Congo

by David Van Reybrouck

  That only adult men were allowed to vote did not mean that the women and young people were politically apathetic. It is precisely in these circles that one saw around that time the rise of alternative displays of social involvement: the moziki and the bills. The former were women’s associations in which successful women gathered to save money and talk about the latest fashions. That might sound banal. At their parties the members of these associations all dressed in the same new, luxurious materials. But these customs also constituted a form of social commentary. The moziki had names like La Beauté, La Rose, and La Jeunesse Toilette, in French, for that was the language of social prestige. It was their way to respond to the gap between the sexes. They adopted the idiom of the male évolués and affirmed their own social progress. The members were social workers, teachers, or merchants. Victorine Ndjoli, the woman with the driver’s license, and a few of her friends set up La Mode: “We were influenced by the European fashions we picked up from the mail-order catalogues. Those French names proved that we had been to school, that we were civilized. Women were only given the right to learn French quite late, so speaking it was a way to place ourselves on the same level as the men.”17 The radio announcer Pauline Lisanga also belonged to a moziki.

  Many of these clubs aligned themselves with one of the city’s popular orchestras. The word moziki, by the way, comes from music. Victorine Ndjoli’s La Mode was an unqualified fan of OK Jazz, the Orchestre Kinois led by François Luambo Makiadi, nicknamed Franco. Makiadi is still considered the greatest guitarist and composer of Congolese rumba and, in a less Anglocentric history of black music, would take his rightful place beside the likes of B. B. King, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard. Franco de Mi Amor was what they called him, le sorcier de la guitare (the wizard of the guitar), Franco-le-Diable. Victorine and her lady friends went to his shows (later he even married one of them) where they drank mazout, beer mixed with lemonade. It had to be Polar beer, though, because that was made by Bracongo, the brewery where around that same time a young man by the name of Patrice Lumumba became an employee. “I was for Lumumba, we supported his MNC,” Victorine said. In a city where the Abako ruled the roost, that choice was hardly self-evident. “When he died, we all went into mourning.”18 Women were not allowed to vote, but fashion, music, nightlife, drinking, and dancing took on political portent. They voted with their glasses. Primus, the beer brewed by the competition, was the one Kasavubu’s supporters drank.19

  And then there were the young people. After half a century of birth deficit, population figures began rising significantly from the 1950s. Between 1950 and 1960, 2.5 million babies were born in Congo. On the day of independence the country had some 14 million inhabitants. Congo was getting younger all the time: in the mid-1950s, 40 percent of the population was under the age of fifteen.20 Young people became a category of major importance, not only demographically, but also in society and politics. The bills were the colony’s first youthful subculture.21 What the nozems were to Amsterdam, the zazous to Paris, and the rockers to London, the bills were to Léopoldville. They took their inspiration from the Westerns screened in the cité. As the name suggests, their hero was Buffalo Bill. They spoke an argot of their own, hindubill, and had their own dress code: scarves, jeans, and turned-up collars that were a reference to the Far West and mocked the impeccable évolués. This latter group, in turn, voiced great concern about how young people were going to the dogs. Unwholesome movies were to blame:

  Restraints must be imposed on the movie theaters. Detective and cowboy movies are extremely popular. All of those scenarios demonstrate to the audiences, who are largely young people and often even children, how to go about stealing, killing, and, in a word, doing wrong.

  When one sees the posters and billboards, one sometimes feels as though one has entered the realm of boorishness and sensuality.

  How are we to teach our sons and daughters modesty, goodness, charity, self-respect, and respect for others? The great evil is housed in the movie theaters.

  What else does one see in those alcoves but the most erotic films consisting of the most lustful scenes, to which extremely sensual music is then attached?

  One evening I attended a showing. There were, altogether, ten adults in the theater. The rest? . . . Children between the ages of six and fifteen. The theater was full of these “lads.” A hellish noise . . . The boys bounced with impatience. The screen lit up . . . A cowboy movie . . . Applause . . . Shouts of joy . . . A love story . . . Kissing going on everywhere and shouts of “ha” from every corner . . . Then came the fistfights and the gunfire that elicited indescribable rapture . . . . Two ugly movies . . . After the show began the reenactment of what we had been watching on the screen for the last two hours. Young girls leaving the theater were accosted and kissed on the cheeks . . . . The boys followed each other with sticks and imitated the sound of a pistol, in emulation of the cowboys . . . . See here the moral lesson provided by that evening’s showing . . .

  Abominable!

  Let us cherish no illusions. The movie theater will become a school for gangsters in the Belgian Congo, unless the screening of certain films is banned in the cité or the centres extra-coutumiers.22

  The bills were seen as hooligans who took to thievery, debauchery, and the use of marijuana. Juvenile delinquency in the cities did increase during this period, but almost never involved anything more than the theft of a basket of papayas or in the worst cases a bicycle, as opposed to serious crime.23 Still, this was something new. Parental authority was crumbling, the prestige of the évolué was being mocked, the influence of the traditional chief had vanished long ago. The bills created a world of their own. They split up into gangs, each with its own territory in the city, and those territories were rechristened with names like Texas or Santa Fe. Explicit political interest was quite foreign to the bills, but they generated a volatile atmosphere of rebellion and resistance.

  On Sunday, June 16, 1957, sixty thousand spectators crowded into Raphaël de la Kéthulle’s Stade Roi Baudouin to watch a historic soccer match: F.C. Léopoldville, forerunner of the first national team, against Union Saint-Gilloise of Brussels, one of the most successful teams in the history of Belgian soccer.24 This was something new. For the first time, a Congolese team would play against a Belgian team in the colony. It was to be a fierce match with a rowdy ending. The referee was a Belgian army officer and his calls caused resentment. When he blew off two Congolese goals for offside violations, the crowd reacted furiously. The final score was 4–2 in the Belgians’ favor. The supporters shouted that the match had been rigged. Upon leaving the stadium, bills, workers, the unemployed, hoodlums, angry mamans, and schoolchildren vented their rage on the surroundings. There was screaming, blows were dealt out. Youth gangs and onlookers rushed in to join the fracas. Stones hailed down on the cars of white colonials trying to leave the stadium. They had never experienced anything like it. Soccer was supposed to keep the masses docile, wasn’t it? The police should have intervened. At the end of the day, the toll was forty persons wounded and fifty cars damaged.

  This mounting tension resounded loudly in the elections held on December 8, 1957. It was an enormous popular success: 80 to 85 percent of all eligible voters turned out. The Abako did an outstanding job in Léopoldville and succeeded in winning the votes of many who were not even Bakongo. It took 139 of the 170 seats on the municipal council. Of the eight native mayors, six belonged to Abako. In Elisabethville, the migrants from Kasai, the largest population group in the city, won a large portion of the votes. The Union Congolaise, a Catholic, pro-Belgian association of évolués, also achieved sound results. Nine white candidates were elected as well.25

  For Brussels, the successful and orderly elections rang in the start of the controlled democratization of the colony. Local elections were now to be held in other places as well, followed by provincial and later national ones. But it was too late for such gradual change, Kasavubu felt. In his acceptance speech as mayor of the borough of Dendale
in Léopoldville, he did precisely what Lumumba would do in 1960 at his inauguration as prime minister: he gave a fiery speech.

  Democracy is not in place as long as people, in order to contain democratic action, still appoint officials rather than elected representatives of the people. Democracy is not in place when the police includes no Congolese constables. The same goes for the army: we have neither Congolese officers nor Congolese supervisors in the medical service. And what then of the top levels in education and the inspectorates? There is no democracy as long as suffrage is not universal. The first step, in other words, has not yet been taken. We call for general elections and internal autonomy.26

  Those words earned Kasavubu a government reprimand, but that hardly fazed him. The office of mayor, in addition to a comfortable salary, also earned him a great deal of respect from the local population. And so he went on campaigning. The elections did not serve as oil on troubled waters, but in fact fueled the fires of unrest.

  AND THE TIME BOMB WENT ON TICKING. 1955: the Abako turns to politics. 1956: publication of the manifestoes of Conscience Africaine and the Abako. 1957: the municipal elections and the start of the malaise. But the year of the great turnaround was 1958. The immediate cause, however, was cheery and took place in an atmosphere of heartfelt fraternity: the world’s fair in Brussels. There was nothing to indicate the potentially revolutionary effect of an easy-going tour of the pavilions at Expo 58. But that is how it turned out. The world’s fair left Belgium with the protomodern monument of the Atomium, and Congo with an acute hankering for autonomy.

  Jamais Kolonga confirmed that. For several years already, small groups of évolués had been allowed to take educational trips to Belgium, but now hundreds of Congolese, including a large group of soldiers, were invited for a few months’ stay to visit the Expo. It seemed like a sort of Wiedergutmachung (reparation) for the three hundred Congolese who had been put on display at Tervuren in 1897. There was a Congolese village this time too, in the shadow of the Atomium, but most of the guests from the colony were there as visitors. “My father was allowed to go to Belgium in 1958,” Kolonga told me. “He was very impressed by what he saw. Europeans who washed dishes and swept the streets, he didn’t know that existed. There were even white beggars! That was a real eye-opener for him.”27 What a contrast with the image of Belgium he knew only from the missionaries’ stories and his superiors’ attitude! The white man was not an unapproachable demigod. That did not come as a disappointment; on the contrary, it gave him hope. This meant there was room for social development, in Africa too. What’s more, the Congolese saw that they were welcome in the restaurants, cafés, and movie theaters of Brussels—yea, even in its brothels, it was whispered.28 That too was very different from the daily segregation they experienced in the colony.

  The visitors to the Expo not only discovered a different Belgium, but they also discovered each other. People from Léopoldville spoke for the first time with citizens from Elisabethville, Stanleyville, Coquilhatville, and Costermansville. Their country’s vastness and the restrictions on travel had meant there was little contact between the various regions. Farmers migrated to the city, but urbanites seldom or never moved to other cities. During those months in Belgium, however, the visitors exchanged anecdotes, talked about the situation at home and dreamed of a different future. During the Expo, a number of évolués were also approached by Belgian politicians and trade union leaders, from both the Left and the Right. That too fostered a growing political awareness.

  But Longin Ngwadi, nicknamed “The Rubber Band,” the star soccer player for Daring who had become boy to Governor General Pétillon, had less luck. When I interviewed him in Kikwit he told me that he had been allowed to go along to Belgium in 1958, but had never seen the Expo. “We went by plane. I went along as Pétillon’s houseboy. I stayed in Namur and had to cook and do the laundry. Pétillon went to the world’s fair to look at all the merchandise. Copper, diamonds, everything from Congo, everything from every country.” But while the governor general was dining in Brussels with the duke of Edinburgh and the Dutch minister of foreign affairs, Longin remained behind in the kitchen in Namur. “I ate well there. I used a knife and fork. I had watched the others to see how that worked. Madame de gouverneur used to burst out laughing when I ate the wrong way. Things were very good in Belgium. I got lots of presents. I heard about trains that disappeared under the ground and about the big seaport. Namur was an intelligent village, just like Kikwit.”29

  Pétillon found the whole Expo idea ill-advised. Send three hundred Congolese to Brussels and expose them for months to the indoctrination of some of these Belgian types? “In the jumble of the crowds and the exuberance of the Expo, they could do exactly as they pleased. They succeeded in their hideous task of undermining and poisoning, even among the soldiers of the Force Publique. It is horrible to think that this happened under the very eyes of the Belgian government, which did not seem to realize that Congo was more or less descending into a prerevolutionary state.”30 As a man of action, he raised vociferous objections. Which was precisely why, during this same official trip, he was asked to remain in Belgium and become the new minister of colonies. His predecessor, Auguste Buisseret, one of the rare liberals to occupy that post, had followed an all-too-idealistic course—among other things, by introducing secular education in the colony. That had breached the hitherto-closed ranks of white authority, according to all those who stood to profit from a subjugated Congo. A technical supervisor was needed: better a fieldworker than a quibbler. King Baudouin applied his influence, Pétillon accepted the job, but after only four months he threw in the towel. Longin never got to see the Atomium.

  One Congolese visitor who was able to admire the structures of steel and pre-stressed concrete at the Expo was a twenty-eight-year-old man from Équateur. The son of a cook at the Capuchin fathers’ mission, he had attended primary school with the Scheutists in Léopoldville. After one year of secondary education he joined the Force Publique. He became a secretary—bookkeeper—a typist, and in 1954 he was promoted to the rank of sergeant. The typing appealed to him. Working on his military typewriter, he began writing articles under a pen name for colonial publications like Actualités Africaines. In 1956 he left the army to become a full-time journalist. Two years later he was chosen to go to Brussels. At the Expo he cut a rather nondescript figure; a lanky, timid man who peppered his conversations with Europeans with the stopgap “n’est-ce pas?” (isn’t that so?). He was courteous enough, to be sure, but otherwise only rather awkward. His name: Joseph-Désiré Mobutu.

  The final months of 1958 were exceptionally turbulent. The Expo visitors returned to Congo, the war of independence in Algeria was coming to a head, and Morocco and Tunisia had already thrown off the colonial yoke. Closer to home, neighboring Sudan was transformed from a British colony into an autonomous state, and in Brazzaville French president Charles de Gaulle spoke the historic words: “Those who want independence must come and get it!” It was intended as a provocation (for anyone responding to the invitation immediately lost all support from France), but the Belgians across the river choked on their coffee when they heard that on the radio.31 In the working-class districts, however, a cheer went up.

  On October 10, 1958, the Belga wire service in Léopoldville received a press release announcing a new political party. That in itself was nothing special. Other parties had been set up in Congo that same month: the Cerea (Centre de Regroupement Africain) in Kivu and Conakat (Confédération des Associations Tribales du Katanga) in Katanga. Every region suddenly seemed to want a party of its own: the electoral success of the Abako had escaped no one’s notice. What was new, however, was the communiqué’s radically national approach. That was reflected even in the organization’s name: Mouvement National Congolais (MNC). The new party’s platform included the resolution to “fight vigorously against all forms of regional separatism,” as being “irreconcilable with the greater interests of Congo.” The Abako had bemoaned only the fate o
f Bas-Congo, but the MNC resolutely struck a national chord. Congo had to be liberated from “the grasp of imperialistic colonialism, with an eye to the country’s independence, within a reasonable period and by means of peaceful negotiations.”32 For the first time, there was a native political movement that viewed Congo as an entity. The list of names at the bottom of the communiqué included people from various tribes and different parts of the country. There were Bakongo, Bangala, and Baluba, people of the Catholic, liberal, and socialist persuasions, trade union members and journalists. The name of the self-appointed party chairman was Patrice Lumumba.

  Lumumba was born in 1925 in Onalua, a village in Kasai. In ethnic terms, he belonged to the Batetela, the tribe that had led the great mutiny during the Arab campaigns in the late nineteenth century. Lumumba’s father was a poorly educated Catholic known for his volatile temper and stubborn nature. A man who brewed his own palm wine and drank it himself. Lumumba went to school at Protestant and Catholic mission posts and, after a time spent crisscrossing the interior during the war years, moved to the big city: Stanleyville. There he found work as a minor administrative official, then as a postal clerk. The colonial post office sent him for training to Léopoldville, where he improved his paltry French and acquired an insatiable hunger for knowledge. Back in Stanleyville he became a fervent reader, working at the library as a volunteer and never missing a reading or cultural evening. In 1954 he acquired the much-coveted registration card. His self-confidence grew by leaps and bounds. He became extremely active in the town’s club life, and seemed to have no trouble juggling a whole series of board positions. He was chairman of the association of postal workers, led the regional branch of the APIC trade federation, maintained contacts with Belgian liberal parties and became chairman of Stanleyville’s Association des Évolués.33 He had a reputation for being able to get by on two or three hours sleep each night.34 In addition to his busy schedule of meetings, he wrote political analyses. He began submitting articles to newspapers such as Le Croix du Congo and La Voix du Congolais, and even set up his own periodical: L’Écho Postal. All who met him in those days in Stanleyville were impressed. Lumumba was quick and acute, zealous and energetic. He had the gift of the word and the power of his convictions. With his spectacles, bow tie, and—a rarity among African men—his beard, he made an intelligent and attractive impression on many. The fact that he was fairly bursting with ambition was camouflaged by his charm and glibness, though he had the tendency at times to say what he knew the listener wanted to hear. At some moments, this made him seem a bit like a chameleon.