Congo River and Basin Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This Congo River and Basin Essay example is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic, please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

The Congo River is the second largest river in Africa (after the Nile) with a length of 2,718 miles. It has greatest flow of any river in the continent and second only to the Amazon worldwide. The river drains more than 1.3 million square miles, making its watershed, the Congo Basin, once again second only to that of the Amazon. Due to the fact that part of the Congo River flows above the Equator and the rest below it, it has a year-round flow and no dry season. In its final descent from Malebo Pool in the Democratic Republic of Congo into the Atlantic Ocean, the river falls more than 1,000 feet in merely 200 miles. Because of its perennial flow and topography, Congo River alone accounts for about one-sixth of the world’s hydroelectric potential. Recently, the South African state-owned power enterprise, Eskon, has announced plans to build the largest power-generating dam in the world on the Congo. Once completed, it would produce twice as much energy as the Three Gorges Dam in China. A major transportation route, the Congo River houses several towns and cities along its banks. These include the capital of Democratic Republic of Congo, Kinshasa, and Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo.

Several, mostly small chieftaincies have historically existed along the Congo, their livelihood predicated upon fishing. In 1485, a Portuguese explorer first came across the mouth of the Congo River, and thereafter several expeditions tried to approach its source. Each of these attempts, however, was futile because of the strong flow of the Congo and the presence of more than 30 imposing cataracts in the first 200 miles. It was only in 1885 that the British-American explorer Henry Morgan Stanley managed to navigate the entire length of the Congo. He did it, however, from the opposite direction. Stanley’s group started in Zanzibar on the eastern coast of Africa and decided to follow the route of the Congo River, first believing that it was the Nile. A few years later, Stanley was contracted by King Leopold II of Belgium to further explore the river and set up trading and military stations along it. This sowed the seeds for full-blown colonialism in Congo; carried out at first personally by Leopold, and after his death in 1909 by the Belgian state.

Political dynamics have been central to the environmental history of the Congo River and basin. The river is perfectly navigable after Malebo Pool, and portage railways were built by forced labor in the 1890s to bypass the cataracts. This set the base for massive exploitation of resources such as ivory, rubber, copper, and gold in the interior of Congo during the colonial period. Large-scale deforestation for timber and rubber plantations was routine during the Belgian colonial occupation of the Congo in the first half of the 20th century. The legacy of plunder has been continued by postcolonial rulers of Congo. Mobuto Sese Seko, the president of Congo for 32 years, amassed great personal riches from the Congo’s vast resources. After a coup that ended Mobuto’s tyrannical rule in 1997, however, Congo spiraled into civil war that cost millions of lives.

The Congo River flows through the second largest rainforest in the world. It has received some attention with regards to the political ecology of climate change, but not nearly as much as the Amazon basin. Both state-led and unregulated logging and incessant mining in the region-often to finance warring militias-pose a threat to the forests and to biodiversity in the region. If unchecked, this will not only deplete a significant carbon sink, it will prove to be devastating for millions of people whose livelihoods depend on the rainforest.

Bibliography:

Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Dover, 1990);
Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Houghton Mifflin, 1999);
Harms, River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade 1500-1891 (Yale University Press, 1981);
M. Iloweka, “The Deforestation of Rural Areas in the Lower Congo Province,” Environmental Monitoring and Assessment (v.99/1-3, 2004);
Stewart, Rumba on the River: A History of the Popular Music of the Two Congos (Verso, 2000);
Wilkie, et al., “Roads, Development and Conservation in the Congo Basin,” Conservation Biology, (v.14/6, 2000).