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A different path for the Congo (the Belgian one, Zaire, Congo-Kinshasa, DRC)

Burton K Wheeler

The G.O.A.T. That Can't Be Got
Location
Tr'ondëk
The World Bank keeps GDP statistics going back to 1960. This is very handy because DRC got its independence in 1961. At the time, per capita GNI was $230 a year. India was $90. After crisis, civil war, and decades of Mobutu's kleptocracy, the country completely collapsed in the 1990's. It's limping along at one notch above "failed state" and despite having had extensive infrastructure development in the 1950's and massive natural resources, its per capita GNI is only twice what it was at independence.

Just to the south is Zambia. It became independent in 1964. Zambia, like DRC, had extensive mineral resources and a large white population working in the industrial sector. Zambia had, in Kenneth Kaunda, a moderate leftist ruler much like the murdered Patrice Lumumba. He struck a balance between opposing colonial regimes and cozying up to the West. The white population was mostly left alone, though a lot left on independence and more trickled out when Kaunda nationalized the mining industry. Kaunda also banned other political parties and ruled for 30 years, but when he left office, there was no civil war, just a peaceful transition to democracy. Other than occasional Rhodesian and South African raids, Zambia was largely untouched by war. Its total economic dependence on copper mining and lack of other industry means economic growth has been a bit cyclic, but its GDP growth has been 2.5 times that of DRC, with GNI growing 3.5 times as fast, from $200 in 1960 to $1360 in 2016 (and rising as high as $1770 when copper prices were higher). Besides copper, Zambia has a fairly well-developed agricultural sector, with a lot of large farm enterprises run by white Zimbabweans and South Africans, who the government has deliberately lured in recent years.

So a Congo that avoids civil war can expect at MINIMUM a GNI the same as India's today (It should be noted that Zambia's poverty rate is almost twice that of India). Zambia is a long way from being a best-case scenario, with its lack of industry outside copper and political corruption. Congo was more industrialized in 1960 and could easily have grown faster than Zambia did. If one posits a peaceful transition of power from Lumumba to his successor and a heavy investment in education, Congo could double Zambia's GNI.

I'm usually leery of making direct comparisons between countries like that, but the similarities between Kaunda and Lumumba caught my eye, so I put numbers in a spreadsheet, like I do when I'm supposed to be working. It's jarring to realize just how much the untenable situation the Belgians created at independence and Mobutu perpetuated messed up the country. A very comparable country became fairly prosperous by African standards just by avoiding war. Everyone here probably knows that China and India were much poorer than Africa in the immediate postwar decades, but analyzing the growth trends side by side makes one realize how bad things could be in, say, China, if warlordism had continued after WWII, or if Deng Xiaoping had failed.
 
GNI per capita tells you very little about what a country is actually like in terms of development. Zambia, India, and China all were poor as hell, but they also had a local educated class that could rule the country and facilitate development. China had a significant educated population, many of whom were educated in the West or Japan. And while some of them fled to Taiwan (a major reason why Taiwan developed so quickly) the vast majority did not and Mao and later Deng tapped into this pool to help govern the country and enact policy. India inherited a strong bureaucracy and an entire class of British educated elites, and despite the chaos of the partition the fact that they have mostly remained a stable parliamentary system ever since is proof of their effectiveness. Zambia had both a white settler elite and an emerging black bureaucracy to help govern it, though was clearly the least developed of the three.

The Congo, upon its independence, had only around a dozen college educated people in the entire country, because the Belgians preferred to directly rule/misrule and exploited it so badly. So in any realistic scenario with a point of divergence around independence, there is not going to be much of a basis for a stable or strong Congolese state. They are going to have to rely on massive aid, either from America or the Soviets, to even maintain sovereignty over their territory, and developing a competent bureaucracy to manage a country that large is going to take generations.

So while their GNI per capitas were all similar upon independence, this is largely due to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the population of all of these countries were subsistence farmers/peasants. The real keys to economic development, like possessing a literate professional bureaucracy, won't be reflected in these numbers to any significant degree until development really starts taking off.
 
I'm aware that GNI doesn't say much, which is why I also mentioned comparative poverty rates (DRC's is so high it's depressing, much higher than Zambia's). I didn't say that Congo could be like China or India, sorry if I wasn't clear. And yes, OTL independence was too late for the Congo. You'd have to have a POD sometime in the 1950's at the very earliest. I don't expect anything like democracy to emerge in the Congo. In a lot of ways Zambia's suspension of elections and nationalization of industry was a blessing. It slowed economic growth, but it also created stability. A lot of African civil wars started after the first free elections.

I don't know enough about the Zambian local educated class, but I know there were a lot of white people there at independence and a large number stayed, whereas in the Congo the white population mostly left during the initial round of civil war (Katanga/Simba). The majority of these people weren't Belgian. My idea was that the white population stays in the Congo long enough to allow a native professional class to be educated. You'd have to walk a tightrope between killing the white goose that lays the golden eggs and stirring up the resentment of the local population. Obviously Tshombe would have been too far on the conciliatory side of it.

CalBear's AANW timeline has the Congo as a sort of African Tiger economy, which doesn't seem really implausible if Belgium is erased from the map.
 
I think there's a geographic factor too. The Congo is straight up tropical, and not suited to extensive European settlement due to diseases/inability to farm European crops. Zambia, while not as temperate as Zimbabwe, is reasonable enough climate wise where a significantly larger European population was willing to settle there and wanted to stay even during black majority rule. You're going to need something drastic, like the aforementioned destruction of Belgium, to encourage significant amounts of Europeans to want to move to and stay in the Congo, and even then I imagine most Belgians would just move to America or Australia or something, don't you think?
 
Zambia has some things Congo does not, at independence.

It's much smaller for one. Another is that the main towns/copper/infrastructure/government is relatively concentrated in the middle, like a spine. Which probably helps government/regime keeping control.

Zambia also being totally integrated into wider federation/ Rhodesian infrastuture had to keep those connections going to remain easily plugged into world economy for at least the first decade, pre blockade.
 
I think there's a geographic factor too. The Congo is straight up tropical, and not suited to extensive European settlement due to diseases/inability to farm European crops. Zambia, while not as temperate as Zimbabwe, is reasonable enough climate wise where a significantly larger European population was willing to settle there and wanted to stay even during black majority rule. You're going to need something drastic, like the aforementioned destruction of Belgium, to encourage significant amounts of Europeans to want to move to and stay in the Congo, and even then I imagine most Belgians would just move to America or Australia or something, don't you think?

I don't buy the climate argument so much. There were quite a few whites in the Zambian agricultural sector, true, but just because the Congo really hot doesn't mean you can't have a white overseer of a rubber plant or whatever. Maybe in 1860, but by the 1960's it's less of an issue. Again, tens of thousands of white people moving to Congo isn't an alternate history scenario, it's OTL.

Zambia has some things Congo does not, at independence.

It's much smaller for one. Another is that the main towns/copper/infrastructure/government is relatively concentrated in the middle, like a spine. Which probably helps government/regime keeping control.

Zambia also being totally integrated into wider federation/ Rhodesian infrastuture had to keep those connections going to remain easily plugged into world economy for at least the first decade, pre blockade.

The decentralization of the Congo is a huge challenge for sure, and played a big part in the first round of civil wars, but transportation infrastructure wasn't awful. There were roads and airports in a lot of the country at independence, and the river is a pretty big help for industrial transportation.
 
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