Under Belgian rule, life for the Congolese was miserable, with millions dying of starvation, disease, and poor working conditions.
It was first privately owned by King Leopold II (right) and referred to as the Congo Free State before being renamed the Belgian Congo after it was taken over by the Belgian government. Congo had been a Belgian territory since the 1880s. The Congo Crisis was a period of social, political, and military upheaval in the newly formed Republic of the Congo-Léopoldville (present day Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire). While proxy wars occurred across the globe - from Central and South America, to parts of Asia - this article focuses on the proxy wars that occurred in the central, eastern, and southern portions of Africa. The reverberations from these conflicts would further destabilize the region for years to come, leading to more wars, cases of genocide, and severely dysfunctional economies, the scars of which can still be seen today. Skirmishes and full blown wars would occur as a result, as the two superpowers engaged in proxy wars that would kill many tho usands. As many colonies pursued struggles for independence, the United States, Soviet Union, and China attempted to fill the power vacuums with money and arms. Colonial powers in the region such as England, Portugal, Germany, and Belgium had started declining in power due to the tremendous costs associated with World War II. The African continent, especially the southern and central portions, proved to be fertile grounds for these kind of interventions. By using both diplomatic and military power, the United States and the Soviet Union attempted to carve out areas that could be utilized as staging grounds against one another. Arguably more important, however, was the ability to have friendly governments that could be used as allies to fight conventional wars or provide bases for the placement of nuclear warheads in the case of nuclear warfare.
Both nations found it critical to expand their spheres of influence, largely by promoting leadership in the “Third World” that would be sympathetic to their causes. These tensions almost boiled over into full on conflict several times, especially as nuclear arms proliferation and testing advanced rapidly during the late 1950s and early 1960s. After World War II, the tension between communist and democratic forms of government strained relations between the Soviet Union and the United States and provided the ideological underpinnings of the Cold War.
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