Congo

by David Van Reybrouck

  It was for this reason that, in 1952, the carte d’immatriculation (registration card) was introduced. This new document gave the évolué the same rights in public life and in the eyes of the law as the European population. The most important advantage was that the évolué could now send his children to European schools, an exceptional social promotion that also guaranteed a decent education. But the skepticism among large parts of the colonial elite was so great that extremely stringent requirements were posed for obtaining such a card. Those requirements were often humiliating as well. During the period of application, an inspector was allowed to pay surprise visits to the family home, to see whether the candidate and his family lived in a truly civilized fashion. The inspector would look to see that each child had a bed of its own, that the family ate with knives and forks, that the plates were uniform in size and type, and that the toilet was clean. Did the family eat together at the table, or did the mother sit in the kitchen with her offspring while the man dined with his visitor, in the old style? Only very few applicants lived up to the these criteria. The result, therefore, was that years of palaver were invested in drafting a legal status from which almost no one profited. In 1958, within a population of almost fourteen million, only 1,557 “civil merits” were handed out and only 217 “registration cards.”77 That led to frustration. For sooner or later yearning turns to distaste, yes, even to hostility.

  TYPE IN A SEARCH for “Jamais Kolonga” on YouTube and within seconds you will hear one of the great classics of Congolese rumba. It could have come from the Buena Vista Social Club, but it was composed by African Jazz, the most popular band in Congo in the 1950s. That legendary orchestra was led by Joseph Kabasele, nicknamed “le Grand Kalle.” The song itself was written by his gifted guitarist, Tino Baroza. It became one of African Jazz’s biggest hits. “Oyé, oyé, oyé,” the refrain went, “hold me tight. Jamais Kolonga, hold me tight. Let me go, and I might fall.” The part about holding tight was open to multiple interpretations.

  I climb out of the car in a narrow, dusty alleyway in Lingala. Could this be it? In colonial times, Lingwala was the neighborhood of the évolués. All the old people I spoke to knew Jamais Kolonga. Of course! But hadn’t he passed away? Hadn’t the local press run an alarming article? “Le vieux Jamais Kolonga laminé par la maladie!” (Old Jamais Kolonga flattened by illness!) was the headline. They had read that the man “who as bon vivant, with his wisecracks and pranks, served as the embodiment of the vitality of Kinshasa in the 1960s” was now critically ill.

  But, after a series of dead ends and a fortune spent on call minutes, I had finally come up with a street and a number. The yard I walked into was surrounded by a crumbling wall and contained a patch of corn, withered and dry as dust. From a cinderblock house a man appeared, wearing short pants, walking on crutches.

  “Are you Jamais Kolonga?”

  “The one and only!”

  One had informants who had seen a lot but had little to say, and one had informants who had little to say but talked a lot anyway. Kolonga belonged to neither category. He had seen everything and he was a fantastic storyteller. He didn’t think so himself: “I’ve just had a hip operation. It’s not going too well. It hurts a lot, even with all the medicines I have to take.” He pulled up his pants leg to show me an impressive scar.

  “Is there something I can do? Do you need anything?”

  “Wine! If you’ve got some money, I can send one of my grandchildren out for wine.”

  “Wine? In your condition? Are you sure?”

  I spent three whole afternoons talking to that little, sharp-witted man, sometimes in his living room, at other times in the shadow of his house. He was excellent company, with a remarkable sense of humor, an unsinkable joie de vivre and a spectacular memory. One time I went to visit him in a little hospital where he had been admitted to convalesce for a few days, and where he flirted with the nurses nonstop. His hip was getting better every day. But now, I asked him, what was the story with that white woman?

  “That was in 1954. I was eighteen and had just started working for the Otraco.”

  “The Office des Transports au Congo?

  “Exactly. My father worked there too. First they put me on the docks here in Kinshasa, but until I turned twenty-one, the wages were paid to my father’s account. That was not exactly ideal. I couldn’t even buy my own liquor. That’s why I asked to be transferred to the interior.” While everyone was moving to the city, he ran away from it. “I had to go to Port Francqui, which is what they call Ilebo now. It’s close to Kasai. When you travel from Kinshasa to Lubumbashi, that’s where you transfer from the boat to the train. In those days I even put up Simon Kimbangu’s children; they were on their way to visit their father in the prison! Bon, so I worked there as clerk. And because of my father, I was the only black man allowed in the white people’s shops. I drank Portuguese wine and whisky. That’s right, even back then.”

  While he was talking, one of his granddaughters had gone to the local shop and come back with a cheap carton of wine, which she set down in front of us. Don Pedro. I stuck to my cola.

  One day Kabasele was passing through with his orchestra. But his train ran off the tracks, and they missed the boat. They were stuck in Port Francqui for fifteen days! I knew that my Flemish boss’s daughter was getting married soon, and arranged for Kabasele to play at the wedding. No sooner said than done. The party was gearing up. That evening I wore a navy-blue suit with a red tie. There were only three évolués there. I had to arrange special permits for the musicians, otherwise they wouldn’t have been allowed into the white neighborhood after dark. I stood at the bar and saw a Portuguese lady. She danced very well. You have to realize that in 1954 a black man wasn’t allowed to touch a white woman. We couldn’t even talk to them! The only white women we saw were the Catholic nuns. The boys were the only ones who came in contact with married European women. But okay, I’d taken a good look at her while she danced and I asked her husband if I could cut in. Just like that! It was an impulse, an obsession. But her husband nodded. So I walked up to her and I asked her to dance. Then I danced with her, for a whole song. Afterward the whites all clapped, even the provincial governor! Later, Kabasele wrote a song about it: “Jamais Kolonga.”

  He poured himself a little more wine. Once an évolué, always an évolué.

  “So tell me about your father.”

  “He was born on January 1, 1900, in Bas-Congo.”

  “Oh really? Is that an arbitrary date, something the missionaries came up with?”

  “No, that was really his date of birth. That same day someone was mauled by a lion, a black man. When my father was baptized, the white people still remembered that. There were a lot of lions and buffalo, even elephants, back then.”

  Now there are no big animals anymore. In terms of wildlife, Bas-Congo is empty. But what a rapid evolution! Only half a century before Jamais Kolonga danced at a European wedding, there were still lions mauling people in Bas-Congo. And missionaries, out after living prey of their own.

  When [my father] was twelve or thirteen, Reverend Father Cuvelier came to the village. He said to my father: “I want you to shine my shoes. Where is your father?” And to my grandfather he said: “Can you give me your son?” “All right,” my grandfather said, “I’ll let him go with you, as long as he comes back to see me sometimes.” My grandfather himself was a Catholic, you see? When he got married in the church, he sent away two of his three wives. He kept the children himself, of course. Anyway, my father went along to the mission post and was baptized on December 13, 1913. After that they registered him with the Redemptorist school in Matadi, and six years later he went to the new secondary school in Boma. So he was, ipso facto, one of the first students to graduate there.

  It was the first time in all my journeys that I had heard a Congolese use the term ipso facto.

  Around 1927 or 1928 [my father] was picked out by an official from Otraco. They needed intelligent people. Until he reached
retirement age in 1958, my father worked for Otraco, always as an office clerk. When the company moved its headquarters from Thysville to Léopoldville, he moved here. My father became an evolué. He managed la cité Otraco, the housing district for the native personnel. He was in charge of masons, carpenters, the men who worked with reinforced concrete. He visited the homes of the Otraco workers and every Saturday he gave a prize for the neatest, prettiest house. My father drank wine, he was one of the first Congolese who was allowed to do that. On holidays he gave speeches for the governor general, for Ryckmans, Pétillon, or Cornelis, he knew them all. In 1928 he even gave a speech for King Albert, when he came here! So of course they gave him a certificate of civil merit and later a registration card. Back then there were only forty-seven immatriculés in all of Congo!

  That had made a great impression. Even old Nkasi remembered him. “Joseph Lema, he was completely mundele.” Kolonga’s father was appointed to the Otraco works council and later to the provincial council. He belonged to the first group of Congolese with even a slight say in administrative matters. Kolonga rummaged around in a grubby brown envelope and pulled out a black-and-white photo that had been eaten away by moisture and termites. The picture was crumbling in his hands.

  “Look, this is my father. And this is my godfather, Papa Antoine.” A man in uniform, heavily decorated. “He was a World War I veteran, and a good friend of my father’s.” On the back of the photograph I saw his father’s handwriting. Extremely graceful and regular, brimming with self-confidence.

  I was born in 1935, in Kinshasa. I spoke French with my father, Kikongo with my mother, and everywhere else it was Lingala. My parents came from the same village. My mother was married to an évolué, but she went back to the village each year for six weeks. It must have been there that she was bitten. She died of sleeping sickness in 1948. By then I was attending school at Saint-Pierre’s, the primary school run by the Reverend Father Raphaël de la Kéthulle. During the recess I was allowed to arrange the books in the school library. And when there was a big soccer match, I was allowed to fetch the ball from his office and lay it on the center spot. The band played martial music and I marched out to the center of the pitch, even though I was the littlest pupil. De la Kéthulle taught me to be brave.

  He tried to demonstrate how he had done that, but his sore hip kept him from it.

  “I wanted to become a priest. I studied Latin and Greek for two years at the preparatory seminary at Kibula, outside Kinshasa. That was with the Redemptorists. But then they kicked me out.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I didn’t like manioc bread. I really couldn’t eat it. They thought I was putting on a show. Jacques Ceulemans was the name of the man who expelled me. I still remember his name. He showed no mercy. I really couldn’t stand that stuff. It was the greatest disappointment of my early years, but after independence—by that time I’d become a spokesman—I turned around and threw him out. That was during the soldiers’ mutiny.”

  Desire, frustration, revenge: a familiar psychological process. For Kolonga, too, the priesthood had been an ardent pipe dream, a dream from which he was rudely awakened.

  “I finally finished school in Kinshasa, at Saint-Anne’s, De la Kéthulle’s secondary school. We were all there at the same time. Thomas Kanza, Cardoso, Boboliko, Adoula, Ileo. Bolikango too, but he was a bit older.” Each and every one of the men he mentioned had occupied key positions after independence. Jean Bolikango went to Brussels to negotiate the terms of independence. Cyrille Adoula, Joseph Ileo, and André Boboliko all served as prime minister at some point, Kanza was the first ambassador to the United Nations, Mario Cardoso was minister of education. “Our school was run by the Scheut fathers. The other school in Kinshasa was a Jesuit collège. [Justin] Bomboko, [Cléophas] Kamitatu, Albert Ndele, they all went there, among others.” More resounding names from the history of Congo. The first two were later to be ministers of foreign affairs, the latter became director of the Congolese Central Bank.

  What a setting, what a portrait of an era . . . This was the jeunesse dorée of Congo. Their schools had served to prepare a young urban elite fairly bursting with ambition. No generation before or after them had ever received such a sterling education. A certain inferiority complex with regard to the whites still remained, but with them the fear felt by an earlier generation reversed itself in moments of daring, certainly for someone like Kolonga. He still purred with pleasure when he thought about Monsieur Maurice.

  I went to work for Otraco in ’52. Monsieur Moritz was one of the bosses. There was an elevator for whites and stairs for the blacks, even for the white-collar workers. I always took the elevator anyway, because I had to go the fourth floor. One day I found myself in the elevator with the notorious Mr. Moritz. And I had wine on my breath, too. Because my father was an évolué . . . Bon. Moritz hit me and we got into a fight. It all ended up at the Otraco security office. I was really the company troublemaker, let me tell you.78

  POSTWAR CONGO was making a complete turnabout, and the évolués were the clearest proof of that. The atmosphere was one of anticipation. The high point was, without a doubt, the famous tour King Baudouin made in May and June of 1955. For the first time, a Belgian ruler visited not only the colony’s strongholds of power and its hunting preserves, but also took time to wave to the people. It was a roaring success, a euphoric experience without parallel. Young people climbed in trees to wave back to the king, women wore pagnes bearing the Baudouin’s likeness, children loudly sang the Belgian national anthem.79 The king and his retinue crisscrossed the country like a traveling circus and were welcomed everywhere with song and dance. In Stanleyville he was carried on a litter by Bakumu tribesmen. He was followed by the women of Elisabethville, who called out: “Our king is so young and so handsome! May God preserve him!”(Our king, they called him; it was the first time that had ever happened.) In Kinshasa someone came up with the idea of having him driven around by Victorine Ndjoli, the photo model with the driver’s license, but the plan fell through. Mwana kitoko was what they called him, pretty boy, for he was quite young and still single. Everyone tried to catch a glimpse of him. To look him in the eye or touch him was believed to bring good luck. Children in the provinces who had never worn shoes now received their first pair, specially for that one day. “It made it hard to walk,” one of them said, “but we certainly laughed a lot.”80 Today, in the homes of elderly évolués, one still sees their wedding picture hung beside a state portrait of Baudouin.

  One of the places the king visited along the way was Lingwala, the district where the évolués lived. “He wanted to see them with his own eyes, the houses that had been built with state funding,” Kolonga said. “And so he came to look at my father’s house, which was here on this plot of land.” He pointed out the window with his crutch at the spot where the corn now stood withering on the stalk. “The house is gone now, but back then Madame Detiège, Otraco’s social assistant, came by to check the easy chairs and decorate the house. The walls got a new coat of paint and they put flowers on the tables. King Baudouin came here with the governor general. They talked to my father for at least ten or fifteen minutes.”

  It was hard to believe that only a few years later that same father would be visited daily in that same house by a man who would stoke the desire for independence like no other. That man was Joseph Kasavubu. A few years after that he would become the first president of an independent Congo.

  A GREAT DEAL HAD CHANGED. After World War I there had been those who longed for a return to the time before the whites arrived. But after World War II, more and more people began longing to live like the whites themselves. There was as yet no fever of independence, but the world war had served as a catalyst of major proportions. The war had displayed the mother country’s vulnerability and had resulted in a new world order in which colonialism was anything but self-evident. The latent tension this generated was never expressed more clearly than by Antoine-Roger Bolamba, journalist, poet, and é
volué, in 1955. He was the greatest Congolese poet writing in French during the colonial period.

  Before the meat of the struggle

  I will wait

  wait for the red hour of the kickoff

  Above my head already whistles the arrow that carries further, much further,

  the dizzying fire of victory81

  CHAPTER 6

  SOON TO BE OURS

  A Belated Decolonization, a Sudden Independence

  1955–1960

  AND THEN, SUDDENLY, IT WENT LIKE LIGHTNING. In 1955 not a single native organization dreamed of an independent Congo. Five years later that political autonomy was a fact. The speed at which it took place stunned almost everyone, not least of all the Congolese themselves. The Belgian colonialism to which they were subjected, after all, was permeated with the idea of gradual change. Step by step, Congo was to be withdrawn from its archaic origins in order to enter the modern age. As far as the Belgians were concerned, the finish was not nearly in sight. Yes, the country had been on the right path ever since World War II, but the “civilizing work” was not even halfway done. “Independence?” Sacred Heart missionary and future archbishop Petrus Wijnants sneered to his congregation in 1959. “Perhaps within seventy-five years, but certainly not within fifty!”1

  But things would turn out differently. Gradual change made way for a stampede, doddering progress for chaos. Who were the ones responsible? No one in particular. Or rather everyone. This high-speed decolonization was not the work of any one specific person or movement, but of an extremely complex interaction between the various players. It was like a game of Ping-Pong that begins calmly, with a slow tapping of the ball back and forth, and then suddenly accelerates into a nervous rally full of focused volleys, lazy lob shots, grim smashes. and sly feints. Faster and faster the ball flies, so quickly that it becomes unclear for players and onlookers alike exactly what is happening where and when. No one can follow it anymore, no one has an overview, but everyone knows: it can’t go on like this much longer. And that is how things went in Congo too. The only difference being that there were more than two players and actually more than one ball. During the process of decolonization, it was not simply a matter of the Congolese against the Belgians; the blocs were not that monolithic. On the Congolese side there were évolués, clerics, soldiers, workers, farmers. The ambitions of people from Bas-Congo were not identical to those from Kivu or Kasai. The dreams of those in their thirties were not those of people in their sixties. But sooner or later they all came to the Ping-Pong table. On the Belgian side one had not only the Belgians in the colony, but also the Belgians in the mother country. There were European liberals, Catholics, and socialists. The church and the royals had interests different from those of the industrialists or the trade unionists. In Congo itself, colonial officials desired different things than did plantation owners in the interior or missionaries in the jungle. All these special interest groups stood shoulder to shoulder, back to back, and face-to-face. And then there were the supporters: Russia, America, and the United Nations stood shouting loudly from the grandstands, surrounded by young states such as Ghana, India, and Egypt. The players didn’t know whom to listen to first, but the Congolese players—as underdogs—clearly received the most encouragement.