[...] while for some European states internal and external conflicts were a laboratory for new and more productive forms of debt financing, African leaders tended to raise the capital needed to finance authority by selling the means of production, both human and ecological. Historians have located the origins of this strategy in Africa’s relative labour shortage: unable to control subordinates who could easily disappear into the vast tracts of unoccupied land when things got tough, rulers saw forms of ‘outsourced exploitation’, notably the transatlantic slave trade, as an attractive alternative. [...]

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.

[...] while the powerful cultivated their image as a fruitful bough, the gifts made to underlings in these performances were in reality a tiny fraction of the whole, obscuring the fact that most wealth was being funnelled offshore. [...] the African trajectory differs in an important respect from the classic capitalist one. Here the alienation of public debt incurred from foreign loans involved re-shipping it offshore—and thus undermining capital formation. Though it is ignored or pushed to the margins by conventional Africanist accounts, capital flight provides a far more elegant and empirically robust explanation for the failure of accumulation in Sub-Saharan Africa than ‘neo-patrimonialism’ or ‘the politics of the belly’. [...]

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.

[...] scholarship cannot isolate Congo from the dynamics of global capitalism. This is not just a matter of resource privatization and giveaway mineral rents, oiled by multi-million-dollar kickbacks. The channels for funnelling value away from on-shore jurisdictions into a netherworld of ‘treasure islands’ benefit from a state-of-the-art grid that Western elites have a big stake in leaving safely buried. The various tax havens are ‘spider’s webs’ with, at their centre, northern financial hubs like Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland or the USA. The British Virgin Islands, which seem to be the major destination for much of the DRC’s recent capital flight, have a very strong connection to the Square Mile. The flows that have helped sap capital formation in Africa’s giant involve a considerable shift of economic surplus from the many to the few, and from South to North.