A Single Gold Tooth

Why Western powers want to ignore the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Freely elected leader of DRC, Patrice Lumumba and colleagues in Brussels, one year before his murder by the Belgian government. Credit: Harry Pot via Wikimedia

1960 was the Year of Africa.

17 nations declared independence from their colonial parasites and held democratic elections.

But parasites don’t give up the host easily.

In the newly formed Republic of the Congo, Pan-Africanist poet and scholar Patrice Lumumba was elected as the first prime minister, taking office in June of ’60. By September, he was ousted in a CIA-backed plot, and in January of 1961 he was executed and his body dissolved in acid by agents of the Belgian government.

While Lumumba was painted as a communist for daring to even speak with the soviets, western interests stonewalled every effort he made to share Congo’s riches with the Congolese.

With 200 languages and 200 tribes, 7,000 miles of navigable rivers and an estimated $24 trillion in mineral wealth, DRC should be the real world Wakanda. They have waterfalls that could power all of Africa, millions of acres of excellent farmland, mountain gorillas and all of the world’s Bonobos.

DRC should be one of the richest and most cosmopolitan places on earth. Instead it is consistently one of the poorest and most underdeveloped.

There’s only one reason for this. Plunder.

Once again the Cold War provided the justification for assasination and interference in a sovereign country, but the real reason was that rich Belgians, Brits, and Americans feared the loss of lucrative mineral concessions, and the infrastructure they’d forced the Congolese to build at gunpoint.

It’s no secret that the rich resources of this country have never benefited the Congolese people, instead they have benefited either those in power or foreign and political financial groups. -Jean-Pierre Bemba, former Vice President of DRC

This single murder of a freely, fairly, and democratically elected foreign official, is alone enough to convince that the West cares more for steady profits than democracy. But of course this is not the only coup the CIA fomented in the name of ‘freedom’.

The West’s pattern of interference and exploitation in other nation’s affairs is…