The long Agony of the Congo（一）
There are few better, or more depressing, examples of the forces that explain the logic of why economic prosperity is so persistently rare under extractive institutions or that illustrate the synergy between extractive economic and political institutions than the Congo.Portuguese and Dutch visitors to Congo in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries remarked on the “miserable poverty”there.Technology was rudimentary by European standards, with the Kongolese having neither writing,the wheel,nor the plow.the reason for this poverty, and the reluctance of Kongolese farmers to adopt better technologies when they learned of them, is clear from existing historical accounts.It was due to the extractive nature of the countries economic institutions.
As we have seen,the Kingdom of Kongo was governed by the king in Mbanza subsequently Sao·Salvador.Areas away from the capital were ruled by an elite who played the roles of governors of different parts of the kingdom. The wealth of this elite was based on slave plantations around São Salvador and the extraction of tax from the rest of the country.Slavery was central to the economy, used by the elite to supply their own plantations and by Europeans on the coast.Taxes were arbitrary and one of which was even collected every time the king’s beret fell off.
To become more prosperous, the Kongolese people would have had to save and invest in occasions where they buying plows. But it would not have been worthwhile, since any extra output that they produced using better technology would have been subject to expropriation by the king and his narrow elites. Instead of investing to increase their productivity and selling their products in the markets. The masses just moved their villages away from the market, they were trying to be as far away from the roads as possible, in order to reduce the incidence of plunder and to escape the reach of slave traders.
(Extreme working condition for a common miner in Congo,to collect diamond buried in mud)
Nevertheless, though the miserable poverty was widespread, the Kongolese extractive institutions had their own impeccable logic: they made a few people, those with political power, very rich. In the sixteenth century the King of Congo and the aristocracy were able to import European luxury goods and the aristocracy were able to import European luxury goods and were surrounded by servants and slaves. There was nothing to stop the king and his elite from the distribution of powers. The political institutions of Kongo were truly absolutist, making the king and the elite subject to essentially no constraints and could put all the people at their mercy. It shows a pattern that of extractive institutions and political absolutism that empowered and enriched a few now were Belgian France China and elite from the other countries but at the great expense of the labor tears and even blood of the masses.
(a western entrepreneur who exploit the diamond mine in Congo)
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