide common policies for trading rough and polished diamonds and precious stones among its twenty-nine members. Their headquarters are in Antwerp. The World Federation of Diamond Bourses (WFDB) is composed of independent diamond bourses in major cutting centers such as Tel Aviv, Antwerp, Johannesburg and other cities across the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Some of the largest deposits of gold, diamond, copper and platinum are in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire, home to approximately forty-four million people. Despite the tremendous natural wealth of the country, the average annual income is usually less than $250. There is rampant corruption and administrative mismanagement of the nation’s resources. Because of the poverty, the typical life expectancy is less than fifty years. Foreign powers and corporations continue to exploit the resources, amass huge fortunes, while the people are forced to labor for those powers. Mobutu Sese Seko (1930- 1997), the former president, from 1965 to 1997, also accumulated a massive fortune, about $5 billion, by developing favorable relationships with the foreign corporations and acquiescing to their demands while they exploited the mineral and human resources. He appreciated the philosophy of Niccolo Machiavelli.

The country is largely undeveloped, with a critical lack of infrastructure, and a few opportunistic foreigners extract the minerals in order to acquire immediate personal wealth. Because they have no interest in the country, they do not invest in the modernization of the nation, as it would be incompatible with their interests. These people sell the gold or diamonds, usually for Federal Reserve notes, the international currency.[718]

In 1958, Patrice Lumumba (1925-1961) helped found the broad-based Mouvement National Congolais (MNC), which embraced Pan-Africanist beliefs. In October 1959, Belgian officials arrested Lumumba for purportedly provoking an anti-colonial riot in Stanleyville, the capital and center of the secessionist independent state of the Republic of Congo. During that riot, the police killed thirty people. The MNC, despite Lumumba’s incarceration for six months, won a majority of the votes in the elections in December 1959. Belgian officials scheduled a conference in Brussels to discuss the future of the Congo. Delegates who were to attend the conference from the Congo expressed outrage over Lumumba’s incarceration and demanded his immediate release. They released him and he attended the conference, January 18-27, 1960. Conference attendees decided to grant Congolese independence and the country could hold national elections from May 11-25, 1960 with their official independence beginning on June 30, 1960. The Congolese people elected 34-year-old Lumumba, announced on June 23, 1960, as the Prime Minister and Joseph Kasa-Vubu as the president of the Republic of the Congo. Lumumba and the MNC could now form a government.

The people of the Congo celebrated Independence Day on June 30 in a ceremony attended by many dignitaries including King Baudouin, of Belgium (1951-1993) and the foreign press. Patrice Lumumba, the new Prime Minister, gave an independence speech even though officials excluded him from the event program. King Baudouin, in his speech praised the progress the country had made under colonialism. He referred to the “genius” of his great-granduncle Leopold II, while briefly mentioning the atrocities they implemented during the Congo Free State. The King said, “Don’t compromise the future with hasty reforms, and don’t replace the structures that Belgium hands over to you until you are sure you can do better.” Lumumba responded by telling the audience that the people had fought hard for the Congo’s independence. Belgium did not magnanimously grant it but resisted it.

Lumumba said, “For this independence of the Congo, even as it is celebrated today with Belgium, a friendly country with whom we deal as equal to equal, no Congolese worthy of the name will ever be able to forget that it was by fighting that it has been won, a day-to-day fight, an ardent and idealistic fight, a fight in which we were spared neither privation nor suffering, and for which we gave our strength and our blood. We are proud of this struggle, of tears, of fire, and of blood, to the depths of our being, for it was a noble and just struggle, and indispensable to put an end to the humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force.”[719]

According to Dr. D’Lynn Waldron, a foreign correspondent covering Patrice Lumumba, the people of the Congo loved Lumumba. Waldron also states, “Belgium and the banking and mining interests were arranging for the coming Independence to disintegrate into chaos so they could take back Katanga with its gold, uranium and copper, and the Kasai with its industrial diamonds, while dumping the unprofitable remainder of the Congo.” His opponents, corporate interests supported by big government, claimed that Lumumba was a Communist in order to vilify him and justify their actions.[720] Just ten weeks later, opponents, probably supported and trained by the CIA, deposed the Lumumba government during a coup that people refer to as the Congo Crisis. Subsequently, his enemies imprisoned him and the CIA in collaboration with Belgium murdered him.[721]

Currently, 1,200 Congolese die each day because of war and its consequences, disease and malnutrition. By 1996, even before war overwhelmed the Congo, the country was one of the world’s biggest producers of cobalt, copper, coltan and industrial diamonds. However, more than 75% of the population lives on less than a dollar a day. A quarter of the population, 15,000,000 people, must subsist on one meager meal per day. Deprivation and poverty should not exist in a resource-rich country. Those elite and their self- serving local agents and enforcers who actually control the county’s resources have created another third- world country.

THE FOUNDERS, ECONOMICS AND WARFARE Doctrine of Discovery