The violent phase of Central African colonialism, involving the forced extraction of rubber, ivory, and timber, was followed by a more systematic phase of economic organization. One facet was the establishment of formal plantations on which to grow oil palms and rubber trees. These plantations required capital, machinery, and expensive foreign management. As a result, there was little margin left for adequate wages for workers. The recruitment of labour became the duty of the colonial state or its licensed agents. Some workers accepted the incentive of a cash wage to buy material goods or to accumulate the necessary social payments for marriage. Others were driven into the wage sector by the imposition of cash taxes, which could be met only by working for colonial enterprises. But some were recruited on a compulsory basis—not as convicts deserving of punishment but as subjects who needed to be “civilized” by submitting to a work regime imposed by the state.

Where plantations did not develop, the colonial state found a means of extracting wealth from free peasants. They introduced compulsory crops, most notably cotton—“le coton du gouverneur.” Forced cotton imposed severe hardships on farmers, who could not grow food for their families but instead had to clear land to sow cotton for the state. When the crop succeeded, they received a small payment. But much of the cotton regime was applied to marginal lands, where it often failed. The risk was borne by the victim, and famine resulted. The planting of cotton led to frequent protests and to harsh repression in Central Africa, as it did in German East Africa and Portuguese West Africa.

The largest industrial complex to develop in Central Africa was the mining industry of the copper belt in what is now far southeastern Congo (Kinshasa). Leopold had won a race with the British South African empire builder Cecil Rhodes to reach the copper mines and had conquered the kingdom of Msiri, killing the king in the process. The next challenge was to build a transport system that could carry machinery into the mining zone and export finished ingots. The politics of transport were the key to development in the high colonial period, as they had been in the early phase. Two railway lines ran to the Indian Ocean coast: one was built across German Africa to the port of Dar es Salaam and another through British Zambesia to the Portuguese port of Beira; a third railroad crossed Angola to the harbour of Lobito on the Atlantic. None of these, however, was under the control of the Belgians, who planned to create a national route to their own port of Matadi on the Congo estuary. To do so they had to use an expensive and complex mixture of rail and river steamers, and so the copper mines remained integrated in an international network of finance and transport. They also depended on neighbouring regions for their supply of coal and electricity. The industry was dominated by a concession company, the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, which became almost as powerful as the colonial state itself. The two were interlocked in rivalry and mutual dependence, and the Belgian Congo was described as the “portfolio state” for its reliance on copper shares.

Two other mining zones added to the wealth of the colonial Congo: diamonds in the west and gold in the east. Between them the three mining zones were large-scale employers of unskilled labour. Some workers were temporary migrants who worked on contract and whose families subsisted on peasants’ incomes during their absence. Much of the burden of colonialism fell on women, who became heads of households and managers of family farms when the men were taken to the mines. Part of the mine labour was supplied by migrants who moved permanently to the towns and became proletarian workers exclusively dependent on their wages. Among the townsmen, education and technical training became the road to economic advancement. The Belgian colonial system maintained a rigorous paternal structure, however, and, although more subjects became literate in Congo than in other colonies, few could aspire to higher skills or managerial posts. These positions were reserved for the white expatriate population.

One distinctive feature of the colonial era in Central Africa was the role of the church. The state provided so few services that missions moved in to make up the deficit. The most famous of all missionaries was Albert Schweitzer, the Alsatian musician and theologian who became a physician and set up a hospital in the heart of French Equatorial Africa. British Baptists also played a major role in converting the people of the lower Congo area to Protestantism and providing them with basic education and minimal welfare services. When turmoil again hit the region at the end of the colonial period, it was the Baptists who brought services to the mass refugee camps. In the Belgian sphere the Roman Catholic church took a high profile and eventually established a Catholic university through which to train not only colonial whites but also a small elite of Black Africans. The rival to the state church was an independent Black church, built in honour of the martyred preacher Simon Kimbangu, who spent most of his life in a Belgian colonial prison. Later still, Central Africa became a prime zone of evangelism for the fundamentalist groups that sprang up in the United States in the last decades of the 20th century. When the postcolonial state withered, the churches took on greater formal and informal responsibilities for health and education and for communications and financial services in remote areas.