Congo Peace, Belgium and Pende Rebellion
June 28, 2025
by William P. Meyers

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Poor Little Belgium, Not

Yesterday, Friday, June 27, 2025, the nation states of Rwanda, the United States of America, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo signed a peace agreement. Congo and Rwanda had not been officially at war, neither had the U.S., but rebel and militia groups had been fighting in the eastern Congo for decades. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who plays Joachim von Ribbentrop to Trump's Hitler, signed for the U.S.

By coincidence I am reading a novel, A Bend in the River, by V.S. Naipaul. Which mentions the Bapende (or Pende) Rebellion on page 131 of my Vintage paperback edition. It is good to remember that the Congo was once called the Belgian Congo. Because Belgium conquered it in 1908, though it had been meddling in the area since the mid 1800s. I'll return to the Pende revolt and the new peace treaty, shortly, but first a bit of U.S. propaganda history.

I am ancient. I take it from discussions with children that World War I and World War II are ancient history now, hard to distinguish from the Civil War, Caesar's conquest of Gaul, or the building of the pyramids. But when I was a child World War I and World War II loomed large. Both my parents served in the U.S. military in World War II, and both my grandfathers served in the U.S. military in World War I. I was taught the standard U.S. propaganda view of the wars.

Here I want to focus briefly on "poor little Belgium." In both world wars the main enemies were France and Germany. Belgium, like the Netherlands, lies between the two nations. Germany, to fight France, decided it made strategic sense to conquer Belgium first. Thus it is easy to portray Germany as the big bully and Belgium as the small victim.

But Belgium ruled the Belgian Congo, which encompassed about 905,000 square miles (2,345,000 square kilometers). Germany's size has varied dramatically, depending on the chances of war, but is currently 358,000 square miles. So Belgium was not really so small, so poor, or so innocent.

The Belgian treatment of Africa was unimaginably cruel, but imaginably profitable. The ordinary good Belgians went along with this regime; they did nothing to stop it. The Congo was an area with many tribes. Among those tribes were the Pende. They suffered like the other tribes. In 1931 they revolted.

Officially there was no slavery in the Congo. Unofficially, there was nothing but slavery, or forced labor. This was largely done through a head tax. The natives had no way of paying the head tax except working for the Belgian companies for slave wages. In the case of the Pende, the primary method of payment was by picking palm fruit. Around 1930 the company lowered the pay from about 2.5 francs to 1 franc, for picking 30 kilos of fruit. Then a new supplementary tax was added. To pay the new tax a single man had to but almost 1 ton of fruit. But if he had a wife he had to pay the tax for here as well. This was added to other abuses. By the way, the main corporation that exploited the Pende workers is now known as Unilever.

Unfortunately, for the same reasons that the Belgians were able to conquer Congo in the first place, they were able to crush the revolt. They used machine guns. The natives used bows and arrows. The revolt started in May of 1931 and ended in September that year.

The scope of injustice, from initial contact to the granting of independence in 1960, was large. Despite the small population of Belgium itself, its cruelty is comparable to that of Nazi Germany, the British Empire, or the slave states of the U.S.

The Congo is not a natural nation, though it may become one over time. It still has a tribal composition. Rwanda is geographically much small, but is well known for its division between Hutu and Tutsi. The eastern part of the Congo that touches Rwanda, and is far from the capital of Congo, Kinshasa.

Predators like Trump and Rubio are only interested in the peace of organized criminals: no one daring to interfere with their unjust methods of making profits. The new treaty gives the U.S. mineral rights, but it does not give you or me mineral rights. Those rights will go to some U.S. corporation, which will doubtless give the Trump family a secret share of stock for its good work in stealing from the people of the Congo.

It is a corrupt world. Occasionally justice prevails, but a just society is always fragile. Trump and his gangster crew, even if they lose the next election, will come out of this four-year reign far richer. Far more able to buy off police forces, judges, whole foreign governments. They have even taken over the FBI. I see no Eliot Ness in the wings to rescue us from Trumpism.

What will be interesting is to see how much military force will be necessary for Trump to actually mine the cobalt and other minerals he made the deal for.