The African Dream

by Ernesto Che Guevara

“I’ve been hit a number of times, but the bullets simply fell to the ground.”

  He said this with a smile on his face, and I felt obliged to respond to the joke, which I saw as a sign of how little importance they attached to the enemy’s weapons. But I soon realized it was meant seriously, that the magical protection of dawa was one of the great weapons of triumph of the Congolese army.

  This dawa did a lot of damage to military preparedness. It operates according to the following principle: A liquid in which herbal substances and other magical ingredients have been dissolved is thrown over the combatant, and certain occult markers—nearly always including a coal mark on the forehead—are administered to him. This protects him against all kinds of weapons (although the enemy too relies upon magic), but he must not touch anything not belonging to him, touch a woman or feel fear, or the protection will be ineffective. The reason for any failure was very simple: a dead man is one who became fearful, stole or slept with a woman; and anyone wounded is someone who succumbed to fear. As fear accompanies war, wounds were quite naturally attributed to fear—that is, to a lack of faith. And as the dead cannot speak, all three transgressions can be readily ascribed to them.

  This belief is so strong that no one goes into battle without having the dawa performed on them. I was constantly afraid that this superstition would rebound against us, and that we would be blamed for any military disaster involving a lot of casualties. I tried several times to discuss the dawa with those in leadership positions in an effort to win people away from it—but this was impossible. The dawa is treated as an article of faith. Even the most politically developed argued that it is a natural, material force and that they, as dialectical materialists, recognized the power of the dawa, whose secrets lie with jungle medicine men.

  After the talk with the brigade leaders, I met with “Tremendo Punto” alone and explained who I was. He was devastated. He kept talking of an “international scandal” and insisting that “no one must find out, please, no one must find out.” It had come as a bolt from the blue and I was fearful of the consequences, but my identity could no longer be a secret if we wanted to use the influence I could exert.

  That night, “Tremendo Punto” left to inform Kabila of my presence in the Congo; the Cuban officials who had been with us on the crossing and the naval technician departed with him. The technician had the task of sending two mechanics—by return mail, so to speak—since one of the weaknesses we had noted was the complete lack of maintenance of the boats used for crossing the lake and their engines.

  The next day, I asked that we be sent to the permanent camp, a base five kilometers from the General Staff headquarters, at the top of the mountains that rose (as mentioned previously) from the lake’s shore. The delays began immediately. The commander had gone to Kigoma to sort out some matters, and we had to wait for him to return. Meanwhile, a rather arbitrary training program was discussed, and I made a counterproposal: namely, to divide 100 men into groups no larger than 20, and to give them all an overview of infantry activity, with some specialization in weapons, engineering (especially trench-digging), communications and reconnaissance, in keeping with our capabilities and the means at our disposal. The program would last four to five weeks, and the group would be sent to carry out operations under Mbili’s command. Then it would return to base, where a selection would be made of those who had proved themselves. In the meantime, the second company would be trained, so that it in turn could go to the front when the first one returned. I thought this would allow the necessary selection to be made while the men were being trained. I explained again that, due to the nature of recruitment, only 20 would remain as potential soldiers out of the original 100, and only two or three of them as future leading cadre, in the sense of being capable of leading an armed unit in combat.

  The response was evasive as usual and they asked me to put my proposal in writing. I did this but I never learned what became of that document. We kept insisting that we should go up and start work at the Upper Base. We had counted on losing a week there to get things ready in order to be able to work at a certain pace, and now we were waiting for just the simple problem of the move to be resolved. We couldn’t go up to the base because the commander had not arrived; or we had to wait because they were “in meetings.” Days passed like this. When the matter was raised again, as I did with truly irritating tenacity, a new excuse was always offered. Even today, I don’t know how to explain this. Maybe it was true that they did not want to start preparatory work so as not to ignore the relevant authority, in this case the commander of the base.

  One day I ordered Moja to go to the Upper Base with some men, on the pretext of training them for a march. He did this and the group returned at night, weary, soaked and chilled to the bone. It was a very cold and wet place, with constant mist and persistent rain; the people there said they were making a hut for us, which would take another few days. With patience on both sides, I outlined various arguments why we should go up to the base: we could help build the shelter in a spirit of sacrifice, so that we would not be a burden, etc., etc. and they would then search for new pretexts for delay.

  This enforced holiday saw the beginning of enjoyable talks with Compañero Kiwe, the head of information. He is a tireless conversationalist, who speaks French at an almost supersonic speed. Day after day in our conversations he would offer me an analysis of the most important figures in the Congolese revolution. One of the first to receive a lashing from his tongue was Olenga, a general in the Stanleyville area and in Sudan. According to Kiwe, Olenga was little more than an ordinary soldier, maybe a lieutenant in Bidalila’s forces, who had been charged by Bidalila to make some incursions toward Stanleyville and then return. But instead of doing this, Olenga initiated his own operations during those easy moments of revolutionary flux, and raised himself by one rank each time he captured a village. By the time he reached Stanleyville he was a general. The conquests of the Liberation Army ended there—which solved the problem because, if they had continued, there were no further military grades with which to reward Compañero Olenga.

  For Kiwe, the real military leader was Colonel Pascasa, who later died in a fight among the Congolese in Cairo; he was the man with genuine military knowledge and a revolutionary attitude, and he represented Mulele.

  On another day, Kiwe very subtly raised criticisms of Gbenyé, commenting casually that his attitude had been unclear at the beginning and now, although he was the president and a revolutionary, there were more revolutionary leaders, etc. As the days passed and we became better acquainted, Kiwe portrayed Gbenyé as a man more suited to lead a gang of thieves than a revolutionary movement. I cannot vouch for Kiwe’s claims, but some are quite famous: for example, the story of Gbenyé’s role in Gizenga’s imprisonment, when he was minister of the interior in the Adoula government. Others are less well known, but if they are true, they cast a sinister light on Gbenyé, such as plots to assassinate Mitoudidi and connections with the Yankee embassy in Kenya.

  On another occasion, the target of Kiwe’s tongue was Gizenga, whom he described as a revolutionary, but a left-wing opportunist, who wanted to do everything by the political road, who thought a revolution could be made with the army, and even that he had been given money to organize the revolutionary forces in Leopoldville,3 but he had used it instead to form a political party.

  These chats with Kiwe gave me some idea of what certain figures were like, but above all they very clearly highlighted the lack of cohesion in this group of revolutionaries (or malcontents), who constituted the General Staff of the Congolese revolution.

  So the days passed. Messengers crossed the lake with an amazing capacity to distort any news, and others went off to Kigoma on some leave or other.

  In my capacity as a doctor (an epidemiologist—which, if this illustrious branch of the Aesculapian fauna forgives me for saying so, entitled me to know nothing about medicine), I worked for a few days with Kumi at the clinic and noticed several alarming facts: the fir
st being the high number of cases of venereal disease, often due to infection picked up in Kigoma. What concerned me at the time was not the state of health of the general population and the prostitutes of Kigoma, in particular, but the fact that the frequent trips across the lake meant many of our combatants could become infected. Other questions also arose. Who paid those women? Where did the money come from? How were the revolution’s funds being spent?

  From the first few days of our stay, we also had the opportunity to see some cases of alcohol poisoning caused by the famous pombe. This is a spirit distilled from fermented corn and cassava flour, which is not so high in alcohol content but the distilled liquor has terrible effects. Presumably these arise not so much from the concentration of the alcohol itself as from the amount of impurities contained in the liquor due to the rudimentary method of its production. There were days when the camp was awash with pombe, leaving behind a trail of brawling, drunkenness, indiscipline, etc.

  Peasants from the surrounding area began to visit the clinic after hearing on “Radio Bemba” [word of mouth] that there were doctors in the area. Our supply of medicines was poor, but a Soviet medical consignment came to our aid. It had not been selected with a civilian population in mind, but naturally to meet the needs of an army in the field—and even then, it did not contain an adequate range of medicines. Such imbalances were to be a constant feature of our time in the Congo. The shipments of very valuable weapons and equipment were sent in such a way that they always turned out to be incomplete. Shipments inevitably featured cannon and machine guns without ammunition or essential components; rifles arrived with the wrong ammunition, mines without detonators—this was the inevitable character of supplies arriving from Kigoma.

  In my opinion, although I have not been able to confirm this in detail, all these failures were due to the disorganized state of the Congolese Liberation Army, and to the shortage of cadres with a minimal capacity to check equipment as it arrived. The same occurred with medical supplies, with the additional factor that they were stored in one gigantic mess in La Playa, where the reserves of food and weapons were piled in total chaos. I tried several times to obtain permission for us to organize the warehouse, and I suggested that some types of ammunition—such as bazooka or mortar shells—should be moved out of there. But nothing happened until much later.

  Contradictory news arrived from Kigoma every day. Occasionally an item was repeated so often that at some point it became true, for example, that a group of Cubans was waiting for a boat, an engine or something to get through; or that Mitoudidi would cross the lake tomorrow or the day after, and then—when the day after tomorrow arrived—that he would be crossing the following day, etc.

  Around this time, we heard news of the conference in Cairo4 from Emmanuel on one of his frequent trips to Kigoma and back. The result had been a complete triumph for the revolutionary line. Kabila would stay for a while to make sure that the agreement was implemented, then he would go somewhere to have an operation on a cyst—not very serious but bothersome—and this would delay him a little longer.

  We had to find something to do to avoid total idleness, so we organized lessons in French and Swahili, as well as general education classes, which were desperately needed by our troop. Given the nature of the classes and the teachers, this could not contribute much to the compañeros’ education, but it did have the important function of passing the time. Our morale remained high although complaints were starting to be heard among the compañeros as they watched the days pass unproductively. Also hovering over us was the specter of malaria and the other tropical fevers that struck nearly everyone in one form or another; these often responded to malaria drugs, but left behind troublesome aftereffects, such as general debility or lack of appetite, which added to the incipient pessimism creeping into the troop’s morale.

  As the days went by, the picture of organizational chaos became more evident. I myself took part in the distribution of Soviet medical supplies and this resembled a gypsy marketplace; each representative of the armed groups produced figures, and cited facts and reasons why he should have access to a greater amount of medicine. There were several conflicts as I tried to stop some medicine or special equipment being unnecessarily carried off to the front lines, but everyone wanted everything. They started to claim incredible numbers of combatants in their group: one declared 4,000, another 2,000, etc. These were inventions, which had no objective basis except in the number of peasants living near the army and potentially becoming a source of future combatants. But, in reality, the real number of soldiers or armed men in the base camps was significantly less.

  During these days, the various fronts were almost completely passive and if people had gunshot wounds to be attended, these were the result of accidents. Since hardly anyone had the faintest idea about firearms, they tended to go off when they were played with or treated carelessly.

  On May 8, 18 Cubans led by Aly finally arrived along with Mitoudidi, the head of the General Staff, but he had to return immediately to Kigoma to search for guns and ammunition. We had an amicable conversation, and he left me with an agreeable impression of reliability, seriousness and organization. Kabila sent word that I should be very reserved about my identity and so I remained incognito as I acted in my apparent role as doctor and translator.

  We agreed with Mitoudidi that the move to Upper Base would take place the next day. This happened, but we left behind Moja, Nane and Tano, who had come down with fever, and the doctor Kumi to take care of the hospital. I was sent to the base as doctor and translator. There were scarcely 20 Congolese there, looking bored, lonely and uncomfortable. The struggle began to break this inertia; we started with classes in Swahili, given by the political commissar at the base, and in French, assigned to another compañero. We also started building shelters as protection against the freezing temperatures. We were at 1,700 meters above sea level and 1,000 meters above the level of the lake, in an area where trade winds from the Indian Ocean condense causing continuous rainfall. We immediately commenced the task of building shelters, and we soon had blazing fires to ward off the nocturnal cold.

  1. Che’s note: According to the latest reports, he has been promoted to general.

  2. In an autobiographical short story Doubt, Che offers an extraordinary analysis of this question of dawa, interspersed with philosophical reflection from a human and cultural perspective on this mystical-religious belief among the Congolese combatants. See: Self-Portrait: A Photographic and Literary Memoir, by Ernesto Che Guevara (Ocean Press).

  3. Today Kinshasa.

  4. The conference of the National Liberation Council (CNL) was held between late May and early April 1965 where the Supreme Council of the Congolese Revolution was constituted.

  THE FIRST MONTH

  Near the Upper Base, some four hours on foot (the only possible means of locomotion), a group of hamlets, each numbering no more than 10 huts, lies scattered over a huge area of natural grazing land. The cluster of settlements, known by the generic name of Nganja, is populated by a tribe that originally came from Rwanda, and which, despite living in the Congo for several generations, retains the ineradicable spirit of its homeland. Their life is pastoral, though not nomadic. Cattle are at the center of their economy, providing them with both food and money. We heard frequently of the troubles of a Rwandan soldier, who lacked the number of cows required by the father of the woman of his dreams. Moreover, women too are bought, and to have several is a sign of economic power—quite apart from the fact that it is they who do all the work in agriculture and in the home.

  During the course of the war, this proximity enabled us from time to time to enjoy the precious beef that is a cure even for homesickness—almost.

  The Rwandans and the different Congolese tribes regard each other as enemies, and the borders between ethnic groups are clearly defined. This makes it very difficult to carry out political work that aims toward regional union—a phenomenon common throughout the length and breadth of the
Congo.

  In my first few days at the Upper Base, I paid tribute to the climate of the Congo by coming down with a very high, though short-lived, fever. Our doctor, Kumi, came up from the Lake [Base] to visit me, but I sent him back as he was needed in the clinic and I was already feeling better. On the third or fourth day they brought in a man wounded in some skirmish at Front de Force; he had not received medical attention for six days, so his arm that had been fractured by a bullet was now suppurating profusely. I had to get up to attend to him in a cold drizzle, and this may have caused my relapse with a very high fever and delirium, bringing Kumi up to the base for a second time. It was like climbing Mount Everest for him, and according to eyewitnesses—because I was in no state to appreciate the fact—his condition after the long, steep ascent appeared worse than that of the patient he had come to attend.

  The relapse didn’t last long either—about five days in all—but the effect left was an extraordinary weakness that overcame me and even took away my appetite. During the first month, no less than a dozen compañeros paid for their novitiate in this hostile land with raging fevers whose aftereffects were equally troublesome.

  The first formal order that we received was issued by Mitoudidi, who had returned from Kigoma, was to prepare for an attack on Albertville to be carried out by two columns. It was assumed we would play the main role in the fighting. The order was absurd; there had been no preparation, we were only 30 in number, and 10 of these were sick or convalescing. But I explained the instructions to the men and told them they should be prepared to go into battle, although I would try to change or at least postpone the plans.

  On May 22 we heard one of the many crazy reports that worried us greatly: “A Cuban minister is crossing the hills and many more Cubans have arrived.” This was so irrational that no one believed it, but I went a way down the mountain to get some exercise and, to my great surprise, encountered Osmany Cienfuegos.1 Embraces were followed by explanations: He had come to hold talks with the Tanzanian government and, in passing, had asked for permission to visit the compañeros in the Congo. He had been refused as a matter of principle, on the grounds that other Cuban ministers would then want to visit the operations center; but in the end they relented and here he was. I also discovered that the Tanzanian government was not yet aware of my presence.