Let’s start with the fundamental truth: the Congo’s current condition is no accident. When journalist Benedicte Kumbi Ndjoko says “In Congo, globalized capitalism creates permanent chaos,” he’s describing a system functioning precisely how it was designed, a system where the West gets rich by keeping the Congo poor, destabilized, and open for plunder.
The modern Democratic Republic of Congo is not a country that collapsed, it is a colony deliberately organized for extraction and exploitation. This should be one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations on earth. It holds the minerals that power our phones, electric cars, and the green energy revolution. It has enough hydroelectric potential to light up entire continents, vast reserves of freshwater, and the second-largest rainforest on the planet which sequesters more carbon than all other tropical rainforests combined. And yet, over four million Africans in the Congo are internally displaced, with more than half a million forced into neighboring countries as refugees. They are victims of wars waged by Rwanda and Uganda, conflicts backed and funded by the United States and the West. The reality is that since the West came to Africa, the Congo has never been permitted true self-governance. Not under Leopold’s brutal regime, not under Belgian colonial rule, and certainly not after nominal independence in 1960.
When the Congo achieved independence in 1960, the entire nation had fewer than thirty African university graduates. There were no Congolese army officers, no engineers, no agronomists, no physicians. Out of five thousand management-level positions in the civil service, exactly three were held by Africans. This was not an oversight, it was intentional colonial policy. King Leopold II made this explicit when he declared: “It is not about Belgian colonies. It is about establishing a new state that is as large as possible and about its governance. It should be clear that in this project there can be no question of granting the Negroes the slightest form of political power. That would be ridiculous. The whites, who lead the posts, have all the power.”
And let’s be clear, when Leopold’s genocidal hands were finally pried from the Congo after his barbarism was exposed to the world in the Casement report, he didn’t leave in disgrace. Belgium paid him off, celebrated him as a hero, and continued his work under its “official” colonial rule. When the Africans in the Congo finally organized under Patrice Lumumba and the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC) to win their independence, the United States and Belgium conspired with Congolese traitors like Moise Tshombe to murder him within a year of that independence. Since then, it’s been one Western-backed puppet after another – first Mobutu, then Kabila, now Tshisekedi – each ensuring the Congo remains open for business to foreign looters.
The West’s Wealth Is Stolen from the Congo
Every major technological leap in the West has been built with resources stolen from the Congo and the mass suffering of the Africans living there. The industrial revolution, and its technological innovations like the pneumatic tire, ran on Congolese rubber harvested under Leopold’s reign of terror where African workers had their hands chopped off for failing to meet quotas. The atomic age was powered by uranium mined in the Congo by Africans given no protective equipment, then tested on Indigenous lands in the US Southwest without warning, leaving generations of Indigenous peoples poisoned to this day. Today’s so-called green revolution – everything from solar panels, to rechargeable batteries, to electric cars – depends on coltan, lithium, and cobalt extracted by children working in hellish conditions in mines illegally dotted across the landscape of the Congo.
The West gets rich because the Congo stays poor. And the Africans in the Congo? They’ve always been seen as obstacles, something to be removed, whether through forced labor, displacement, or outright extermination.
Genocide is the Standard Operating Procedure
What’s happening in the Congo, even what Leopold did, isn’t some historical aberration. It is standard imperial practice. While Leopold’s forces were massacring millions, Germany was slaughtering the Herero in Namibia. Cecil Rhodes was violently establishing a corporate foothold for British settler-colonialism in Southern Africa. The United States was killing hundreds of thousands overseas in the Philippines – torturing prisoners and burning villages – while simultaneously waging a war of extermination against indigenous nations within its borders. Today, Israel carries out the exact same playbook in occupied Palestine with the full backing of the West.
We must recognize these as not a series of unrelated atrocities but a consistent tactic of capitalism and imperialism. If you are deemed a “surplus population” standing in the way of resources – whether those resources are land, oil, water, or coltan – you either get worked to death or you get wiped out. Today, that same logic of “surplus populations” drives Western intervention in Haiti, where the US considers the Africans living there an obstacle to be cleared away in order to establish a geopolitical stronghold to keep the Caribbean under control. Genocide isn’t an accident, it is a primary tool of the capitalist system.
We must also recognize what’s happening in the Congo has never been just about the Congo. The transatlantic slave trade and Leopold’s forced labor camps were two sides of the same system. The apartheid policies in the Congo under Belgian rule mirrored Jim Crow in the United States. The same system that plunders Central Africa enriches Zionist billionaires like Dan Gertler, who steals Congolese diamonds and cobalt to fund illegal settlements in the West Bank. The same tech corporations selling surveillance equipment and weaponry to the IDF and the US military depend on minerals mined by African children in the Congo to manufacture their products. The same Israeli forces training police to kill Africans in the United States also arm right-wing death squads across Latin America. Our struggles are connected.
The Africans in the Congo Will Liberate Themselves
The Africans in the Congo are not passively suffering and waiting for salvation. They are fighting back – constantly. In January 2025, protesters in Congo’s capital Kinshasa burned US and Belgian flags outside Western embassies, chanting “The Westerners are behind the looting of our country, Rwanda doesn’t work alone, so they must leave our country.” Another demonstrator put it plainly: “All of this is because of Rwanda. What Rwanda is doing is in complicity with France, Belgium, the United States and others. The people of Congo are tired. How many times should we die?”
This resistance isn’t isolated. Across Africa, from Western Sahara to the Sahel to Zimbabwe, movements are expelling foreign military forces, defying land theft and economic sanctions, forming independent ties with anti-imperialist nations, and building revolutionary Pan-African alliances like the Alliance of Sahelian states. They are proving that another world is indeed possible and they are engaged in an existential struggle for it to be born.
For those of us in the West, our job is clear: disrupt the machine that feeds on the Congo. That means exposing the connections between struggles, joining organizations fighting for justice, and taking collective direct action against the corporations and governments profiting from this exploitation. The very same corporations and governments that are driving and profiting from the transition to an openly fascist government that is brutalizing us in the United States. Our struggles are connected. As the Congo goes, we will go.
As Patrice Lumumba declared in 1960: “The Congo’s independence is a decisive step towards the liberation of the whole African continent.” The liberation and unification of Africa under scientific socialism will be a death blow for global capitalism and imperialism which means the fight for the Congo is the fight for all of us. The only question is: which side you are on.