Africa's Leaky Giant
joe trapido AFRICA’S LEAKY GIANT ccording to the un’s Human Development Index, the Democratic Republic of Congo is just about the world’s worst place to live.* Bad things in Niger, and some very marginal improvements in the drc itself, have recently moved it up Afrom the bottom spot it occupied in 2011, but you get the picture. Not incidental to this dismal ranking was a seven- or eight-year international war in which, according to the Lancet, nearly four million people died.1 There are reservations to be entered about both of these results: the kind of complex comparisons included in indexes like the undp’s are capricious, with rankings changing according to the relative weight you assign to each of the proxy indicators—life expectancy, education, per capita gdp. The narrow range of the proxies included also conveys a rather stunted idea of what is, at times, the most delightful place. One can imagine that if the Human Development Index had given great pop music, a sense of irony, or antelope stew with sorrel and palm nuts their due, then Congo would have scored rather better. Likewise, it is hard to know what to make of mortality estimates in a region where there has been no census since 1984. Whatever the exact figure, only a small proportion of the deaths during the Second Congo War were caused by direct violence: the majority succumbed to collapses in food production, health systems and wider infrastructure. While exacerbated by war, these deteriorations can themselves be traced much further back in time, across three decades of economic regres- sion, in which Congolese gdp shrunk to less than a fifth of its former peak and industrial capitalism, however underdeveloped, ceased to be the dominant mode of production.2 This essay will examine the origins of the drc’s current malaise and, in the process, take issue with some of the arguments put forward in the burgeoning literature on the coun- try.
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