The carpenter’s son who was not allowed to become a priest, the salesman of household textiles and moldy liverwurst, the lightning forward for Daring, now became manservant to the next-to-last governor general of the Belgian Congo. “I worked for him for four years. He called me mon fils, my son.” Léopoldville was truly a city of opportunity.53
LONGIN NGWADI’S STORY WAS EXCEPTIONAL, of course, but many newcomers experienced a new sense of freedom in the city. That certainly applied to many women. After her husband died, Thérèse from Kasai moved to Léopoldville. An uncle took her in and helped her to set up a little business. On the street market in Kinshasa she sold manioc beer, and later fruit juice she made herself from ripe bananas. After one year she had her children come to the city, a few years later she remarried, this time to a worker she had come to know, someone of her own tribe who had ended up in the city as well.54 In the cité, a “free woman” was no longer a prostitute, the category once referred to in official documents as “the healthy women of native extraction who theoretically live alone,” but simply a person trying to get by on her own.
Or Sister Apolline. She was Longin’s age. I met her at the Franciscan convent in Kinshasa. She came from a mixed family in the interior—her father was Congolese, her mother Tanzanian; they had met during World War I while her father was with the Force Publique, fighting in German East Africa. When she turned twelve, her parents found a suitable partner for her to marry. But she had different plans. She wanted to enter the convent, she felt freer there. The life of a nun took her to the big city. “I worked in Lubumbashi for twenty-nine years. I was the headmistress of a primary school there. And many years later I became the first black member of the religious provincial council. I’ve always lived in the city.”55
Or Victorine Ndjoli. She was the first Congolese woman to get her driver’s license. “I went to home economics school at the Franciscan sisters. Sewing on buttons, needlework. Later, at the foyer social [community center], I learned to make baby clothes and hats. Back then the white people were looking for pretty girls for their advertisements. I was a photo model for a brand of bicycle, for sherry, for milk. I liked that, but I wanted something more. I ran away in order to take driving lessons. My father didn’t want me to at first, but afterward he was proud of me. I had my license within a week. It was 1955, I was twenty. I took lessons in a Dodge, but I’ve never had my own car. The men in the family were against it.”56
Victorine also took part in the first beauty contests in Léopoldville, organized by the dance-school owner Maître Taureau (Master Steer). It would be hard to imagine a name more macho than that. I asked him about it as we sat in front of his house in Yolo, a working-class neighborhood where every passerby knew him. “No, my real name is François Ngombe. Ngombe is Lingala for bull. And maître because I am the master of Life without a Master!” He roared with laughter. “At my dance school I taught the cha-cha, bolero, rumba, and charanga, but also swing and rock ’n’ roll. As a sideline, I organized Miss Charm contests in the neighborhoods. The Greek and Portuguese merchants gave away free textiles. The girls wore them as pagnes [skirts], which worked as a kind of advertizing. There was a contest, and one of the girls was chosen.”57
Kinshasa became a city of fashion, elegance, and coquetry. Young women wore long, colorful pagnes, a custom introduced by the nuns at the missions. By way of Europe, batik textiles arrived in Central Africa. The girls wore their hair short, but from around the age of ten they let it grow. A dozen African hairdos arose at this time, some of them taking up to three hours to create.58 Women played a key role in the creation of a new urban culture. They controlled small trade, they determined which clothing, music and dances were fashionable and they gave form to a new, modern African lifestyle.59
A number of women were able to break through to prestigious positions. In 1949 Pauline Lisanga was hired as announcer for Radio Congo Belge. The station had begun with broadcasts for the African population. Lisanga became Africa’s first black female radio announcer.60 Few Congolese owned a radio, but passersby and neighborhood residents would gather around loudspeakers set up at many spots in the city. There they heard Lisanga’s voice. They listened to news programs, edifying sketches and religious programs, but also to traditional Congolese music and light Western music. There were even slots for contemporary Congolese music.
Léopoldville in those days was teeming with bands that provided entertainment for weddings, funerals, and parties. Their lively rhythms, virtuoso guitar arrangements, falsetto vocals, ingenious song lines, and light-hearted lyrics made for irresistible dance music. This was the rock ’n’ roll of Central Africa. In Congo, the major dance venues were in the hands of Greek immigrants. In Kinshasa one had (and still has) the Akropolis; in Kisangani there was the Bar Olympia. A number of Greek entrepreneurs also began opening recording studios. There, the wondrous dance music of a number of Congolese orchestras was preserved for posterity. Radio resulted in the rise of new popular heroes. Kabaesele’s African Jazz and Franco’s OK Jazz became the most popular bands of the 1950s.
Yet urban life had more to offer than beauty contests, manioc beer and dance recordings. At the shipyards of Léopoldville, in the chemical and metallurgical plants of Katanga, and at trading firms in the urban centers, a new generation of Congolese men like Longin Ngwadi were finding their first jobs. There they made acquaintance with a demanding modern economy. There were no strikes, but here too reigned the deceptive silence before the storm. Only a few years later, when the fever of independence broke out in full force, many people dreamed of never having to work again after power had changed hands. But for the time being things remained calm, ominously calm. After all, how could any rancor have risen to the surface? Trade unions provided no solution; until 1946, in fact, they were forbidden for black workers. White civil servants had set up their first associations as early as 1920, but they admitted no Congolese members. A trade federation exclusively for trained personnel, the STICs, the Syndicats des Travailleurs Indigènes Spécialisés, was established after the war, but effectively excluded 90 percent of all Congolese workers. Later came the APIC, the Association du Personnel Indigène de la Colonie, which was a much more militant organization. But with the stipulation that such organizations be supervised by white advisers, the colonial administration was able to keep almost every trade union organization on a short leash.61 Always having a civil official or padre looking over one’s potentially rebellious shoulder effectively quashed all autonomy. Trade union activities were expected to be constructive and calm. At best, the colonizer saw the associations as a useful éducation sociale for the worker.62 A sort of soccer, in other words, but then indoors: you learned to hold meetings, to draw up an agenda and take minutes, to discuss a budget . . . . The trade union was considered a form of training, not a legitimate forum for opposition and protest. When Belgian trade union organizations—both Catholic and socialist—tried to gain a foothold in the colony, their attempt was doomed to failure. The Congolese worker felt no affinity with them. It felt like something was being imposed on them from above, something white. Of the almost 1.2 million Congolese on payrolls in 1955, only 6,160 belonged to a union, less than one-half of one percent.63
The government did, however, stimulate the larger companies to establish works councils in which Congolese could have their say. These were easier to monitor than autonomous trade unions. The provincial councils also took on their first black members, and from 1951 the colonial administrative council, an informal advisory body without real powers, numbered eight Africans—most of whom came from the countryside and did not belong to the new urban middle class. These were tentative attempts to hear the grievances and complaints of colonial subjects, but they also attested to the opinion that there was still a world of time in which to arrive at more substantial measures.64 Everything was still going swimmingly. Or so they thought.
HOW COULD ANYONE HAVE SUSPECTED that a revolution was brewing? The rural population remained docil
e, the city dwellers seemed satisfied enough. In fact, there was even a real caste of évolués on the rise who wanted to live in the most European fashion possible, who were wild about anything Belgian, and who loudly voiced their praise of the merits of colonialism. Today the term applied to these Westernized Africans seems rather problematic, but it was very much a title they chose for themselves.65 And these évolués, the Belgian colonial was sure, posed no threat whatsoever. Given, there was at times something ludicrous about it, about the whole business of tidy suits and mannered French. But these were the true social climbers, the ones reaping the bulk of the fruits of that noble task of spreading civilization. There could hardly be more loyal subjects.
But it was precisely from within the circles of the évolués that the bomb would finally go off. Most of them had been born in the cities between the wars. They had only secondhand knowledge of village life. They attended the mission schools, went to work for European businesses, respected the colonial government, and therefore looked up to their white rulers as the only social role model they had ever known. Many of them went to great lengths to be taken seriously. They studied in the public libraries, read the newspapers, listened to the radio, went to the movies and to the theater, and read books; it was the white man’s intelligence, even more than his prosperity, that they envied. The latter was nothing but an expression of the former.
A lively culture of clubs and associations arose. Still under colonial supervision, these organizations were nonetheless of great historical importance: in the alumni associations, academic clubs, and tribal organizations, after all, lay the seed of the political awakening to come.66 The former pupils of Tata Raphaël’s school came together in the Adapes (Association des Anciens Eléves des Pères de Scheut), later an important breeding ground for the first generation of Congolese politicians. In the cercles des évolueés (évoluées’ clubs) they gathered to discuss books and organize debates; these were a sort of informal night school, and they shot up like mushrooms. In 1950 there were three hundred of them all over Congo. The tribal associations in the cities were now more than simply emergency coffers; they became cultural organizations that would soon develop political ambitions as well. In Elisabethville, tensions grew between the Baluba from Katanga and the Baluba from Kasai: the latter group, to the locals’ great irritation, had come down to work in the mines in huge numbers. New clubs were set up as a result. In Léopoldville, the Bakongo felt threatened by the growing influx of Bangala, tribespeople from Équateur who were active in the military and in commerce. Lingala was replacing Kikongo, the original language of the area around the capital, and so the Abako, the Alliance des Bakongo, was set up; a purely cultural association that promoted the language of the Kongo people. Its founder, once again, was a young man rejected for the priesthood.
An évolué was a man (never a woman, except as partner) who had enjoyed a certain level of education, had a fixed income, displayed great seriousness about his profession, was monogamous, and lived in European fashion. As the children of two of them explained to me once, the évolué also owned a Raleigh bicycle, preferably with gears. “That was the black man’s Mercedes in those days.” In his home he had a Coleman lantern. He had a record player, which he used to listen to Edith Piaf. Wendo Kolosoyi records were all right as well, because that was calm music. “But definitely not any music that might give rise to lewd dancing. My parents went dancing on Sundays, my father always wore a derby.” The évolué sent his wife to prenatal care at the health center. Their baby was weighed. At home they abided by the nutritional advice given by the white nuns. They rejected traditional medicine and ancestor worship, but the gap between male and female was sizeable. The former was educated and worked for an employer, the latter uneducated and jobless. Only two or three women in all of Stanleyville around that time were able to carry on a conversation in rudimentary French.67 One of the évolué children told me: “I often heard my father tell my mother: ‘You, you’re a real Negress, you know! The white people don’t live like that!’”68
The number of évolués was never very large (fewer than six thousand in 1946, and a little under twelve thousand by 1954), but their articulateness tipped the scales in their favor. Tragically enough, what they desired was closer contact with the Europeans, at the very moment when the Europeans were withdrawing more and more to their villas, swimming pools, and tennis tournaments. Yes, in the Belgian Congo there were black truck drivers and telegraph operators, but in cafes and restaurants the color bar was more pronounced than ever. If a white journalist in Léopoldville dared to take a black colleague along to a European bar, conversation would stop. Trains and riverboats may have been run by black engineers and captains, but the passenger compartments were strictly divided into black and white. If a black man jumped into a swimming pool, the whites would get out. Corporal punishment with the chicotte was still applied to all Africans, even those who could distinguish the Latin dative case from the genitive and read De Gaulle’s speeches. The writer Paul Lomami Tshibamba worked for La Voix du Congolais, a government-monitored magazine for évolués. For the second issue, published in 1945, he wrote a controversial but by all means moderate piece entitled “Quel sera notre place dans le monde de demain?” (What Will Be Our Place in Tomorrow’s World?). By his own account, its publication resulted for him in “countless legal sittings, accompanied by endless lashes.”69 The chicotte cracked while, elsewhere in the city, synchronous but far more lazy, the tennis balls thunked against the backboards. Meanwhile, white colonials went to the horse races and organized bicycle races. Festive kermis competitions, with amateur cyclists riding cheerfully under banners advertizing Martini and Rossi vermouth.
The painful yearning felt by the évolué was never clearer to me than during those few seconds of historical footage in Heimweh nach den Tropen, a gripping documentary by Luc Leysen. It is 1951 and the whites are lined up to judge a contest in Léopoldville. Yet these are not poodles or poultry being judged, but families. Before an exclusively white audience, Congolese families are parading past the jury. The father in short pants, his wife beside him, then the children neatly lined up according to age. The youngest child carries a sign with the contestants’ number. The audience applauds politely. Then they walk offstage gravely . . . . So much despair in so few seconds.70
The évolués desired a special legal status that would do justice to their unique place in society. That was understandable. They had, after all, become “social mulattoes,” people who dangled between two cultures.71 The évolués of a small town like Luluabourg expressed it most grippingly:
We ask the Government to kindly recognize that native society has evolved powerfully in the last fifteen years. Beside the native masses who are rated less important or who are uneducated, a new social class has been formed which constitutes a sort of native middle class.
The members of this native intellectual elite do everything possible to advance themselves and to live in a respectable fashion, as respectable Europeans do. These évolués have realized that they have responsibilities and duties. But they are convinced that they deserve, if not a special legal status, then in any case special protection from the Government against measures or treatments applied to the ignorant and backward masses . . . . It is painful to be received as a savage, when one is full of good will.72
It is also painful to think that anyone who writes so eloquently could still be subject to flogging with a strip of hippopotamus hide. The subservient, almost servile tone bespeaks a great longing. The évolué did not wish to tear down the wall between black and white, but to be lifted over it. He did not fight against the color bar. He did not demand rights for “the Congolese people,” or for his tribe, but only for the circles to which he, after great effort, had gained access. Was that egotistical? Definitely. Was there something denigrating about it? Yes. But in the final analysis, in their desire for assimilation, they had even adopted the perspective from which most of Europeans regarded the natives.
The Belgian colonial authorities hesitated for a long time. After all, they had never set out to cultivate an uprooted elite, had they? Everything in good time, that was the motto. It was not until 1938 that a hesitant start was made with general secondary schools, and not until 1954 (only six years before independence, but no one knew that yet) that the first university, Lovanium, was set up, an auxiliary branch of the Catholic University of Louvain. During its first year, the new university had thirty-three students and seven professors. You could study natural sciences, social and administrative sciences, education, and agronomy. A law school was started only in 1958.73 No big hurry, in other words. Was it then really necessary to recognize a privileged caste?
In 1948 the Belgian administration found a provisional solution: the évolué could apply for a “certificate of civil merit.” Anyone without a criminal record and who had never been deported, who had sworn off polygamy and sorcery, and who could read, write, and do arithmetic was eligible. Those who held such a certificate could no longer be administered corporal punishment and would, in the case of a trial, be tried before a European judge. They had access to separate wards in hospitals and were allowed to walk through the white neighborhoods after 6 P.M.74 This made a great impression on the average Congolese. In Boma, Camille Mananga, a man who was thirteen when the certificate of merit was introduced, told me: “That was reserved for the truly prominent. They were allowed to go shopping and drink along with the whites. That was a very great distinction. I was still much too young. The sky was more within my reach than a certificate like that!”75 But for people who had been working their way up the ladder for years, it represented fairly minimal privileges that stood in no proportion to their efforts. Structural wage inequality still existed. As a former évolué, Victor Masunda, another inhabitant of Boma, could still get wound up about that: “Of course I didn’t apply for that card. It really didn’t mean any higher wages. A lot of people groveled, but I refused to lower myself. Applying for the certificate of merit was degrading. Was I supposed to become their little brother? No. I could get hold of my red wine and whisky on my own.”76
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