Lives Left to Die: Congo and the Necropolitical Order
Imagine a professional killer — not one who shoots openly, but one who destroys quietly, systematically, and with surgical precision. He drains health resources, prepares the ground for deadly diseases, crushes the spirit — so that when the victim finally dies, no trace remains. The killer moves on, planning his next murders with the comfort of knowing he will never be blamed.
This is precisely the mechanism at work in today’s Congo.
Some die in the fighting, but millions more share a slower, more insidious
fate: poisoned in mines, violated into silence, deprived of healthcare, and
forced into constant displacement — each step bringing them closer to death.
The Congo has become, in Achille Mbembe’s terms, a vast laboratory of necropolitics
— a regime where power decides who may live and who must be left to die. Global
actors, corporations, and regional proxies (Rwanda, Uganda, and the corrupt
Congolese elite) keep their hands clean while perpetuating the same sinister
logic that creates new victims every day.
Mass Rape: The Weaponized Body
According to the American Journal of Public Health,
between 2006 and 2007, an estimated 400,000 Congolese women aged 15–49 were
raped in just one year. A 2011 study reported that 1,152 women — roughly 48
every hour — were sexually assaulted daily across the country.
Armed groups, particularly the Rwandan-backed M23, raid
villages with brutal efficiency. They commit unimaginable crimes before the
eyes of husbands, fathers, and sons. Young girls and children are abducted,
subjected to systematic rape, and forced into pregnancies. Sexual violence
extends far beyond the body — it annihilates families, destroys social fabric,
and shatters entire communities. Survivors are stigmatized, abandoned by their
partners, and the children born of rape are rejected or marginalized.
As a strategy of war, rape aims to make individuals
physically alive yet socially and spiritually dead. It dismantles kinship
structures and terrorizes future generations. In some cases, whole villages
flee, leaving behind homes and history to escape the horror.
Mines and Structural Violence: A Toxic Legacy
The mines of Congo — where the world’s cobalt, coltan, and
other critical minerals for electric cars, smartphones, and computers are
extracted — function as death plantations. This system produces not
prosperity but decay. The country’s $24 trillion mineral wealth is not a source
of life for its people but a slow, grinding death.
Devoid of safety measures, mining pits collapse regularly,
claiming instant lives, while others die slowly, their lungs filled with toxins
and their skin burned from handling ore with bare hands. Despite corporate
promises of “ethical supply chains,” the backbone of Congo’s mining industry
remains child labor and armed exploitation. (As of 2025, an estimated 40,000
children are working in cobalt mines.)
In this slow-kill economy, vital resources are
systematically stripped away. Rivers are poisoned to produce “better” phones;
farmlands turn barren; the Congo Basin — home to one of the world’s largest
rainforests — loses thousands of hectares each year to illegal logging.
Displacement and the Politics of Abandonment
Over the past three decades, conflict has forced more than 7
million Congolese to flee their homes. Today, millions live in makeshift camps,
battling hunger, disease, and despair. Stateless and forgotten, they survive at
the mercy of humanitarian aid — suspended between life and death.
The Architects of Necropolitics
After decades of brutal Belgian colonialism that killed
millions, Congo gained independence in 1960 — only to see its hopes crushed.
The country’s founding leader, Patrice Lumumba, was silenced by a CIA-backed
assassination. Mobutu Sese Seko’s long dictatorship that followed served U.S.
interests while deepening corruption and inequality.
Subsequent regimes oversaw two devastating wars triggered by
invasions from Rwanda and Uganda. Though “peace agreements” were signed, the
violence never stopped — it simply mutated. Backed by global corporations and
Western powers, regional actors keep Congo deliberately unstable to prevent it
from becoming a sovereign nation capable of nationalizing its resources.
The strategy is clear: maintain chaos so the plunder can
continue unchecked. War, rape, hunger, and forced migration are not by-products
— they are desired outcomes.
The Right to Life Is Not Universal
From Gaza to Sudan, from Xinjiang to Congo, the message is
the same: some lives matter less. The global order operates on a hierarchy of
existence where certain populations are deemed disposable.
Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, in the so-called
“developed” world, the allocation of ventilators and ICU beds became an
exercise in necropolitics: younger, “more viable” patients were prioritized
while the elderly were quietly left behind.
For powers that so easily discard their own people,
condemning the historically devalued peoples of Africa to death comes
naturally.
Awareness Is Our Power
For anyone with a conscience, the Democratic Republic of the
Congo is a moral test. The silence of the global media is not an excuse. Our
phones, laptops, and electric cars are built on Congolese blood, sweat, and
soil.
If we devoted even a fraction of the time we spend
researching the next phone model to understanding this system and breaking the
silence, we would already be dismantling its first gear.
Ignoring the link between our comfort and Congo’s suffering
doesn’t make it disappear. Every shopping cart, every “like,” every software
update is part of an ongoing collaboration with this machinery of death.
Congo is not merely a place — it is the dark heart of modern
consumption. Every beat of that heart pumps blood for our luxury. Facing this
truth is the first and most human act toward breaking the machine. The only
power strong enough to challenge this order is our collective awareness.
According to Achille Mbembe, necropolitics is the power
to decide not who lives, but who is left to die — a form of rule that governs
through death rather than life. It includes not only direct killing but also
the slow suffocation of populations through insecurity, poverty, and despair.
In our time, politics no longer protects life; it quietly extinguishes it.
Sources:
Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Duke University Press.
Panzifoundation.org – Rape as a Weapon of War
BBC News – DR Congo: 48 Rapes Every Hour
UNHCR – Almost 80,000 flee DR Congo amid fighting, sexual violence
Humanium.org – Child Labour in Cobalt Mines of the DRC
Amnesty International – “This Is What We Die For”: Human Rights Abuses in
the DRC Power the Global Cobalt Trade
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