POLITICAL HISTORY, PAGE 13
The scramble for Africa had been but a preview of Europe's economic and territorial rivalries. In the summer of 1914 those simmering conflicts exploded into World War I. The outbreak of fighting produced additional demand in the colonies for raw materials to feed the war machines of the great powers. In the Belgian Congo, Union Minière du Haut Katanga, created in 1906 to exploit the region's newly discovered mineral wealth, dramatically expanded operations during the war years. More production called for more African labor to work copper and tin mines. Concession companies continued to push the sordid rubber harvest for patriotism and profit. African sweat and muscle constructed rail lines to connect mines with river ports for rapid evacuation of ore over the Congo's vast network of waterways. With France a major participant in the war, its colonies and their people were conscripted to defend French interests in a number of capacities including extraction of raw materials and even combat.
Conscription did not end with the war. A new government-run slavery complete with slave ships, this time in the form of river barges crammed with Africans stolen from Chad and Oubangi-Chari, took hold in French Equatorial Africa. The French, after years of discussion, decided to build their own rail outlet to the sea to eliminate dependence on the Belgian railroad across the river. For a dozen years, beginning in 1921, Africans were forced to construct the poorly planned Congo-Ocean rail link of three hundred miles between Brazzaville and Pointe Noire. Richard West reports that, "One section of thirty miles included thirty-six major bridges or viaducts, sixty-three minor bridges, twelve large supporting walls and two miles of tunnel."46 Not only were laborers conscripted from northern areas to augment those dragooned from the scantily populated south, but they were forced to work in the most appalling conditions. The ordeal of daily forced labor (flogging with the chicotte seemed to be the preferred method of coercion) was compounded by inadequate diet and rampant disease. A reporter for a French newspaper, Le Petit Parisien, who was sent to investigate, estimated that 17,000 people died working on the project.47 Countless others were killed during "recruiting" raids on villages or succumbed on the two- to three-week passage down the Ubangi River.
The French Congo proved to be poorly endowed with the resources favored by Europe. As one bloody year limped into the next, both human and elephant populations, and thus ivory collection, declined drastically. Wild rubber plants withered from the effects of excessive harvest. By the time the Great Depression set in, most concession companies had gone bankrupt, like the policy that created them in the first place.
Across the river, Belgium had inherited a bountiful chunk of territory, and the concession companies exploited it to the hilt. Curbing their single-minded pursuit of profit proved difficult, for oftentimes government administrators would retire only to take up employment with one of the companies they were supposed to be regulating. Gradually, however, some areas re-opened to free trade. The authorities curtailed a few of the more outrageous methods of extracting produce. Africans were eventually granted more rights over portions of their own land. But as historian Roger Anstey, citing a surprisingly enlightened colonial functionary, points out, "There was...no African conception of individual freehold tenure, and to impose European ideas of land tenure on the Africa-wide view of land as the patrimony of the tribe or clan, who alone could enjoy or delegate the use of it, was to lay up immense trouble for the future. What Africans dreaded most and what was most likely to disaffect them was alienation of their land. Indeed, such was their feeling about land as in some sense the preserve of the ancestral spirits that alienation could never have that final meaning which purchase or expropriation would give to the European mind."48 To compound the crime a system of compulsory cultivation was forced on Africans, to improve the local diet it was said, but more importantly to provide profitable exports to Europe during the Great Depression when demand for rubber and minerals slumped.
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