Violent extraction reached its apogee under the Belgians, following the establishment of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State in 1885, gifted by the European powers assembled at the Congress of Berlin

Leopold’s ‘Free State’ was a paradigmatic Raubwirtschaft (predatory economy)

In this, Zaire’s catastrophe emerges not as sui generis, but as an extreme variant of a wider pattern of financial mise-en-dépendance.

This form of distribution is often referred to in Weberian terms as ‘neo-patrimonialism’—the ‘neo’ indicating that the apparatus of a modern state is used to administer patronage, yet without the forms of institutional separation between individual networks and office said to be characteristic of modern forms of authority.

In place of the old party-state, hundreds of parties were established—many of them simply ‘partis alimentaires’, ideology-free ‘eating parties’ designed to sell their support to various power-brokers, and filled with hungry cadres in search of (often pathetically small) financial rewards.

In these circumstances, popular jacquerie was not directed by any kind of hegemonic leadership and went nowhere.

In these circumstances, popular jacquerie was not directed by any kind of hegemonic leadership and went nowhere.

The RPF saw the camps as an existential threat, supplying a base to Hutu revanchists as they plotted their return to power

Kabila’s government had no independent access to capital markets: the only way of securing credit lay through the IMF’s Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) programme, where debt relief was tied to the usual requirements of the Washington Consensus

Western governments prevaricated: they had never warmed to Tshisekedi, and many had some lingering attachment to Kabila.