Congo

by David Van Reybrouck

  MAP 5: BELGIAN CONGO DURING WORLD WAR I

  The struggle for Lake Tanganyika was one of the most epic of World War I. From South Africa, British troops smuggled the parts for two fast and maneuverable gunboats of their own to the shores of the lake. Carrying ships in overland: it was like a repeat of Stanley’s day. Under their codenames Mimi and Toutou, the ships played a decisive role in weakening the Germans’ naval power. Even more audacious, if possible, was the initiative to reinforce Belgian troops on Lake Tanganyika with four aquaplanes. Air travel was still in its infancy, especially in the colonies. No one knew how these lightweight planes would react in the warm tropical skies. No one knew a thing about wartime flying, let alone about flying fragile biplanes that took off from water. The four planes arrived in pieces at Matadi. The train then took them to Kinshasa, whence they were loaded onto a freighter bound for Kinsangani. One month later they reached Kalemie. The shipment comprised five hundred metric tons (five hundred fifty U.S. tons) of hardware, fifty-three thousand liters (14,000 gallons) of fuel and oil, four machine guns, and thirty thousand rounds of ammunition. Lake Tanganyika was too turbulent for takeoffs and landings, so the planes were brought to a landlocked lagoon thirty kilometers (about nineteen miles) farther away. The lagoon was completely out of the enemy’s sights and the water was placid. In 1916 the planes flew out a number of missions over Lake Tanganyika, primarily with the intention of bombarding the Von Goetzen. On July 10 of that year, the bombs found their target. (The Von Goetzen, however, did not sink; in 2010 it was still in service, as a ferryboat on the same lake where it had met its inglorious end as gunboat.) The defense of the German coastline, and particularly of the town of Kigoma, had been broken.

  Meanwhile, the infantry came into action as well. The commander of the Force Publique, General Charles Tombeur, assembled a large contingent on Congo’s eastern border. He brought together fifteen thousand men, all equipped with rifles and ammunition. Moving all that matériel into place must have been a logistical nightmare. The transport was seen to by thousands and thousands of local bearers; for every soldier who went into battle, some seven porters were needed. During the four war years, no less than 260,000 native bearers—out of a population of less than ten million inhabitants—took part in the effort. Many of them suffered from malnourishment. Drinking water was scarce. People drank from ponds; people drank their own urine. There was a dire shortage of victuals, tents, and blankets, even as the troops moved through the Kivu highlands with their chilly nights. An estimated twenty-five thousand porters died along the way. Another two thousand soldiers succumbed; at the height of the struggle, the Congolese troops numbered twenty-five thousand men. But unlike the campaign to Sudan in 1896, there was almost no desertion or mutiny, partly because the white officers behaved more mildly toward their African auxiliaries, partly because this was a victorious campaign that boosted the soldiers’ morale.

  In March 1916 Tombeur felt the time was ripe for an offensive. His troops crossed the border into German East Africa and the advance on Kigali, later the capital of Rwanda, could begin. The city fell on May 6. From there the campaign moved on to Tabora, administrative nexus of the Germany colony. That city lay six hundred kilometers (370 miles) farther as the crow flies, and the soldiers advanced on foot, once again with tens of thousands of bearers. A second Congolese column departed from the shores of Lake Tanganyika. With a number of big hotels, mercantile houses, and industry, Tabora was a substantial city on a dry, open plain at twelve hundred meters (3,900 feet) above sea level. The battle formed the climax of the Belgian colonial efforts during World War I. On September 19, after ten days and nights of heavy fighting, the city fell into Belgian-Congolese hands. The German troops fled; the Belgian tricolor was raised above their fort. One year later, in 1917, the city would serve as base for another successful campaign against Mahenge, five hundred kilometers (310 miles) in the direction of Mozambique. The Force Publique now controlled one-third of German East Africa. A few scattered troops actually pushed on to the Indian Ocean, but Tabora was the name everyone would come to know. General Tombeur was raised to the peerage—most appropriately, his new name became Tombeur de Tabora—and a stylized monument was raised to him in Sint-Gillis, close to Brussels. In Congo, the name Tabora took on the connotation of a mythical conquest, heard of by generations of schoolchildren to come. “[King] Albert watches the enemy,” the pupils of the Marist Brothers in Kisangani sang, “Unflaggingly / In Europe, in Tabora town / He keeps his eye on them.”62

  Martin Kabuya, the ninety-two-year-old veteran whose grandfather was buried alive during the Sudanese campaign, was two years old when the war ended. His other grandfather, from his mother’s side, saw the fighting from close by. One suffocatingly hot day, as I sat in his garden, he told me the following: “My grandfather’s name was Matthias Dinda and he was born in 1898. He was a Zanda, from the north of Congo. Our tribe originally comes from Sudan, in fact we are all Sudanese. He was a very strong man, he hunted leopards. He joined the Force Publique and was promoted to soldat de première classe [soldier first class], the highest rank for a black man. From Goma he went to Rwanda, and Burundi and Tanzania, all those German territories. He was there when Tabora fell.” Kabuya was quiet for a moment. An orange-headed lizard flashed across the wall. “My grandfather was a friend of the men who planted the flag there. He even provided them with cover. He was a very great soldier.”63

  I saw Kabuya again at the Armistice Day commemoration in the Maison des Anciens Combattants. The few dozen invitees took their places in the now-dry courtyard. He sat up in front, with the veterans. Plastic lawn chairs had been set up for them. The podium, packed with nicer chairs, was soon filled with military and civilian dignitaries. As the brass band launched into the Belgian and Congolese national anthems, everyone stood and remained saluting the soldiers and officers. It was gripping to celebrate a truce in Kinshasa while, in the east of the country, Nkanda’s rebels were in the midst of their most concerted offensive. During his speech, one of the World War II veterans said: “This riles us and fills us with horror. If we were as young as we were in 1940, we would take up our weapons and go and disarm these troublemakers.”64

  After the speeches it was time for the annual remise des cadeaux (distribution of gifts). A deputy cabinet minister presented the chairman of the veterans’ club with a refrigerator, another decorated veteran received ten kilos (twenty-two pounds) of manioc flour from the Belgian military attaché. But the most important gift—a boom box, imported from China—went to a fragile old woman referred to by all as “la veuve” (the widow). Her name was Hélène Nzimbu Diluzeyi; she was ninety-four and the last remaining widow of a veteran of World War I.

  Afterward, for a full thirty minutes, a band played “Ancien combatant” by Zao, a singer from Congo-Brazzaville, perhaps the loveliest song in Congolese pop music. “La guerre, ce n’est pas bon, ce n’est pas bon” (War, it’s not good, not good) it went. Elderly soldiers began dancing in the courtyard, while beer and soft drinks and snacks were brought out. Some of them shuffled cautiously to the beat, others played war: one man held an umbrella and pretended to be shooting it, another fell in slow motion to the ground, shook his arms and legs in time to the music, then pretended to be dead. “La veuve” watched in amusement, clapped her hands, and couldn’t help laughing out loud now and then at this brilliant pantomime.

  When the party was over, I walked her home. She lived in the Kasavubu district. We crisscrossed the muddy streets of the cité, avoiding the larger puddles. She held tightly to my left arm; under my right I held the monstrously huge box containing the boom box. It was the first time I had ever walked arm-in-arm with a veteran’s wife. When we reached her yard, we sat down together beneath the line hung with laundry. Children and grandchildren came and gathered round us. Her son came to interpret. “My husband’s name was Thomas Masamba Lumoso,” she began. “He was born in 1896. He came to Kin when he was ten. The Protestant missionaries taught him English, then
they handed him over to the army. That’s where he got his uniform. In khaki.”

  “No, Mom, that was much later. Back then they still wore a blue uniform with a red fez.”

  “Really? En tout cas, he was eighteen when the war began. He operated the TSF, as a corporal.”

  TSF, I remembered, that was the telégraphie sans fils, the field radio.

  “He went to wherever the war was. Everywhere. But he was never wounded. God protected him greatly.”

  “That’s right,” her son chimed in, “and he spoke a lot of languages. Swahili, Kimongo, Mbunza, Tshiluba, Kinzande, but also Flemish, French, English, and, because of the war, a little German too.”

  “German?”

  “Yes, things like ‘Guten Tag! Wie geht es? Danke schön!’ I don’t know what it means, but that’s what he always said.”65

  It was the only time during my ten trips through Congo that I met someone who knew a few words of German.

  That evening, at the house of the widow’s other son, Colonel Yoka, I saw a photograph of the war veteran. In uniform, wearing his decorations and looking quite grave. In a report from 1921, his father was described as being “active and honest.” But the most interesting document the colonel showed me was a letter from his Belgian superior: “The aforementioned Masamba from the village of Lugosi served as a supervisory noncom on the TSF from August 9, 1914, to October 5, 1918.” Signed, on October 7, 1918, by someone named Vancleinghem, as far as I could read the handwriting. The dates said a great deal. Masamba’s tour of duty coincided almost exactly with the duration of World War I. He entered the army five days after it started and was discharged one month before the Armistice.66 The last of the veterans was also the one who had served the longest.

  THE WORLD WAR effected more Congolese than the men of the Force Publique alone. In Katanga, the miners worked like mad. The excavation activities were running at full speed. The financial ties with Brussels had been broken, but the war caused the demand for copper to skyrocket. In the midst of the conflict, colonial copper exports rose from 52 million Belgian francs in 1914 to 164 million francs in 1917.67 The British and American shells fired at Passendale, Ypres, Verdun, and along the Somme had brass casings made for 75 percent from Katangan copper. Parts of their cannonry were made of pure, tempered copper. Their bullet shells were made of nickel, which is 80 percent copper. Torpedoes and naval instruments were made from copper, bronze, and brass.68

  Yet even outside the big industrial areas a great many Congolese experienced the fact that a war was on. In Orientale province, farmers were obliged to raise rice as victuals for the troops. In other parts of the country the government charged the population with the cultivation of cotton; that was not only good for exports, but also for the local textile mills. A whole system arose of cultures obligatoires (mandatory state crops). This evoked many unpleasant memories. In their village in Bas-Congo, Nkasi and Lutunu may have noticed little of the war, but brought many people in the interior back under the colonial yoke. And, as has happened more often in Congolese history, the protests against that situation took on a religious form.69

  In 1915 in the Ekonda region of Équateur, a woman by the name of Maria Nkoi had a mystical experience. She became convinced of her own powers of healing and her prophetic duties. From then on she was known as Marie aux Léopards (Marie of the Leopards).70 She began treating the ill and preaching. In addition, she called for a revolt against the colonizer and predicted that Congo would soon be liberated by the “djermani,” the Germans.71 These inflammatory words caused a run-in with the local administrators. She was jailed. Her story is reminiscent of the woman who, in 1704, amid the ruins of the cathedral at Mbanza-Kongo, had come up with an alternative form of Christianity and was prosecuted for that. Then too, European authority had been experiencing a crisis, and then too people feared the consequences of such a religious revival.

  Liberated by the Germans? Albert Kudjabo and Paul Panda Farnana would have had something to say about that! After all, they had been taken prisoner by the Hun! Kudjabo and Panda were among the very few Congolese to fight in World War I in Belgium itself. As early as 1912, a man named J. Droeven had joined the Belgian army; he was the son of a Belgian arms manufacturer who was murdered in Congo in 1910 and a native woman. Droeven was the first man of color in the Belgian army, but less than three months after the war started he deserted and went off to live a life of debauchery in the cafés of Paris.72 Kudjabo, on the other hand, was part of a Congolese Volunteer Corps that had offered to help the beleaguered Belgian forces in 1914.73 Most of the corps consisted of former European colonials; its leader was Colonel Louis Chaltin. These were the only Belgians with previous combat experience, gained during the Arab campaigns and the Sudanese expeditions. But even that didn’t matter. They helped to defend the city of Namur from the advancing German army, but not very successfully. Das Heer steamrolled Belgium, and twenty-one-year-old Albert Kudjabo, along with Paul Panda, were captured. Sent to Berlin as a prisoner of war, he suddenly found himself amid soldiers from all over the world. A handful of anthropologists and philologists became fascinated by this impromptu ethnographic assemblage; they set up the Royal Prussian Phonographic Committee and made almost two thousand recordings of this band of exotics. Albert Kudjabo was asked to sing a song. He drummed, whistled, and sang in his native language.74 Those recordings have been preserved. It is a moving experience to hear them: the only Belgian soldier from World War I whose voice we know is a Congolese.75

  WORLD WAR I had far-reaching consequences for the Belgian Congo. Territorial ones, first of all. The 1919 Paris Peace Conference that produced the Treaty of Versailles decided to divvy up the German colonies among the victors. Cameroon became French and British, Togo became French and British, German East Africa turned British, and Namibia was mandated to the British dominion of South Africa. Belgium received guardianship over two minuscule countries on its eastern border, the historical kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi (still Ruanda and Urundi at the time). In 1923 the League of Nations ratified these territorial mandates. A trust territory was, on paper, not a colony, but in actual practice there was little difference. Here too the rigid and only recently developed tenets of anthropology were applied. In the protectorates, too, people reasoned, one had “races.” Those were absolute: you were either Tutsi or Hutu or Twas (Pygmy). From the 1930s on, this was also printed in one’s passport. For centuries, the borders between these tribal groups had been diffuse, but people forgot about that. The consequences of this neglect, during the second half of the twentieth century, were catastrophic.

  In Congo, the war comprised a sort of pause button in the country’s social history.

  The tentative attempts to improve the living conditions of the natives, by means of better housing at the mines or large-scale campaigns to combat sleeping sickness, were put on the back burner. After four exhausting years, the public health situation was once again extremely precarious. In 1918–19 the Spanish flu claimed fifty to a hundred million victims worldwide; half a million died in “the Spanish fever,” ninety-two-year-old Kabuya told me, “now that killed a lot of people.” The decimation of 1905 seemed to have returned. The pause button was a rewind button as well.

  But, in the eyes of the Belgians, something really had changed. For the first time they began viewing the fate of the Congolese with compassion. The Belgians realized that these people had suffered greatly under a war that was not their own. In addition, the experience of war had resulted in a feeling of soldierly camaraderie. That caused a Belgian officer in the Force Publique to wax lyrical: “No, these men, they have fought, suffered, hoped, desired, forged ahead and triumphed along with us, like us, these are no . . . these are no longer wild men or barbarians. If they could be our equals in suffering and making the greatest sacrifice of all, then they must, then they shall be that too when it comes to being civilized.”76 The soldiers of the Force Publique had shown great courage and loyalty, even under the worst conditions. That called fo
r greater mildness and, yes, greater involvement in the natives’ fate.

  For the Congolese themselves, however, it was an ambivalent experience. Many soldiers entered fully into the undeniable Belgian military successes. The euphoria of victory was sweet and forged new bonds that were certainly sincere and warm. The Belgians could fly through the air and land on water! But for many normal Congolese, the war effort had been grueling. In addition, and this was the most sobering of all, they had seen how the whites—who had taught them not to kill anymore and to stopping waging tribal war—had applied an awesome arsenal for four whole years to combat each other for reasons unclear, in a conflict that claimed more lives than all the tribal wars they could ever recall. Yes, that did something to the respect they felt for these Europeans. It began to crumble.

  CHAPTER 4

  IN THE STRANGLEHOLD OF FEAR

  Growing Unrest and Mutual Suspicion in Peacetime

  1921–1940

  DURING THE INTERWAR YEARS, THE MAJOR SOCIAL UPHEAVALS that began during the first decade of the Belgian Congo continued unabated. Industry picked up its pace. More and more people left their villages and went to work for an employer. The first cities arose. There, tribes became mixed and new lifestyles gained popularity. On Sunday afternoons, people danced to the music of Tino Rossi; the generation before them had still done so to the rhythm of the tom-tom. But in the countryside, time had not stood still. The system of mandatory crops introduced during World War I was now applied everywhere. The mission posts expanded their hold over the people’s souls. Schools and hospitals were built even in remote areas. The teams combating sleeping sickness moved into even the smallest villages.

  In that light, everything was tending toward expansion, a process that served both colonizer and native. Or, at least, that is how people preferred to view it. “Since the world war of 1914–18, the calm in Congo has never been seriously disturbed,” wrote a Catholic school headmaster in a Flemish backwater.