Page 28 - Afrika Must Unite

THE COLONIAL IMPRINT 13
Belgian Government. A Governor-General was appointed,
responsible to the Belgian Parliament, but he had no Legislative
Council or Assembly to check his power, and no Congolese sat
in the Brussels Parliament. Nobody in the Congo, white or black,
could vote, and the Congolese had few, if any, civil rights. The
essence of the Belgian colonial system, as later developed, was to
buy off any discontent by giving a certain amount of economic
opportunity.
Belgian district commissioners ruled their various localities in
the same authoritarian m anner as the Governor-General in
Leopoldville. The Rom an Catholic church and big business
were the other, no less, powerful rulers of the Congo. The
Belgian Government, in fact, shared considerably in the invest­
m ent holdings of the interlocking combines which monopolized
the Congo’s economy, often to the extent of as much as fifty per
cent.
The belated attempts of the Belgians to prevent mounting
national feeling in the Congo from expressing itself in violence,
by holding carefully controlled and limited municipal elections,
failed. The Congo became independent in June i960, and tragic
subsequent events showed that the Belgians never intended that
Congolese independence should, in fact, become effective. There
were practically no experienced Congolese politicians or civil
servants, and no African officers in the force publique. The per­
sistent interference of Belgian big business interests in Congolese
politics has further complicated an extremely difficult situation.
In South Africa a different, though no less dangerous, state of
affairs exists. There, government policy can be summed up in
the one word, apartheid, which involves social, political and
economic segregation on a basis of race. The Union of South
Africa, when it was formed in 1910, was a sovereign, inde­
pendent state within the British Empire.
It is now a Republic, no longer a member of the Common­
wealth, and the only independent country in Africa governed by
its white minority. The problem in South Africa is basically the
same as that in other settler territories in Africa. In these coun­
tries there is a European minority, settled over a considerable
period of time, which claims by virtue of race the right to rule
for ever over the majority of the inhabitants.