LONDON – When the United Nations pulled its troops out of the Congo in June 1964 Secretary General U Thant reported “The UN cannot permanently protect the Congo from internal tensions and disturbances created by its own organic growth towards unity and nationhood”. That was some kind of relief after a peacekeeping operation that nearly tore apart the UN and claimed the life of U Thant’s predecessor, Dag Hammerskjold. Yet the UN did bring a measure of peace to the Congo in the sense that it ended a civil war fought over the succession of the mineral rich province of Katanga and provided an alternative to what was in danger of becoming an East-West grab for influence that threatened to turn the Congo into a major Cold War battleground.
Once again the Congo has become a maelstrom. Susan Rice, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Africa, warns that the fighting might become the continent’s “first world war”, as Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola and Chad pitch in on the side of the beleaguered president, Laurent Kabila, and Rwanda and Uganda support the rebels. This is high exaggeration. Either Ma Rice has no idea of the carnage and political disequilibrium delivered to the world by the First World War or she believes that it is necessary to hype a mainly guerrilla war, with so far fairly limited casualties, to engage our attention.
It is true that neighbourly intervention on the opposing sides is of a different order than in the past, but it’s happened before, most spectacularly Tanzania sending its army to help depose dictator Idi Amin in Uganda. And the Congo is a very big country with many neighbours. Moreover, the military intervention that would really count, that of Nigeria and South Africa, is not on the cards.
No, what should worry us not that it’s going to become Africa’s first world war, but rather (pace Stokely Carmichael) how does Africa get to grips with its age old problem of tribalism, that has produced war for centuries and, given the artificial state boundaries bequeathed by the colonial powers, is now the possessor of a built-in recipe for continuing conflict?
The genocide in Rwanda was African tribalism in its most extravagant form. In the Congo it has not come to that. Indeed, under strong man, the late Mobuto Sese Seko, who laid the country economically bare, it was reasonably quiescent, such were his extraordinary powers of manipulation and political balance. Only in the final effort to bring him down were tribal fault lines played upon successfully by the contenders for power, as they are doing again right now, turning the tribal tables on Kabila.
But if we are going to discuss the problems and pitfalls of tribalism we must first understand its strengths. If it is the gunpowder that can blow peoples apart it is also the glue that holds ordinary society together. It lives and breathes in everyday life. In ordinary village (and in much urban) life tribalism operates like free-masonry or the old school tie: helping each other along with jobs and introductions, sharing the burden of harvest, resolving disputes, whether matrimonial or material and, not least, fashioning art and music in a distinctive form. It is only when these virtues mutate into a virulent, spare-no-quarter contagion, that the wrong tribal scar or nose shape becomes a death warrant.
It is now a truism that the old colonial boundaries ignored the mosaic of tribal loyalties. But what is done is not easily undone, as the first post-independence leaders recognised with their writing into the charter of the Organisation of African Unity, the sanctity of these boundaries. But even if Africa is not to be broken down into its 800 tribal constituencies some reform of these boundaries is obviously necessary.
It can be done by amicable divorce, as Ethiopia showed. After the overthrow of dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam the Eritreans went their own way, with the most civilized of transitions. There was a referendum, there was a pause for reflection and then both sides agreed on a timetable for separation. (Admittedly, six years on they nonetheless had a border dispute.)
There are really two choices for those parts of Africa beseiged by tribal conflict–and that goes for Rwanda, Nigeria, the Sudan or Angola as much as it does for the Congo. To start a civilized divorce, if necessary with help from neutral outsiders. Or to build a federal democratic state, as South Africa has done. The day when the strongman can hold sway from the centre, whether he be malign like Mobuto or benign like former Tanzanian president Julius Nverere is obviously over. Every foreign investor of worth–apart from the giant, well padded, oil and mineral companies–knows such systems will end in disaster and will always think more than twice before risking a major investment.
This is what U Thant’s “organic growth” must be about for the Congo. Is Africa prepared to ask the UN to re-involve itself in the Congo to help bring this about? The present free for all by its immediate neighbours is guaranteed to solve nothing.
