History of the Republic of the Congo
The earliest inhabitants of the region comprising present-day Congo were the Forest peoples whose Stone Age culture was slowly replaced by Bantu tribes.
The main Bantu tribe living in the region were the Kongo, also known as Bakongo, who established mostly unstable kingdoms along the mouth, north and south, of the Congo River.
The capital of this Kongolese kingdom, Mbanza Kongo, later baptized as São Salvador by the Portuguese, is a town in northern Angola near the border with the DRC[clarification needed].
King John II of Portugal sought, in order to break Venetian and Ottoman control over trade with the East, to organize a series of expeditions south along the African coast with the goal of establishing direct contact with Asia.
Baptised around 1684 as Dona Béatrice, Kimpa Vita was raised Catholic and being very pious she became a nun seeing visions of St. Anthony of Padua ordering her to restore the kingdom of Kongo to its former glory.
[citation needed] The period leading up to the Berlin Conference on Africa saw a rush by the major European powers to increase their control of the African continent.
The rise in Western Europe of capitalism and the consequent industrialization led to a fast-growing demand for African raw materials like rubber, palm oil and cotton.
On the north bank of the river arrived the French explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, born in the Italian city of Rome in 1852.
Traveling from the Atlantic Ocean coast in present-day Gabon via the rivers Ogooué and Lefini he arrived in 1880 in the kingdom of the Téké where on 10 September 1880 he signed the treaty with King Makoko establishing French control over the region and making his capital soon afterwards at the small village named Mfoa later to be called Brazzaville.
[citation needed]The French government allowed for the establishment of the so-called Concessionary Companies in 1889 so as to circumvent the economic non-discrimination provisions of the Treaty of Berlin and maximize the revenue drawn from underpopulated and undeveloped regions under their control.
Cost-benefit considerations reigned supreme as often undercapitalized companies employed unqualified personnel and/or adventurers who lived off the land while stripping their concessions of all possible riches.
Ivory and rubber virtually disappeared from the concessionary areas; indigenous populations were decimated by brutal forced labor, disease, and maladministration, and some fled to neighboring colonies.
The construction between 1921 and 1934 of the 511 km long railway, the Chemin de Fer Congo-Océan between Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire is for example said to have cost the lives of around 23,000 locals and a few hundred Europeans.
On 15 January 1910 the colony again was renamed to French Equatorial Africa (Afrique Equatoriale Française or AEF), this time it also included Chad and Oubangui-Chari, nowadays the Central African Republic.
Peoples from more marginal areas of AEF such as Chad were forced to work in Middle Congo, and funds were funneled primarily into the region, causing a great sense of resentment.
Ultimately the massive expansion of Middle Congo's civil service contributed to a drain of the rural population into the cities, and created an entrenched bureaucracy and trade union network that would prove to be a burden on state stability following independence.
Because of this and his earlier support for De Gaulle he became Governor-General of the Afrique Equatoriale Française (AEF) in 1940, the first non-white to achieve this position in French colonial history.
This conference led to the abolition of forced labor and the code de l'indigénat, which had made the political and social activities of the indigenous people illegal.
This in turn led to the new French constitution of the Fourth Republic approved on 27 October 1946 and the election of the first Equatorial African members of Parliament in Paris.
The Congo went in the space of fourteen years from having no political freedom whatsoever to complete independence, making the rise of legitimate democratic institutions respected by a substantial proportion of the population near-impossible.
For example, between 1946 and 1956 the Lari, an important community in the country, refused to take part in elections, with many under the belief that their deceased messianic leader André Matsoua would return.
Only by aligning himself with his erstwhile enemy, the more radical Jacques Opangault in the parliamentary elections of March 31, 1957 could he continue to play a leading role in Congolese political life.
Prior to independence, the French establishment and Catholic Church feared Opangault's radicalism and favored the rise of Fulbert Youlou, a former priest.
In return both politicians, as well as Germain Bicoumat, joined Youlou's government and received ministerial posts, effectively destroying any organized political opposition.
Development of the sector has been hampered by the nation's traditionally powerful trade unionist movement, political uncertainties, as well as the costs of exploitation in a country with poor transport infrastructure.
A number of people were accused of shooting Ngouabi were tried and some of them executed, including former President Alphonse Massemba-Débat and a fisherman, Chanrithy Moukoko, but there was little evidence to prove their involvement, and the motive behind the assassination remains unclear.
Ending a long history of one-party Marxist rule, a specific agenda for this transition was laid out during Congo's national conference of 1991 and culminated in August 1992 with multi-party parliamentary and presidential elections.
[14] On June 5, 1997, government forces surrounded Sassou Nguesso's home in the Mpila section of Brazzaville, attempting to arrest two men, Pierre Aboya and Engobo Bonaventure, who had been implicated in the earlier violence.
Yhombi-Opango supported Lissouba during the war,[15] serving as leader of the Presidential Majority,[16][full citation needed] and after Sassou Nguesso's victory he fled into exile[15] in Ivory Coast and France.
This new violence also closed the economically vital Congo-Ocean Railway, caused great destruction and loss of life in southern Brazzaville and in the Pool, Bouenza, and Niari regions, and displaced hundreds of thousands of persons.
