Text by Koli Jean Bofane
Excerpt from ‘Congo Inc. Bismarck’s Testament’, by In Koli Jean Bofane, trans. Marjolijn de Jager, Indiana University Press, 2018, pp. 174–175; original publication in French in 2014 (Actes Sud)
12. Game Over!
The algorithm Congo Inc. had been created at the moment that Africa was being chopped up in Berlin between November 1884 and February 1885. Under Leopold II’s sharecropping, they had hastily developed it so they could supply the whole world with rubber from the equator, without which the industrial era wouldn’t have expanded as rapidly as it needed to at the time. Subsequently, its contribution to the First World War effort had been crucial, even if that war—most of it—could have been fo (…)
