ESSAYS| Congo Catastrophe
I had intended this piece based on visiting the Central Africa Museum in Brussels to provide the final few paragraphs of the second account of my experience in Brussels (see Shorts|Times of My Life 4). I soon realised that, to make more sense to me, the Museum visit required a much broader and more thorough background. I needed colonial history and some focused detail about the more recent period leading up to independence. And so the books came out, the reading delivered and I ended up with this essay on Congo history, the Belgian involvement and the chaotic efforts to establish an independent nation.
Catastrophe and Tragedy as the Congo Disintegrates
Prologue
The early months of 1961 exposed me to the developmental stages of two disasters, one at very much closer range than the other. At the level of person-to-person relationships, my colleague Jimmy and Monique’s troubled marriage had been unravelling fast towards an untidy conclusion. Whether the action was in west London, in the room next door to mine in the Hotel Richmond in Brussels, or at her parents’ country cottage at Fontainbleau, the eventual outcome was probably always on the cards. By July 2nd, like Ernest Hemingway’s life, it was all over. One hopes they each remarried later to enjoy a much better experience at the second attempt.
The Museum at Tervuren
At the macro level, disaster was being generated during those same months on a massive and terrible scale, as national and international forces combined in the violent independence birth-throes of the former Belgian Congo. Today over fifty years later at time of writing, the country, now called the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), having just managed to survive one of the longest and most corrupt dictatorships imaginable, still remains mired in writhing, directionless suffering. Several millions of its people were indiscriminately butchered on the slightest whim of any number of rival rebel groups throughout the late 1990s. During the same period, millions were slaughtered in a near-genocide in neighbouring Rwanda while those parts of the world (i.e. our own) that might have done something to prevent it did practically nothing.
Given the potential economic prizes in this huge territory, at the turn of the millennium nearly every neighbouring country had some overt or undercover military presence in the continuing power struggles. Tens of thousands die every month from preventable diseases. There has never been anything very democratic in the Democratic Republic of Congo: in the east of the country, uncontrolled warlords are still serially on the rampage, tensions kept high by forces competing to harvest the area’s highly valued mineral wealth. Chief among them is coltan, the substance that needs to be present in practically every electronic device in the world, of which the DRC is one of only a few sources on the planet.
Visiting the Royal Africa Museum at Tervuren in 1961 was timely. Anyone trying to make sense of the day-by-day events of that terrible year immediately following official independence in 1960 needs a much longer historical perspective of the whole colonial period. Admittedly, the tentative coupling of causes and effects is complicated and obfuscated by the intervention of external international players. It takes years for the extent of their involvement to become acknowledged and more widely known. Still, if you’re looking for some firm ground to start with, Tervuren should provide it. It’s now called Musée Royale de l’Afrique Centrale, or Koninklijk Museum voor Midden-Afrika. Because, in the Museum’s own apologetic words, the permanent exhibition ‘still reflects the way Europe regarded Africa in the nineteen-sixties, despite a radically altered social context not only in Africa but here [in Europe] as well’, the whole place has been undergoing a massive programme of renovation, reorganisation and refurbishment (and, who knows, reinterpretation) which was expected to be completed in 2010. Meanwhile, with some galleries closed for long periods, temporary exhibitions continued to be staged.
Memory of Congo: The Colonial Era was one of these, which ran during most of 2005. I expected its explanatory guide booklet to provide some valuable, detailed background material on the former Belgian Congo, available today in a form, and touching on matters, that would not have been at all accessible fifty years ago when the colonial era was undergoing its sudden and catastrophic collapse. Even now, the text seems to suffer in key places from a restrained ‘establishment’ amnesia that other relatively recent visitors to the Museum have also highlighted. While researching their books, both Michela Wrong (In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz, 2000) and Adam Hochschild (King Leopold’s Ghost, 1998) visited the Museum and comment on this aspect.
Built at the turn of the century on the orders of King Leopold II, the only European
monarch to ever personally own an African colony, the Royal Museum for Central
Africa boasts one of the largest collections of Congolese artefacts in the world. But
the quantity of items stored inside this elegant building in Tervuren – the Belgian
equivalent of Versailles – has done nothing to prevent a strikingly simplistic vision
of history from emerging.
On the day I visited, the woman handing out tickets . . . seemed surprised I wanted
to see the permanent collection, rather than a special exhibition of West African
masks on temporary display. Strolling under the gilded cupolas . . . I began to see
why even its staff might regard the museum as an anachronism and feel a sense of
relief that a large number of the exhibits were currently hidden from view,
undergoing refurbishment.
Political correctness, the modern sense that colonialism is something to be regretted
rather than gloried in, had made the barest of inroads here . . . Under his [Leopold’s]
watchful eye, history is still being sieved through the mental filter of the nineteenth-
century capitalist and driven missionary – colonialism as economic opportunity and
soul-saving expedition, all wrapped up into one convenient package.
Michela Wrong: In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz, (Fourth Estate, 2001) pp 35-6
Having observed the pointed lack of commentary on the far from savoury methods of using African labour to extract rubber, minerals and other primary assets from the Congo, she even wonders whether it was a ‘symbolic accident or deliberate . . . that the lights in the rooms displaying the battered suitcase and worn khaki bag used by Stanley were barely working, discouraging any lingering over Congo’s controversial pioneer’. You could not fail to come away with the strongest impression that Leopold colonised the Congo, not for commercial or vain imperialist reasons, but in a monumental act of philanthropy ‘to snuff out the barbaric slave trade that for centuries had robbed central Africa of its strongest and its best’. That was how he sold it to the other (very) interested European powers at the Berlin Conference in 1884, and that is how they swallowed it. He was clearly most convincing. Sir Bartle Frere is quoted in Thomas Packenham: The Scramble for Africa (1991), as saying, following Leopold’s personal explanation to him in Brussels in 1883: ‘. . . his designs are most philanthropic and are amongst the few schemes of the kind . . . free from any selfish commercial or political object.’
Hochschild’s final chapter on this same theme is entitled ‘The Great Forgetting’. He begins by declaring that the Museum of the Revolution in Moscow ‘has changed in ways its creators could never have imagined’. And yet, ‘on the other side of Europe is one that has not changed in the slightest’. Whatever you might see in any of the Museum’s twenty large exhibition galleries, ‘in none . . . is there the slightest hint that millions of Congolese met unnatural deaths.’ He broadens this point to observe that numerous great buildings and monuments in and around Brussels – including the very Royal Palace at Laeken - were financed, with never a word of acknowledgement or recognition, ‘from the blood spilled in the Congo, the stolen land, the severed hands, the shattered families and orphaned children’. One of the city’s grandest Congo-financed monuments is the great Cinquantenaire Arch, now frequently providing the backdrop to TV reports from the bureaucracies of the European Union. ‘But of the millions of Africans whose labours paid for all this and sent them to sepulchres of unmarked earth, there is no sign’.
Even grander, in Michela Wrong’s opinion, is the Hotel van Eetvelde on Avenue Palmerston, which she describes as ‘pure Congo’, as well as many other costly projects beyond Brussels which Leopold could commission, ‘thanks to this independent monetary source he could tap at will’. At the Eetvelde:
The hardwoods that lined the ceilings, the marble on the floors, the onyx for the
walls and the copper edging each step of the curving staircase all came from the
colony. What did not come directly from the colony was paid for with its proceeds
. . . [plus] Ostend’s golf course and sea-side arcade and a host of other works were
all provided by the Congo. But there was more, much more, and not all of it quite
so obvious to public eyes: presents for Leopold’s demanding young mistress; a
special landing stage for the yacht he, like Mobutu later, would use as a place to
hide away from an increasingly hostile public, sometimes spending months abroad;
Parisian chateaux; estates in the south of France and a fabulous villa in Cap Ferrat . . .
Michela Wrong: In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz, p 46-7
In fairness, as Hochschild rightly says, Brussels isn’t the only culprit where collective amnesia is concerned. Paris and Lisbon have no reminders of the huge slices of population wiped out by their commercial activities in French and Portuguese Africa. The existence of slavery in the American South is hardly marked by any kind of monument, while reminders of Civil War events and preserved plantation-owners’ mansions are everywhere.
And yet the world we live in – its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between
rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence – is shaped far less
by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget.
Leopold’s Congo is but one of those silences of history.
Adam Hochschild: King Leopold’s Ghost (Papermac, 2000) p 294
The Museum’s guide to Memory of Congo does admit that it, the Museum, had been ‘a great producer of images on the Congo and the colonisation. A propaganda tool, it was also a scientific establishment . . .’ Despite its generally disinterested and neutral approach, the guide does raise two of the critical issues. There are special panels entitled ‘Genocide in the Congo?’ and ‘Brutalities and acts of barbarism’. In both cases, there’s a serious insistence on identifying and examining real evidence. Both conclude that, whatever actually occurred on the ground, much has been exaggerated in the past and been based on far from scientific sources. As the genocide discussion rightly points out, demographic data of any kind – let alone accurate - was notoriously difficult to come by at the end of the 19th century in a country the size of the Congo. This would be true of practically any as yet unexplored African country at the time, and still presents difficulties in many, especially when conducting nationwide elections. Motives alter cases: any explorer with an eye to encouraging future European investment or even colonisation in such an area might be likely to overestimate the population to suggest an abundance of useful local labour. Population figures of between 20 and 30 million were suggested during the key period 1885-1910.
Edmund Morel was one of the first Europeans, in the early 1900s, to suspect that the Congo Free State was not so much a ‘free’ state as a ‘slave’ state maintained by armed force. In 1906 he was also
the first to put a figure on the loss of human life in the Congo, which he arbitrarily
estimated as between 100,000 and 500,000 a year. [Assuming an original population
of 20 million] he finally reached the figure of 10 million lives lost for the period from
1890 to 1910 and he attributed all these losses to colonial violence . . . This estimate
later became firmly embedded in popular accounts.
By the 1920s it was thought that 18 million might have been a reasonable starting figure for 1885 and that a reduction of 50% had indeed occurred. Now other potential causes were introduced, such as ‘epidemics and disruptions brought on by conscription of labour and the movement of people’. Similar orders of population reduction were announced in neighbouring countries but all still based on no more than estimates in the absence of any controlled population census. Present-day historians apparently reject the high estimated figures of the 1890s, while accepting that population decline took place particularly in the 1920s, ‘the grounds for which lay in the period prior to that’.
The guide’s discussion gives Leopold II an easier ride than many would believe appropriate or deserved. It concludes that the history of population decline
now sets the abuses of power of Leopold’s regime within a wider context including
health factors and movements of people, without attributing exclusive significance
to any one of these factors alone.
Unfortunately, the media today appear to be unaware of these conclusions, as the
estimates of human losses made in the 1920s are maintained and attributed
exclusively to human factors and deliberately described as ‘genocide’ . . . This
interpretation has no scientific basis.
Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren:
Guide to exhibition Memory of Congo: The Colonial Era (2005)
As the booklet itself says, ‘genocide’ is ‘the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group’. It seems unlikely that such a policy would ever have been part of Leopold’s or the successor Belgian government’s administration of the Congo. There would be no point. What they needed to help fulfil their commercial ambitions was, above all, a limitless supply of labour. On the other hand, the excessively brutal methods of using that labour and of clearing tracts of land of their populations for commercial exploitation took a massive toll. As the virtually unavoidable part of the process, they caused quite remarkable and shockingly huge numbers of deaths consistently over several decades. While rejecting the use of the term ‘genocide’ with some justification, the guide fails completely here to tackle the main issue.
The Museum is right to admit to its earlier permanent displays reflecting the mindset of 1960s Europe. One wonders whether they read Hochschild’s book while preparing the Memory of Congo exhibition of 2005. The ‘Brutalities and acts of barbarism’ panel initially suggests that someone may have done so and begins with much less shifty avoidance of culpabilities. As British Consul Roger Casement showed, many very ugly things did take place during 20 years of the early 20th century, rapaciously fuelled by the worldwide rubber boom. There was no shortage of witnesses, African and European, to the inhumane treatment of workers and massive abuses of power by all concerned in the insatiable collection of rubber. Casement’s report stimulated Leopold to agree to send a Commission of enquiry to the Congo. In turn, their painstaking report triggered the Belgian government’s decision to annex the Congo and relieve Leopold of any further direct involvement in its administration.
However, in its determination to be historically even-handed, the discussion then accuses many at the time of a degree of amnesia towards an ‘equally real’ historical matter:
. . . the sense of liberating progress that the Congo State constituted for numerous
witnesses and collaborators from the very beginning, African as well as European.
This partial amnesia matched the organised amnesia back in Belgium, particularly
once it had annexed the Congo: politicians, the press and schools kept silent about the
errors of the past whilst pursuing the critics of Leopold’s regime. In Belgium, this
revisionism was rarely questioned, particularly since archives remained either closed
or subject to arbitrary access. [It’s said that Leopold and his aides took eight continuous
days to burn all his papers relating to the period of his ownership of the Congo Free State].
The international press for its part continued to portray the Congo as an example of colonial
abuse and Western humanitarianism.
Today the history of atrocities in the Congo has given rise to a ‘genre’ all of its own, as
prominent authors capitalise on the catalogue of atrocities, the boldest and most extreme,
working it into an extensive account of 20th century barbarity and, more particularly, a history
of mass murder . . . it reduces an entire history to the balefulness of one man, Leopold II . . .
and reduces the Congo State to a theatre of horrors.
Tervuren guide, cited above
Perhaps Hochschild’s book and others are being called to account in the above. In diverting criticism from Leopold and the later Belgian government’s colonial period, the plea is made for the atrocities and abuses of the rubber era to be viewed differently. Not as uniquely and horribly attributable to those agencies, but in a global context of much more widespread colonial crisis in Oceania and the New World as well as numerous other parts of Africa. The point is rightly made, as so often in discussions on the slave trade, that those who might call themselves ‘civilised’ were content, perhaps occasionally squirming slightly when lying awake at night, to condone a range of barbarities inflicted on indigenous populations over some 50 years. It chimed with their ‘Sacred Hunger’, the title of Barrie Unsworth’s slave-trade novel, that pure and simple greed generated and driven by the prospect of the monumentally undreamed-of profits to be made from successful colonial ventures – despite their involving forced labour, the cruellest physical mutilations and much else of utter barbarity. Even so, broadening the issue to include the blameworthy ‘civilised’ and other colonial powers behaving similarly does nothing to
excuse anyone.
A bigger historical picture: early colonisation
I seem to recall gigantic statues of triumphal elephants outside the Museum but very little of its contents. I must have wandered through, around and past galleries devoted to ethnography and African arts; history, prehistory and archaeology; agriculture and the forest economy; the richness of Congo zoology; landscapes, geology and mineralogy, a chief source of the country’s potential wealth - and of contemporary national and international political struggle. You could certainly spend at least an entire day here and I probably spent much less. Did I see the slave manacles in a glass case, or items of Stanley’s clothing and equipment? Perhaps - apparently they were there. But was there also a rhino whip on display, capable of flaying a human being, even killing one if applied with sufficient force and commitment? I don’t know, although the recent exhibition does show a photograph of such a whip in use, perhaps attributed to the usual culprits, the ‘wicked Arab slave traders’.
Europeans arriving on previously unmapped shores have tended to assume that, because they have never been there nor seen it before, the territory is more or less empty and has neither residents nor history. Those first arriving in North America met local residents almost immediately but little knew then that the entire continent was copiously sprinkled with ‘Indian’ tribes from coast to coast. Or that such tribes would be traceable back to periods like Bronze and Iron Ages, just like ourselves. The vast emptiness of Australia contained, to their amazement, aborigines who had lived in, on and by the land for uncountable generations. So it was with Africa, largely perceived from Europe as a ‘dark continent’ (the term Stanley used in his title Through the Dark Continent).
Absence of historical records does not mean there has been no history. We now acknowledge Central Africa as the cradle of our species homo sapiens, developing somewhere between two-and-a-half and four million years ago. Over thousands of generations of selective evolution, primitive humans refined themselves while Africa remained at the centre of the inhabited world. They used ‘pebble tools’ and then, some three hundred thousand years ago, ‘hand-axes’ to skin and chop the animals they then ate raw. It was only some fifty thousand years ago that late Palaeolithic man in both Africa and Europe discovered fire. ‘The resulting social and economic revolution was probably the most profound in human history.’ (Oliver and Fage: A Short History of Africa, 1962).
But it was only about ten thousand years ago that man began cultivation to produce food crops. This revolution led to the establishment of more settled communities, along with the taming and breeding of animals to keep for food, rather than drifting over the landscape to hunt for them. The process apparently worked its way down the continent from Egypt, developing in sub-Saharan regions by the late fourth millennium BC. In the equatorial forests of Guinea (i.e. West Africa) and Congo, where there was insufficient sunlight for growing cereals or providing adequate fodder for livestock, food production concentrated more on nurturing roots and fruits rather than grain, and on fishing not hunting. Indigenous food sources included yams, oil palm, kaffir potato and different sorts of pea and bean. In fact, the most significant food plants in Africa today came from other continents. Various plants, including the banana, came from South-East Asia, while the staples cassava and maize arrived from the Americas only as late as the 16th and 17th centuries AD.
It may be safe to say that, during the four thousand years up to the beginning of the Christian era, the Congo basin remained largely undisturbed. Around it, however, plenty was going on. During that long period, the great dynasties of Egypt and their towns, cities and magnificent monuments had come and gone. Gone too were the civilisations of the Sudan; the North African developments along the Mediterranean coasts; the Arab Empire establishing itself north of the Sahara during the first century AD. Then came the Great Age of Islam. It expressed itself through a series of Empires along the North African coast and south across the Sahara nearly to the Atlantic and certainly as far west as Lake Chad between c.973 and c.1250 AD when the Kanem Empire flourished in or close to north-eastern Nigeria.
Closer to our concern is the tropical rainforest region of West and Central Africa. The area right along the ‘bulge’ of West Africa was usually known as Guinea. Its coastal belt, well south of the River Niger, was dense forest and mostly untouched and unknown by the Arabs or others from the north of the continent. European traders had been slipping in and out of its ports for centuries, and particular stretches of the coast were named for their specific products: the Grain Coast, the Ivory, Gold and Slave Coasts. A trans-Saharan trading network, particularly from the direction of Sudan, also developed and expanded, bringing a wide range of commodities south (especially salt) and taking north goods such as gold, kola nuts and ivory. For the inhabitants of the Congo basin, with its minute coastline and even denser forest cover, it’s likely that relatively little such activity bothered them. Nevertheless, according to the Tervuren guide:
In the course of two thousand years [dating from roughly 300AD], agriculture and
cattle-breeding are established and the use of copper and iron develops, while a
network of commercial, technological and artistic exchanges is formed. During the
16th century, relations with the world beyond Africa are established via the Atlantic
seaboard, as a result of European navigation. From this time onwards, in some areas,
centralised political systems began to form around royal courts, thus introducing a
new phase of the region’s history.
The trans-Saharan trade patterns functioned right through the Middle Ages but, interestingly, there was no noticeable trade in slaves until at least the 12th century, and then only on a small scale. Most rulers and other wielders of power, at whatever level in their society, displayed that power by showing off the huge numbers of slaves – along with horses and cattle – that they kept for their own use. The Guinea states did not engage in large-scale slave trading until the growing demand from Europe from the 16th century onwards. That commodity aside, Europeans coming to the Guinea coast during the 15th century found commercial mechanisms working well, with highly valued goods available from as far afield as Morocco, and urban settlement patterns resulting from both stability and wealth. As we know now, the arrival of that sea-borne trade on the West African coasts was to change the nature of that region fundamentally, in every conceivable respect.
The first major players were the Portuguese. Through their extensive contacts with the North African states, they learned of the Guinea Coast and its potential riches, as well as about shipping routes into East Africa. Having already set themselves up on the Cape Verde Islands from 1445 onwards, they reached the Gold Coast in 1471, where they found so much gold, particularly at Elmina, that they rapidly built a string of forts to keep their European competitors away from it. This operation, linked to their successes on the east of the continent, gave Portugal ‘complete freedom to penetrate Negro Africa at any point she chose from the Senegal to the Red Sea’, though her hold on East Africa and the Red Sea ports was considerably loosened by the Ottoman Turks during the 16th century.
Whatever disturbances and re-settlements were taking place at the time in the northern reaches of Africa, the European maritime trade with the Guinea coast grew only slowly. Of course, gold and ivory were always in demand but merchants went to Asia for other luxury goods like silk, perfumes and spices. Some small-scale plantations were established to produce European requirements on nearby islands or very near the coast, but the rest of the terrain was too dense and potentially dangerous, if only in health terms, to be managed effectively. In the 17th century, however, everything changed with the fast-growing demand for labour on the European-owned plantations in the New World. Sugar was the crop, demand for it at home was insatiable, and England, France and the Dutch engaged in fierce competition for the trade.
It is thought that 1.3 million slaves were landed (many more shipped) in the West Indies during the 17th century and as many as 6 million during the 18th century. By the end of that century, the result of the international competition was that nearly half of all slaves shipped to tropical America were carried on British ships. Britain’s commercial and maritime power was growing in Europe and she was also devoting considerable attention and investment to the Slave Coast, the area between Gold Coast and the Niger Delta (the coastal belt of today’s Nigeria). The expanding slave trade during the 17th and 18th centuries meant that centres of wealth and power became well established along the Coast, particularly Benin, Oyo and Ashanti. The European traders of the time were so focused on their trade, especially that in slaves, that they made virtually no attempts to penetrate the interior beyond the coastal belt.
Discovering the Congo River estuary in 1482, the Portuguese had made contact with one of the largest states of sub-Saharan Africa: the huge, sprawling kingdom of the Bakongo. It had a kind of federated structure, largely because of the tremendous distances involved, where local regional chiefs ran their own affairs more or less independently of any central control. These Kongo chiefs did respect a formal allegiance to the Manikongo’s supremacy, though more in theory than in practice. Most of the central part of Angola (previously Ngola) south of the river participated in this loose association. During the later 15th and early 16th centuries, the Portuguese sent in Christian missionaries along with a variety of skilled tradesmen, but progress with such ‘civilising’ activities tended to be increasingly overtaken by the demands of the slave trade.
In time, the burgeoning Portuguese colony of Brazil was making such enormous demands for labour that rather more direct supply methods than previously used were called for. In 1575 the conquistador Paolo Dias established his base in Loanda, just south of the Kongo border, initiating a century-long war of conquest against the Ngola peoples. Oliver and Fage (A Short History of Africa, p130-1) describe this phase of colonial expansion:
The new Portuguese method of colonisation, aimed principally at supplying
the slave trade, was to train and arm bands of native ‘allies’ to make war on the
peoples all round the slowly expanding frontier of the colony; and naturally it
was not long before the Kongo kingdom’s southern provinces became a favourite
target for such forays, most of which were carried out by cannibal brigands called
the Jaga or Yaka. Early seventeenth century. Manikongos, all of whom were still
Christian in name, made pitiful appeals to the Holy See through their missionaries.
Several Popes showed a personal concern . . . but the Portuguese government
declared itself powerless to control its subjects in Angola. Finally in 1660 the
Bakongo turned to war – with disastrous results. Defeated by the Portuguese . . .
[they] were left too weak to maintain the internal unity of their kingdom … Angola
remained the supply-base for the Brazil slave trade, and during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries was converted into a howling wilderness. The Kongo kingdom
was near enough to the storm to be torn apart by it.
So, for at least two continuous centuries, the Europeans generally consolidated their operations in Africa, based on the export of vast numbers of slaves and of other valued commodities. There were few attempts to venture inland - except for missionaries and isolated explorers, of whom Stanley was the most notable in both his achievements and effects - or to develop much in the way of administrative structures. Left alone, these informal patterns might have continued for another hundred years. Well into the nineteenth century, there was no sign whatever that any European power was nurturing colonial intentions. These undertakings had limited aims: they were commercial, not political, concerned, above anything else, with making money. Indeed, as Oliver and Fage suggest, if all had remained that way: ‘Had full-scale European intervention been delayed fifty years . . . the northern two-thirds [of Africa] would have belonged culturally to the world of Islam.’
The Scramble and King Leopold II
But suddenly large parts of the continent became subject to an internationally negotiated parcelling out of territory. The rush began, not among the small number of powers with established, though relatively small, tropical African interests, but with those who had none and wanted some. Chief among these new players were King Leopold II of Belgium, with his crudely commercial motives, the establishment of a vast monopoly to feed his personal coffers and boost his personal status. Germany, the other significant new entrant, had quietly made several effective African land-grabs, not for reasons of empire, but much more subtly to exert long-term political influence in European affairs involving herself, Britain and France. The old convenient ‘balance of power’ had been upset. The three traditional operators each felt threatened, both by their rivals and particularly by the newly interested parties, who were soon joined by Spain and Italy also wanting a share. It was really Leopold’s intention to make the Congo his personal empire that most disturbed Portugal, Britain and France, leading to Bismarck calling the Berlin Conference in December 1884 to settle ‘the Congo question’. It achieved rather more than that: a colonial cake-slicing of the continent as European politics were played out on African territory.
Thomas Packenham, in his magisterial study of what came to be called the ‘Scramble for Africa’, neatly summarises this situation, with special reference to Congo and Leopold:
Ever since Roman times, Europe had been nibbling at the mysterious continent
to the south. By the mid-1870s, much was still mysterious. It was known that
Africa straddled the equator with uncanny precision. But no explorer had penetrated far along the dangerous latitude of zero towards the interior. No one knew which
Was Africa’s greatest river or where it led. Europeans pictured most of the continent
as ‘vacant’: legally res nullius, a no-man’s-land. If there were states and rulers, they
were African. If there were treasures they were buried in African soil. But beyond the
trading posts on the coastal fringe, and strategically important colonies in Algeria and
South Africa, Europe saw no reason to intervene.
Suddenly, in half a generation, the Scramble gave Europe virtually the whole
continent: including thirty new colonies and protectorates, 10 million square miles
of new territory and 110 million dazed new subjects, acquired by one method or
another. Africa was sliced up like a cake, the pieces swallowed by five rival nations –
Germany, Italy, Portugal, France and Britain (with Spain taking some scraps) – and
Britain and France were at each other’s throats. At the centre, exploiting the rivalry,
stood one enigmatic individual and self-styled philanthropist, controlling the heart
of the continent: Leopold II, King of the Belgians.
[And leading us forward to the 1960s . . .] Europe had imposed its will on Africa at
the point of a gun. It was a lesson that would be remembered, fifty years later, when
Africa came to win its independence.
Thomas Packenham: The Scramble for Africa, (1991) p.xxiii
What now seems as amazing as anything else, and it applies throughout Africa, is just how short a period of time the colonial adventure occupied. The continent was carved up in 1885 but, just over seventy years later, the Gold Coast had already become independent Ghana in 1957. Following this initial breaching of the colonial dam, Nigeria achieved independence in 1960, the same year as the Congo’s hurried, unprepared and terrible liberation. By 1963, the four British East African colonies were all independent. Viewed against the broader historical background, the colonial period is a tiny aberration. But that small chapter, despite its brevity, dramatically interrupted the natural, slow-moving flow of African affairs. It disturbed, damaged and frequently destroyed completely existing power structures, conventions of behaviour and regional boundaries. It imposed on its subjects alien and often incomprehensible new systems of living which, if not willingly absorbed, were enforced at gun-point and often maintained in place by the harshest of repressive methods. Nowhere was that more true, especially during the rubber-farming years, than in the Congo.
The Congo Free State (really Leopold’s personal commercial undertaking, Association Internationale du Congo) was based on a string of treaties Stanley had obtained with unwitting tribal chiefs who had no idea what they were signing at the time, nor what they were signing away in terms of land and rights. The structures of the State were all codified in writing but most of it was a ‘private estate’ reserved for Leopold’s use and later also for numerous mainly Belgian companies. Much of the revenues went to finance the King’s grandiose projects elsewhere. Until the Belgian government annexed the Congo in 1908, it was ‘more of a private enterprise than a colony’ and a magnificent ‘money-maker almost from birth’. Despite this, Leopold pretended it was not doing well, and secured massive loans, based on entirely false accounts, from the Belgian government. Like some modern African dictators, no one knew just how much money he had made and used for his own purposes. Big deals were done through concealed third parties and holding companies in other European countries. It took the Belgian investigators some fifteen years to disentangle his financial web, not helped by his destruction by fire of all his paper records. He told Stinglhamber, one of his aides: ‘I will give them my Congo, but they have no right to know what I did there.’
How did Leopold reach the situation of having his private colony confiscated? The first few years of the Congo Free State were not particularly successful economically. Leopold had borrowed heavily from the government and floated numerous investment vehicles for which he was ultimately heavily liable. The worldwide rubber boom of the 1890s saved him - not just saved, but helped him towards a fortune whose colossal size even he had never imagined. During that decade the industrialised world was screaming for rubber products, vehicle tyres being a rapidly expanding aspect of the market. Demand rose fast and so did the price. As Hochschild puts it:
Nowhere did the boom have a more drastic impact on people’s lives than
in the equatorial rain forest, where wild rubber vines snaked high into the
trees that covered nearly half of King Leopold’s Congo . . . the king
voraciously demanded ever greater quantities of wild rubber from the Congo
because he knew that the price would drop once plantations of rubber trees
in Latin America and Asia reached maturity. This did indeed happen, but by
then the Congo had had a wild-rubber boom nearly two decades long. During
that time the search knew no bounds. [In what was now the most lucrative
colony in Africa] the profits came swiftly because, transportation costs aside,
harvesting wild rubber required no cultivation, no fertilizers, no capital
investment in expensive equipment. It required only labour.
Collecting wild rubber is an arduous, often physically painful task, so unpleasant that hardly any local person could be encouraged to engage with it whatever rewards were on offer. As one Belgian officer said: ‘The native doesn’t like making rubber. He must be compelled to do it.’ The compulsive method selected, though never recognised as official policy, was the taking of hostages from a village – often women, children or elders - keeping them prisoner until the chief had supplied the required quantities of rubber. Once the quota was reached, the hostages, often raped and otherwise maltreated as a matter of course, were sold back to the village. The recommended methods of taking and keeping the hostages were enshrined in one volume called Practical Questions of the Manual produced for the guidance of managers of collecting posts and commercial stations in all aspects of their Congo work. Every post had a stockade for keeping hostages.
According to the Tervuren guide ‘producing rubber by every means possible . . . resulted in abuses of all kinds.’ A glance at Hochschild’s index related to what he calls the ‘rubber terror’, reveals terms such as hostages, horrors, hand severings, sadism, death toll and abuses, enough without additional detail to convey the striking flavour of the rubber harvesting operation. When villagers refused to become rubber harvesters, hands, noses and ears were cut off to encourage compliance among the others. On occasions, the population of an entire village might be shot, so that neighbouring villages appreciated the message. The whole affair was ‘militarised’ and soldiers were required to present the hand of a corpse to prove that their bullet had killed a person. Village chiefs did the same. Garrisons of the Force Publique, which was both police force and army, all over the rubber region provided their firepower under contract to the commercial companies, who also had private militias of their own.
Millions were massacred and, while there was no genocidal intent behind them, the numbers of killings were certainly of genocidal proportions. During the two decades of the rubber era it is estimated that the Congo’s population had been halved, though not all as a result of Belgian massacres. In addition to the large-scale murder, where refusal to work could mean destruction of entire villages, there were deaths from exhaustion, starvation and exposure as people fled their villages, had their food sources destroyed as punishment, or died in the hostage stockades. Diseases, especially smallpox and sleeping sickness and various European-borne diseases, accounted for many who had no immunity to them and whose malnourished condition gave them no resistance. Finally, the birth rate crashed all over the Congo as the voracious and sadistic regime destroyed stability, and terrorised and tore families apart to the point where they ‘simply stopped having children.’
Reports of the abuses came home to Europe from missionaries, foreign visitors –though Leopold discouraged such people from visiting - diaries and other writings of Belgian personnel. Leopold appointed a Commission to examine allegations, and the European press began to take more notice. But it was the sustained campaign of Edward Morel and the report of Roger Casement’s investigations that produced the greatest effect. Morel made the Congo business his life’s central work and his attention was meticulous. For any specific allegation that Leopold and his officials attempted to deny, Morel was able to supply detailed chapter and verse, including names of individual Congolese victims of abuse and murder, frequently aided by direct information from insiders. When men came home on leave, they brought documents with them. His work generated opposition to the king in the Belgian parliament and more widely as he exposed entanglements of deceit not only in the Congo but also in Leopold’s dealings with European high officials, some of whom still apparently believed in his ‘enlightened rule’ in the Congo Free State.
In 1900 Casement was sent to the Congo to establish the first British consulate there. He had already spent time in the country in 1890-91 (when he met Joseph Conrad at Matadi) and worked in consular administration in what is now Nigeria. He was well tuned to the nature of colonial injustice. Leopold entertained him in Brussels en route but, unlike most others who came into contact with the king, he was not charmed. In May 1903, having already seen how the Congo functioned, he received permission from the British Government to carry out an investigation in the rubber growing regions. He travelled entirely independently of the authorities, enabling himself to visit exactly the areas he wanted to visit without interference.
He was a man possessed. His anger at what he saw had a dramatic effect on
many of the other Europeans he encountered; it was as if his visible outrage
gave them permission to act on stifled feelings of their own. Two missionaries
Casement visited . . . promptly set off on their own investigative trips; one began
writing critical letters to the governor general. George Grenfell [veteran missionary
who listened to Casement] promptly resigned from Leopold’s sham Commission
for the Protection of the Natives. The Italian consul in the Congo . . . abandoned
plans for a European holiday and made an investigative journey of his own that
confirmed Casement’s findings.
Adam Hochschild: King Leopold’s Ghost, p 201-2
The formal and restrained language of Casement’s eventual report could not disguise the horrors he was exposing. There were attempts in several highly placed quarters to silence him or dilute the force of his account, and when his masters in the Foreign Office eventually dared to publish it, they had found ways of toning it down. (For the unmediated account, his diaries give the full detail and flavour). Casement was furious and teamed up with Morel to form the Congo Reform Association, ‘white men trying to stop other white men from brutalising Africans’, with Leopold as their main target of attack. Morel fronted the Association as Casement was still employed by the FO. By 1908, criticisms of the Congo administration from numerous sources had reached such a pitch that Leopold was forced to hand over his ‘plaything’ to the Belgian government to run on more conventional colonial lines. Even then, he shamelessly managed to screw some 50 million francs out of the government as reward for what he had done. He died the following year.
Towards independence
Working in Brussels office in 1961, aged 22, I knew almost nothing of this enormous, guilty background to the post-Independence atrocities that were then taking place daily. I can’t recall anyone I knew there ever discussing it. I knew that some of the more senior staff had investments in the Congo, particularly in pieces of land, perhaps even on the shores of the beautiful Lake Kivu where they might have imagined retiring one day to a luxurious, air-conditioned villa near the water’s edge. They talked of ‘les événements’ as revenge by the Congolese on their colonial masters, but revenge for what exactly? This was never stated. When African independence was gathering pace, country by country, year by year, it was received wisdom, especially if you were British or French, that Britain and France were at the top of the quality league for managing colonies and preparing them for independence, while Portugal and Belgium were the worst by a long way.
Morel knew that putting the Belgian Congo into the Belgian government’s hands did not mean that unwarranted killings, rapes and pillaging would stop forthwith. They did not, and plenty of eye-witness accounts attest to that. It was still far too lucrative for Belgium to relax its control and become the model of humane colonialism overnight. Most of the same Leopoldian officials remained in place, and the feared and hated Force Publique, the ubiquitous military arm of that control, even retained its name. Coercion to collect rubber continued, backed by guns and all the well-tried abuses. In time, however, unrelenting pressure was such that, from Morel’s Association as well as from other foreign agencies, reports of atrocities against Congolese people diminished continuously over the next few years. By 1913 indeed, Morel felt able to wind up his campaign in the light of the ending of such treatment and of forced labour generally. Congolese ownership of their own land had not been achieved, but Morel was sufficiently satisfied that, in his words, ‘A responsible Government has replaced an irresponsible despotism.’
It remains more than simply laughable that, at the Independence Conference in February 1960, King Baudoin was able to say:
. . . our thoughts return to King Leopold II, who founded the Congo State over
eighty years ago . . . An exceptional and admirable factor is that my great-great
uncle did not achieve this union through conquest, but essentially by peaceful
methods, through a series of treaties signed by the King and the tribal chieftains.
Thanks to these treaties, the Belgians were able to establish safety, peace and all
the other prerequisites of prosperity in the heart of Central Africa.
The new Congo government put in place after the takeover was a rigid bureaucracy, headed by a Governor-General, who ruled the country. He had a team of nominated advisers, all white to begin with but gradually including some Africans. No elections of any kind took place until some limited local government was introduced in 1957. Belgians occupied all administrative positions and ‘Africanisation’, the admired element of both British and French systems, was not even contemplated in the Congo, any more than was independence during the late1950s. The Colonial Charter outlawed compulsory labour, though this was not implemented completely until the1930s. Freedom of the press, of meetings and association did not come into effect until 1959, rather too late in the day to have much point. Under the new penal code, flogging by whip or stick remained a regular punishment for Africans (even though denounced as long ago as Stanley’s time), and was not withdrawn until 1940. The Force Publique gradually replaced its thousands of European personnel with Congolese recruits under Belgian officers, but its mutinies in 1944, and particularly in 1960, ‘constituted some of the major episodes of upset and suffering of the colonial era’.
Meanwhile, the propaganda machine Inforcongo regularly and proudly told the world about the spectacular economic successes that were progressively raising living standards in every aspect of Congolese life. There were plans to develop an African ‘Ruhr’, a huge and varied industrial zone based on plentiful hydro-electric power and very low labour costs. As rubber for the world market came on stream from other sources, the Congo diverted its attention to exporting other home-grown products. Palm oil had conventional local uses but was also needed in large quantities by Lever Bros and others manufacturing both margarine and domestic washing powders. By the time I worked for Unilever’s United Africa Company, their foreign subsidiaries Plantations Lever au Congo (PLC) and Huileries Congo Belge (HCB) were major players in this field, and had been for years. Coffee plantations were holding their own by the mid-1930s after a very shaky start, and confounded the experts by reaching top place in Congo’s agricultural exports in the 1950s.
But it was the discovery of immensely rich and varied mineral resources – like the rubber, completely unforeseen in Leopold’s earliest days – that saved the country following the decline in rubber exports. Minerals, especially diamonds and copper, but also uranium and radium, have become the core element of the Congo’s contribution to the world economy. Congo has unimaginable potential wealth in mineral deposits, which goes a long way to explaining the close interest in her affairs consistently showed by so many other countries – and by her internal rival power factions. The mineral ‘honeypot’ is the southernmost province of Katanga (capital Elisabethville, later – and earlier - Lubumbashi), whose infinite resources were not discovered until after Leopold’s death.
In his Congo Disaster, written and published in 1961 during ‘les événements’, Colin Legum writes:
It was called a ‘geological scandal’ because of the variety and quantity
of minerals buried in the relatively small area. This ‘scandalously’ rich
province produces something like 8% of the world’s copper, 60% of the
West’s uranium, 73% of the world’s cobalt, 80% of its industrial diamonds,
as well as important quantities of gold, zinc, cadmium, manganese, columbium,
and tantulum. Its mineral resources appear inexhaustible. Although Katanga
holds only 12% of the total population, it contributes 60% of the Congo revenue.
It is the economic heart of the country; without it the Congo would be as miserably
poor as any of its neighbours. It is obviously worth holding on to.
Katanga’s mining wealth is produced by large monopoly companies such as the
Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK) and Forminière . . . UMHK contributed
almost half of all the country’s taxes. But the Union Minière is not entirely its own
master. It forms part of the gigantic complex of financial companies erected by the
Belgians in the Congo . . . a State within a State . . . the biggest [giant] is the Société
Générale de Belgique . . . the other four monopolies [include] Huilever, a subsidiary
of Unilever.
While there was no such thing as an official colour bar in the Congo, nor was there social equality. As the Belgians denied any racial practices, segregation and discrimination were officially practised obviously and everywhere. The doctrine of white = superior, black = inferior was universal. Africans who managed to achieve distinction in the education system became évolués, having evolved towards civilised status. This qualified them to become members of élite society, except that the majority of the whites in the country would not absorb them. Given that attitude, many évolués did not want to join anyway. At independence, there were fewer than a dozen university graduates in the entire Congo. The whites held all the good jobs and in any occupation, at every level, the wage differential between white and black was colossal. The majority of the 100,000 whites simply treated all Africans as their inferiors, including those in the lower grades of white society, the petits blancs, who were mostly Flemish. They were especially targeted by rampaging Congolese in the riots of 1959 and when the Force Publique mutinied in 1960.
Colin Legum blames the Belgians themselves for the gradual slide towards the loss of their former commanding and unchallenged position. Between 1946 and 1958 they could have initiated moves to develop inclusivity and increased social justice. Inforcongo itself stated in 1958:
. . . the white man . . .with the growth of the local élite, has lost some of the
prestige, which was based on factors of racial supremacy. This is a natural
and logical phenomenon.’
But they ignored this and similar warnings, including indignant repudiation of the view expressed by a former US Ambassador, Chester Bowles, who had written ‘with great prescience’ in 1955:
The danger lies not so much in the possibility that the Belgians will not
compromise eventually with the force of nationalism, but that when they
do they will find the Africans almost totally inexperienced in handling the
responsibilities which they are certain to demand and eventually to get.
Quoted in Colin Legum: Congo Disaster
Brussels did take note of, and warning from, nationalism movements in other African countries, but its suggestions were frequently blocked in Léopoldville, and everyone failed completely to appreciate the true speed of events. The Belgian and the Congo governments came into direct conflict following election of a new Liberal-Socialist government in Belgium, which particularly wished to enlarge Congolese education opportunities, and break the former Catholic grip on this institution. The support of évolués was sought and they gave it gladly, as it enabled them to use their own voice in political life for the first time. The Governor-General was not amused. Nor would he have taken kindly to the move among the very large commercial concerns – in the light of observed experiences in other African colonies – to begin operating more liberal regimes.
It was the Belgians’ decent intention that the Congolese élite would develop as the government’s friend and ally and co-operate in enacting reforms, albeit slowly. The flaw here is that history shows that nationalist and revolutionary movements come not from the oppressed, the poor and the hungry, but from the better educated middle-class elements. Groups gradually formed, containing the better educated and better paid people, all apparently innocent. But getting together gave them the opportunity to discuss employment issues such as conditions, wage differentials and the lack of opportunities for promotion. Discussion also came to focus on ideology and political matters. It was Joseph Kasavubu, then a treasury official, officer of a socialist study group, and later first President of the Congo, who coined the slogan ‘Congo for the Congolese’. Newly formed regional tribal associations added their contribution to emerging Congolese politics. It was not until 1957 that the first democratic events took place, a limited experiment in the form of elections for major urban councils.
But things had already begun to change, and quite fast, throughout the 1950s. The évolués were flexing their muscles to the considerable discomfort of the Belgians. There was Belgian talk of movement towards a society where Africans and whites became equal members, so that an eventual independent country could be a wider, integrated ‘Belgo-Congolese Community’. Such ideas were discussed, almost entirely excluding the Congolese themselves, but no one knew what to do next – until the interventions of Professor Van Bilsen in 1954. Having studied developments closely in other parts of Africa, he proposed a Thirty Year Plan for moving towards releasing Central Africa from the Belgian grasp. He castigated the authorities for their multiple failures to make any real moves in this direction, saying that ‘The colonial imperialism of the past half century is gone for ever.’ And, he implied, a good thing too. The Congolese themselves began to talk about independence, saying that they would show no hostility towards Belgium as long as she genuinely moved towards that target within thirty years.
Thirty years was a long time when nationalism movements and demands for self-determination were surfacing fast in countries all over Africa. In some, constructive steps were being taken towards democracy and independence only a few years ahead. De Gaulle arrived in Brazzaville in 1958 to announce the future of an independent French Congo. In the same year, large numbers of leading Congolese were invited to Brussels for the World Fair, Expo 58. Many had never met before, and seeds were sown here for the later formation of new political groups back in the Congo. Among these was the Mouvement pour le Progrès National Congolais (MPNC), launched during 1959, strongly favouring national unity rather than political activity through a more fragmented structure based on the regions. In favour of these tribally based politics was Abako, founded by the Bakongo people of the Lower Congo (capital, as of the entire country, Leopoldville), strongly supported by Kasavubu. Finally, in this key year for the Congo, the All-African People’s Conference was held in Accra in December. Kasavubu could not attend because ‘his inoculation certificates were not in order’, an accident that allowed Patrice Lumumba of the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC) to go and speak for the Congo. On returning to Leopoldville on 28 December 1958, in Legum’s words:
Inspired by Accra’s spirit of African solidarity, Lumumba made a full-blooded
nationalist speech; he committed the MNC to full support for Accra’s decision
in favour of immediate independence for all African countries. (The thirty-year
programme towards independence was no longer an aim.)
Six days later riots occurred in Leopoldville. Their immediate cause was a march
by 30,000 unemployed workers in the city. The Abako leaders were arrested and
their movement proscribed. No action was taken against the MNC or other parties.
In the twinkling of an eye the long-delayed reforms for the Congo were announced
by the King of the Belgians.
. . . [During 1959] No colonial power in history was destroyed more quickly, and
by such a rabble: there was not even a coherent nationalist movement which could
command nationwide support. But there was rebellion: a rebellion of the mind that
rejected paternalism and all it stood for. The children were children no longer.
The riots were ferocious - and ferociously put down by the Force Publique – as hatred of the whites was made abundantly clear for the first time. Forty-nine people were killed but this was ‘nothing untoward as riots go in Africa’. Kasavubu and his deputies were arrested and flown to Belgium, though not put on trial. Reforms began apace: in the course of seven months over forty new legislative measures were enacted, all to provide various new kinds of freedom for the Congolese people. Parliament sent a commission of inquiry to discover what had gone wrong in the Congo over the years. One of its achievements was to expose the distorted view of recent history there issued systematically by Inforcongo to keep most of the truth from the Belgian people. Its analysis was acute and perceptive in every aspect, particularly in its total demolition of the widely held myth that Africans really want their lives to be guided by whites and controlled by their repressive legal systems and methods. This sentence in their report summarised the most important lesson of all (quoted by Colin Legum): ‘In a country where the white man is both judge and jury, it is human that the black man should begin to feel that he can get no justice because he is black.’
The year 1959 saw intense Congolese political activity. The core issue – as in many other African countries, especially the larger ones – was the difference between wanting a strong single, centralised government and a federal structure of provincial governments based on tribal associations. (This issue has bedevilled Nigeria ever since its independence in 1960). Kasavubu returned triumphantly, expressing his dream of restoring the historical Bakongo Kingdom. His personal status and following were enormous and he was ‘hailed as the King of the Bakongo’. By the end of the year, the Belgians had lost control of Lower Congo and saw that only the use of military force could restore it. But so much had happened in recent months that making that decision was no longer a straightforward matter. During the year serious fighting broke out between the Lulua and Baluba tribes in Kasai province, as the former feared that their neighbours might too easily grasp power and exert authority over them. An election timetable had been established, intending to culminate in indirect elections for the central government in September 1960. At the same time, Lumumba, seen as one of the more ‘extreme’ elements in Congo politics, was becoming increasingly impatient with even the slightest delay in granting independence. The MNC split on this issue, and friction between the two main wings of the party led to an explosion in Stanleyville. Lumumba, campaigning there at the time, was arrested and sentenced to six months imprisonment.
As the Congo sleepwalked towards complete anarchy, the Belgians realised they had no means of regaining the initiative. Responsibility for what happened in the Congo should rest with the Congolese, and as soon as practicable. The Brussels Round Table Conference was called for 20 January 1960, and within a week the job was done: full independence would be effective six months later. The Belgian government – and many parties elsewhere – ‘were completely unprepared’ for the quite remarkable speed of these developments. The Bruxellois had their first real experience of black people walking the city’s streets as some 200 Congolese delegates and advisers enjoyed their first experience of the colonial capital.
In only a year, Lumumba had come from virtual unknown to major figure on the Conference stage. He’d been flown straight from prison to the Conference and ‘quickly became the popular figure’ there. He was installed in ‘a small plain [hotel] room’ while Kasavubu occupied one at the flashy Plaza Hotel, ‘large and elegantly decorated in Regency red-and-white striped wallpaper’. In their conversations with journalists, Lumumba was generally ‘all forgiveness and friendship . . . distinctly cooperative’ while Kasavubu ‘had not a good word to say for the Belgians’, and was suspected by some of plotting with Belgium’s enemies. However, even among the so-called ‘moderates’ (two-thirds of the Congolese delegates), Lumumba’s position, Independence Now, was the only one they dared support, given the strength of this feeling among their supporters at home.
Despite the Belgian attempt to delay its discussion, independence took first place on the agenda and the vote in favour was unanimous. The Government accepted it, and then had no choice but to agree also to the motion proposed for complete independence on 30 June 1960. The Conference ended on 20 February, with Kasavubu the only leader absent from the Royal Palace reception. Through a series of tactical errors during the proceedings, he had alienated both himself and Abako from the rest of the participants. Lumumba’s final speech was ‘brimful of goodwill for the Belgians and for the Europeans living in the Congo.’ It is more than simply regrettable that many critical issues on the economic and constitutional fronts were left to be decided later, including the crucial one of the federal vs. the unitary state.
Independence 1960: Patrice Lumumba’s brief career
But the catastrophe of the final transitional six months was the Government’s ‘complete breakdown of their relations with the Congo’s most influential leaders.’ The essential confidence needed between the two parties was non-existent. During the early months of 1960, Kasavubu and the Belgians remained deeply suspicious of one another. He threatened ‘to live on our own in Lower Congo’ if the independence government should reject his federalist ideas. Lumumba the Unitarian declared himself ‘delighted with the Belgian spirit’, seeing cooperation between white and black as the foundation for Congo development. By April, the situation had been reversed. For reasons never really clear at the time, Lumumba fell out with the Belgians, who denounced him roundly, while taking Kasavubu back into the fold, ignoring the earlier reasons for marginalizing him.
Tensions continued to grow in the Congo: among whites fearful for their future safety; between political and tribal groups competing for eventual power. Meanwhile, anti-white feeling increased. What concerned Belgian officials most – but the Congolese least – on account of their massive investments in the country was the Congo’s financial health: ‘the size of the Public Debt . . . was alarming.’ There was a flight of capital from the country and international confidence evaporated because of the critical short-term financial situation, let alone longer-term economic issues. It was increasingly clear that fiscal measures taken earlier in the Belgo-Congolese relationship would severely restrict the independent Congo’s economic freedom. Easy enough – relatively - to generously grant independence. It was much less so to watch the country’s economy disintegrate, along with the hopes of the Brussels Bourse and its international investors.
Following the June 1960 elections, Lumumba became the Congo’s first Prime Minister at age 35. His MNC was the largest party but with only a quarter of the total seats and no support to speak of in Leopoldville Province. Nothing in his life to date had remotely prepared him for running a very complex country with a disparately motivated coalition government. Even so, no political leader but him had anything one could call a national following, and, for those first few months, things more or less held together. But, as Legum puts it: ‘Lumumba’s great political error is that he tried to cast the Congo into the tight [unitary] mould of Ghana, rather than into the larger, more accommodating [federalist] mould of Nigeria’. Kasavubu became the first President with very clearly expressed views favouring federalism. Based on his earlier dreams of a completely separate Bakongo, he tended to fluctuate between separatism and federalism within the Congo. Just as obstinate as Lumumba, suspicion of the Belgians was the only real quality they had in common. It suited them to be allies at the moment of independence but they had no political common ground whatsoever.
The third central player, with yet another entirely individual agenda, was Moise Tshombe. He had tended to ‘stay close to the Belgians’ during the colonial period and led the CONAKAT party of Katanga, where so much potential mineral wealth lay buried. After the elections, he failed to negotiate acceptable terms with Lumumba for seats in the new Cabinet, and immediately put in train plans for the southern province to break away from Congo with himself as its leader. In Legum’s view, ‘Tshombe is not a politician of straw; the mistake his opponents made was to treat him as one.’ In addition to him, the unstable political mix was completed by nearly a dozen other aspirants, each with his own party, some splinters from the larger ones, some tribally and/or regionally based, some to the left, some to the right, some pro- and some anti-Belgian, some federalist, some for unity, and among them one or two deadly rivals.
They worked together in government only because of their shared wish to see Belgium out of the picture once and for all.
Within a week of the end of independence celebrations, a small aggravation occurred at the military camp near Thysville, where Force Publique members helped themselves to ammunition and threatened their Belgian officers. The action was contained, but no extra security measures were put in place, even when Congolese troops failed to appear for duty for four days. Some Belgians were beaten, both officers and civilians outside the camp, but no general alarm was raised. Elsewhere in the country, multiple rapes and other humiliations of Belgian civilians began to be reported during that same week. Violence spread fast, with soldiers and police targeting whites all over the country, as many thousands of Belgians fled in every direction. Troops mutinied and disarmed their Belgian officers in the provinces of Katanga and Kasai. When newly arrived Belgian paratroops occupied Leopoldville and moved out to other parts of the country on 11 July, rebellion erupted on a wide front. On that day Tshombe announced Katanga’s independence and levels of violence increased severely. Colin Legum summarises it thus, as the ‘Congo Disaster’ unrolled:
The mutiny changed everything; it destroyed what was hopeful in the situation;
it killed cooperation between the Belgians and the Congolese; it splintered the
brittle alliances of the Coalition Government; it opened the way for foreign
intervention; and it wrecked internal security. Those trained to uphold law and
order were themselves the leaders of lawlessness and disorder.
Here was the final irony: the instrument, fashioned by the Belgians at the outset
of their occupation of the Congo to establish and maintain their rule, turned in
their hands to destroy them. Nobody had foreseen this possibility. On the eve of
the mutiny, General Jannsens [Force Publique Commander] . . . met questions
about the security position in the Congo with easy confidence: ‘The Force Publique?
It is my creation. It is absolutely loyal. I have made my dispositions.’ Three days
later he was dismissed; a few days more and the Force Publique had become the
rogue elephant of the Congo.
The Force had been ‘a native army, almost entirely illiterate, poorly paid, and officered almost entirely by Europeans.’ Many of its men came from the most backward areas of the country, and there was no opportunity for trained and educated men to become officers. For the many dissident members of the Force, independence was the trigger. In the spirit of ‘We are the masters now’, violence took over countrywide, perpetrated by soldiers and police - but relatively few civilians - against virtually anyone, European or Congolese, with whom there was a score from the past to settle. Obviously the Force’s members had good reasons for dissatisfaction and wanted some independence benefits for themselves. But when the Belgian paratroops moved in, ‘discipline broke and vengeance followed.’
On 12 July, the UN took on the task of defending Congo’s independence. Kasavubu and Lumumba had appealed for their military assistance against a ‘Belgian act of aggression’, the arrival of the paratroops. By then, already well over three-quarters of all the Belgians formerly in the Congo had fled. Within thirty-six hours of the UN resolution being passed, neutral forces arrived in Leopoldville from Tunisia and Ghana. ‘It was the swiftest and largest operation the UN had ever undertaken on its own. Its stock had never been higher.’ But a series of misunderstandings as to the Force’s precise mission, especially concerning Katanga’s future, and its insistence on a self-defence role, nearly caused a complete collapse of the initiative within a week of its arrival. In the crisis of confidence that followed, Lumumba threatened to invite Soviet troops in if Belgian troops were not removed almost immediately. To prevent this, troops from five African countries arrived (though the countries involved deplored Lumumba’s threat to involve the Russians) and a timetable for prompt Belgian withdrawal was agreed. They had left the Congo by 23 July, but remained in Katanga, joining Tshombe in defiance of the UN.
The Russians exploited the chaos by condemning UN policies and actions, and announced massive deliveries of aid material, to be channelled direct, not via the UN – which heartened Lumumba considerably. Tshombe’s continued opposition took them all back to the drawing board, where the Secretary-General (Dag Hammarskjold) made the case for no longer delaying sending UN troops into Katanga. Despite Russian objections, the resolution was passed warning the Belgians to leave Katanga at once and declaring that a UN Force would come in to ensure their resolutions were fulfilled. Lumumba found this decision acceptable and relations between him and Hammarskjold improved. The UN Force was allowed into Katanga on 12 August by which time ‘the internal situation had deteriorated to a point almost past recovery.’
In a matter of days, critical disagreements had broken out between Lumumba and Hammarskjold over interpretation of precisely how the UN Force should be used, forcing a fourth Security Council meeting to try and prevent complete breakdown.
Hammarskjold’s reputation was now under fire, especially from Eastern bloc countries. There was no resolution this time but his interpretation of those already in place was upheld. He also obtained approval to his proposal to set up an Advisory Council of all the countries who had sent troops to the Congo. Lumumba was again ‘satisfied’, though not for long. The fifth Security Council meeting saw, at last, an open confrontation between the united Afro-Asian group and the Russians, who thought they could shake them. They couldn’t and the Afro-Asian group unanimously supported Hammarskjold’s position. The Russians used their veto only to find it overridden by every single country outside the Soviet bloc.
Irreconcilable arguments continued between Lumumba and Hammarskjold throughout August over how the UN Force should be deployed until Lumumba found himself isolated, even from his chief supporters, the African states. Without reference to the President or to anyone else, he turned to Russia whose military trucks and transport planes started rolling in. Lumumba used them first to send special Force Publique personnel to Kasai Province (the ‘Diamond State’) where Albert Kalonji had imitated Tshombe’s move to secede from the larger Congo. Kalonji’s ill-considered decision caused the deaths of over 1,000 Baluba tribesmen. From that moment in early September, any semblance of functioning government or rational decision-making collapsed. The always fragile coalition fell apart. Kasavubu dismissed Lumumba, appointing Ileo as new Prime Minister. Lumumba rejected this and dismissed Kasavubu. (Just to complicate things, for what it was worth, the Senate refused to accept both dismissals.) The result was two competing putative governments and all the ingredients for civil war.
At this crucial juncture, towards the end of 1960, the young Colonel Joseph Mobutu (28, a former journalist and trained accountant, recently secretary to Lumumba) took pole position – where he was to stay for more than thirty years. Using his commanding Force Publique position, he declared military rule; he shut down parliament; ordered dismissal of both rival governments; and kicked out the Russian bloc emissaries and ‘technical advisers’. They had had their first experience of the unfathomable peculiarities of African politics and, having ‘made just about every mistake in the book’, were quite pleased to leave. Lumumba and his closest aides rejected their own dismissal, were arrested but then escaped, seeking protection from various African embassies. In all this new, massive, potentially desperate turmoil, not a single person was killed.
Recaptured, Lumumba again escaped from a military base when the soldiers mutinied. But by now the Americans were playing a major part and, though we knew little or nothing of it at the time, the CIA were on his case. He was a marked man. His earlier appeal to the Soviet bloc for assistance could not fail to engage the US more or less automatically. The CIA director had declared his removal as an ‘urgent and prime objective’. Lumumba had believed that political independence was not enough. The new Congo should also release itself from the economic grip of Europe. His numerous inspiring and charismatic speeches to this effect alarmed both the European states and America, all with substantial investments in the country’s diverse and inviting mineral industry. Lumumba was not for sale. As the West cooled dramatically towards him, he appealed for help to the Soviet Union and so the Congo, within mere months of its independence, became a pawn in the Cold War. A highly placed American sub-committee for covert operations decided he should be assassinated, President Eisenhower himself quoted as considering Lumumba ‘a mad dog . . . and he wanted the problem dealt with.’ In the event, it didn’t take long. With positive though covert support from the Americans and the Belgians,
Kasavubu and the commissioners despatched him to his arch-enemies in the south.
On 17 January 1961, Lumumba and two collaborators were flown to Katanga . . . Approaching Elizabethville the pilot radioed the control tower to announce ‘I have three precious packages
aboard.’ On arrival, they were taken away to be killed, almost certainly shot dead in front of
Katanga’s top officials and their Belgian collaborators . . The Congolese secessionists had
done the CIA’s dirty work for them . . . The whereabouts of Lumumba’s body have never been
identified. It was probably hacked into pieces, the head dissolved in a vat of sulphuric acid by a
Belgian clean-up team sent to remove all traces of the assassinations
Michela Wrong, p 78-9
After being arrested and suffering a series of beatings, the Prime Minister was
secretly shot in Elizabethville in January 1961. A CIA agent ended up driving
around the city with Lumumba’s body in his car’s trunk, trying to find a place
to dispose of it. We cannot know whether, had he survived, Lumumba would
have stayed true to his rhetoric and to the hopes he embodied for so many people
in Africa and elsewhere. But the United States saw to it that he never had a chance.
Like millions of Congolese before him, he ended up dumped in an unmarked grave.
Adam Hochschild, p 302
It took many years before various ‘truths’ about Lumumba’s career in those few brief years were unravelled, particularly the circumstances of his death. On that subject, in Brussels at the time rumour upon uninformed rumour circulated hotly and at high speed, like anything to do with the Congo by then. Leaving aside the agencies of the powerful international elements involved, there was no shortage of suspects of Congolese origin: secessionists, members of rival tribes, rogue Force Publique cadres, political rightists, other political competitors, federalists, Kasavubu, even the new rising star Mobutu himself. What brought me, in my very small way, to Brussels in that year was that Lumumba’s death, while it eliminated one whom many players saw as a dangerous loose cannon (a ‘dangerous leftist trouble-maker’ in the American government’s view), did not herald a period of stability and calm in the Congo.
From then on, in its attempts to restore some kind of order, the UN Force became involved in direct fighting with mercenary forces recruited by Katanga. The well-ordered demonstrations that we heard outside our office along the rue Montoyer were usually pro-Katangese secessionists. Mobutu, head of the armed forces, ‘was watching and waiting’ for the moment to launch his coup, while one ineffective government after another failed to make progress. We know now that he ‘received cash payments from the local CIA man and Western military attachés while Lumumba’s murder was being planned’ (Hochschild). Michela Wrong summarises this phase:
Once the Katanga and Kasai secessions had been brought to heel, the government
was confronted by a new set of anti-Western Marxist uprisings in the east. In one
of these a young rebel called Laurent Kabila, whose womanising ways and heavy
drinking exasperated Che Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary who had set off to
help his African brothers, played a role before fading from view. Western audiences
were more preoccupied by the horrors that occurred in Stanleyville, where a white
mercenary force and Belgian paratroopers were unable to prevent the slaughter of
200 Europeans held hostage by the rebels. Never again would Western leaders and
the public at large look at Africa with the same cheerful optimism of the post-war
days.
Michela Wrong, p 80
Epilogue
Michela Wrong's last sentence above has proved sadly true for so many African countries since the 1950s, and for none more significantly than the Congo. At no time since independence in 1960 has the country enjoyed the necessary stability and peace to enable it to develop its infrastructure and provide its people with a reasonable standard of living. Its vast mineral wealth has been a curse, encouraging those in power to give full rein to the greed and corruption that have exploited its magnificent natural resources without any of that enormous wealth trickling down to benefit its population. During his 30+ years as President-Dictator Mobutu is alleged to have stolen US$ 4-5 billion while in office. According to the Human Development Index, by 2016 the DRC’s level of development was 176th out of 187 countries.