> At the outset, only groups officially acknowledged as indigenous were entitled to a native authority, and with it the right to a tribal ‘homeland’ administered by chiefs appointed from within their own ranks. Not only were non-indigenous groups denied this right; they were required to pay tribute to ‘indigenous’ chiefs in the native authority where they lived. The colonial system thus rested on a dual system of institutionalised discrimination dressed up as cultural difference: by race in the cities and tribe in the countryside. The native authority system continues today to create suspicion and animosity between two politically defined groups – one indigenous, the other not – and to set the scene for violence. What used to be called tribalism – and is now called ethnic conflict – is the expression of a structural contradiction between the economics of a market system and the politics of a residual colonial system. Markets move people, and not simply products of labour, across boundaries, but a colonial mechanism such as the native authority disenfranchises anyone who crosses tribal boundaries, as millions of Congolese were obliged to do, in the service of a fluid migrant labour system. This contradiction was at its most acute in the southern province of Katanga and the eastern provinces of Ituri and Kivu. With independence from Belgium in 1960, there was a prophetic round of ethnic cleansing in Katanga and Kasai, repeated on a more dramatic scale in 1992-93, and shortly afterwards in Ituri and Kivu.⁰
Since independence, the DRC has seen millions of deaths due to conflicts largely caused by ethnic strife, principally during the Second Congolese War, which alone appears to have caused approximately 4 million deaths.¹
In this context it seems that Ebola is not particularly threatening; certainly, if one views human conflict as a disease, it has not killed particularly many. The principal conclusion from this conflict, I should think, is that the DRC is quite vulnerable to the spread of other diseases that are even more infectious.
Transport in the DRC is notoriously difficult. Many “roads” are not visible either on Google Earth or in attempting to use “remote sensing”². There may therefore be some hope that the spread of a more dangerous infectious disease could help to reduce conflict by increasing fear of contact between populations. As things stand, it seems that most contact consists of violence instead of useful things such as trade. If the jungle cannot stop the militias, perhaps disease can. (It admittedly failed to do so during the Plague of Justinian.)
0. Mahmood Mamdani, “The Invention of the Indigène”, in: London Review of Books (20th Jan. 2011), pp. 31-3, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n02/mahmood-mamdani/the-invention-...
1. Benjamin Coghlan et al, “Mortality in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: A Nationwide Survey”, in: The Lancet 367.9504 (Jan. 2006), pp. 44-51, DOI 10.1016/S0140-6736(06)67923-3
2. DR Congo Snapshot: Roads in the DR Congo—Democratic Republic of the Congo, https://reliefweb.int/report/democratic-republic-congo/dr-co...