What was going on here? Had the colonizer, in an unguarded moment, given away independence? No. The round-table conference had indeed gained more momentum than first intended (as was the case with almost every initiative in Belgian colonial politics after 1955) and the Belgian delegation was indeed badly prepared, but this was no rash decision. In the context of the moment, Belgium had only two options: either to reject the common front’s demand, which would almost surely have led to massive rioting, or to agree to the request and hope that things would not get out of hand.64 There was no time for calm negotiations. The choice, in other words, was obvious enough. There were enough Belgian soldiers stationed at the military bases at Kitona and Kamina, but Belgium was not at all in favor of a conflict model. A bloody struggle for independence had been raging in Algeria for the last six years. There was absolutely no majority to be found in the Belgian parliament for a military show of force. The United Nations Charter and the anticolonial standpoints of the United States and the Soviet Union also gave Belgium little room to maneuver on the international scene. Fight off independence? That was possible, but only at the cost of a risky undertaking in the colony and moral isolation from the international community. In 1960 no less than seventeen African countries were to gain independence; Belgium could not lag behind. The only European countries with no intention of releasing their large African holdings were the southern European dictatorships: Salazar’s Portugal, which refused to surrender Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and the Cape Verde Islands, and Franco’s Spain, which still clung to Equatorial Guinea. Apartheid South Africa had no plans to let go of Namibia either. Belgium could agree to the date of June 30, 1960, because it knew that, even after that, it would continue to be involved in policy making, the army, and the economy. Top officials would act as ministerial advisers, white officers would remain in service, the big companies would remain Belgian, and missionaries would carry on teaching.
At the Plaza Hotel in the heart of Brussels, the atmosphere was euphoric. All kinds of things still had to be talked about, of course (that Congo would become a republic, that the ties with the Belgian royal family would be severed, that it would become a unitary state, that the provinces would receive powers of their own: none of this had been established yet), but the loot had been dragged in, the cat was in the bag! Joseph Kabasele’s African Jazz orchestra, which had had such success with its song about Jamais Kolonga, had accompanied the delegates to Brussels. Even negotiators in three-piece suits have to be able to dance after the plenary sessions.
Charly Henault still remembered it clearly. He was African Jazz’s drummer for years, but a Belgian nonetheless. “I was white, but what did I care? I was a drummer in a land full of drummers,” he told me when I found him one drizzly day at his home in eastern Belgium. He was deathly ill and stayed in bed; the memories were becoming washed out. “The round-table ball was held at the Plaza, yeah . . . . The joy, the euphoria . . . Kabasele called the politicians by their first names. They all loved him . . . . A man with class, in his powder-blue tuxedo with black piping. Very chic . . . He loved women and he loved making jokes . . . . One time I even hid his pajamas!”65 Besides all the fooling around, at the Plaza the band made a start composing the song that would soon become the biggest hit in Congolese music: “Indépendance Cha-Cha.” The lyrics, in Lingala and Kikongo, celebrated the newly won autonomy, praised the cooperation between the various parties and sang of the great names in the struggle for independence: “Independence, cha-cha, we took it / Oh! Autonomy, cha-cha, we got it! / Oh! Round table, cha-cha, we won it!” After 1960 Congo would adopt a number of national anthems, under Kasavubu, under Mobutu, under Kabila: pompous compositions with pathetic lyrics, but throughout the past half-century there has been only one true Congolese anthem, one single tune that right up until today makes all of Central Africa shake its hips: that playful, light-footed and moving “Indépendance Cha-Cha.”
JUNE 30 IT WAS. The round-table conference ended on February 20, 1960, with only four months left in which to knock together a country. The to-do list was impressive. A transitional government had to be formed, a constitution written, a parliament and senate established, ministries expanded, a diplomatic corps appointed, provincial and national elections organized, a cabinet put together, a head of state chosen . . . and that was only the country’s political institutions. A national currency also had to be created, and a national bank, in addition to postage stamps, driver’s licenses, license plates, and a land registry office.
A great many Belgians in the colony were leery of this mad rush. They were afraid that the colony, which had been worked on so carefully for seventy-five years, would go down the tubes in a few months’ time. Many of them began sending their savings, their belongings, their families home. Others migrated to Rhodesia or South Africa. During the first two weeks of June, four times as many passengers left from the airport at Ndjili than in the same period the year before. Sabena had to organize seventy extra flights, the boats to Antwerp were brimming over.66
The run-of-the-mill Congolese, on the other hand, was enjoying it immensely. He believed that a golden age was on its way, that Congo would become prosperous from one day to the next. That, after all, was the promise made him in the dozens of pamphlets circulating around the country. Almost all the parties were making promises that could never be kept, promises that were sometimes grotesque, sometimes downright dangerous.67 “When independence arrives,” an Abako broadsheet read, “the whites will have to leave the country.” That was definitely not one of the conclusions of the round-table conference. “The goods left behind will become the property of the black population. That is to say: the houses, the shops, the trucks, the merchandise, the factories, and fields will be given back to the Bakongo.” Little wonder then, with such inflammatory texts, that farmers in Bas-Congo expected nothing short of boundless liberty: “All laws will be abolished, we will no longer have to obey the traditional chieftains, nor the elders, nor the officials, nor the missionaries, nor the bosses . . . . .” In that longing for a sudden, radical turnabout one heard echoes from the days of Simon Kimbangu. Independence itself became a sort of messianic moment that would bring with it “life, health, joy, good fortune and honor.” Kasavubu and Lumumba, both of whom had spent time in prison, grew to became prophets and martyrs. In Kasavubu people saw the resurrection of the king of the old Kongo Empire, while dynamic Lumumba was compared to the Sputnik satellite! Simple people looked forward to nothing less than a cosmic turnabout. Employment and taxes would disappear. Some of them even assumed that, from then on, “the black will have white boys” and that “everyone will be allowed to pick out a white woman for themselves, because they will be left behind and redistributed, just like the cars and other things.”68 A few hucksters took advantage of that naïveté and began selling white people’s homes for the trifling sum of forty dollars . . . . Gullible souls, not realizing they had been swindled, knocked on the doors of white villas to ask whether they could come in and take a look at their new property. Some of them even asked to inspect the woman of the house, because they had just paid twenty dollars for her as well.69
On a macroeconomic scale, a number of things had to be arranged too. Colonial industry, after all, was intertwined in numerous ways with the colonial state, which would soon cease to exist. To deal with that, a second round-table conference was held in Brussels. This time, the political parties in Congo attached far less importance to the meeting. Independence was the most important thing, they figured, and they had secured that. Besides, it was already late April and everyone was busy campaigning for the upcoming elections in May. None of the heavyweights had time to leave Congo for any period. Young party members went to Brussels in their stead, where they were assisted by a few Congolese who had studied in Belgium.
One of those delegates was Mario Cardoso. Today he is the deputy vice president of the Congolese senate. He invited me out to lunch in Kinshasa at the restaurant of the stately Memling Hotel.
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br /> I was the third student from Congo allowed to study in Belgium. Every year, Raphaël de la Kéthulle would send one of the Scheutists’ students to the university at Louvain. The Jesuits felt that they should educate people in their own country, but the Scheutists wanted to show that they had pupils who could stand comparison with Belgian students. The first one to go was Thomas Kanza, in 1951. He studied psychology and education. In fact, he had been hoping to study law, but the governor general had forbidden that, out of fear for subversion. The next year it was Paul Mushiete. He studied psychology and education too, and sociology alongside that. My turn came in 1954. What I really wanted was to attend the military academy, but that wasn’t allowed, so I also went for psychology and education. In 1959 I came back to Kinshasa and became an assistant at the University of Lovanium. I was planning to become a professor, but Lumumba asked me to go to the economic round table. I was the head of the MNC delegation, the Lumumba caucus.
The party had split in the meantime: there was Lumumba’s MNC-L, which was unitarian, and the MNC-Kalonji, which advanced the interests of the Baluba in Kasai. “There was an awful lot of suspicion at that conference. The Belgian delegation included gentlemen who had been our professors. We had to negotiate with them. That was no mean feat. The talks were about the future status of the colonial companies, but everything seemed to have been decided beforehand.”70
The economic round table was, above all, an attempt on Brussels’ part to save the furniture. Belgium wanted to safeguard its business interests in Congo and felt that Belgian companies should be free to decide where their registered office would be after 1960.71 Cardoso was still bitter about that: “The companies were allowed to decide whether to continue under Congolese or Belgian law. That measure was forced down our throats as a foregone conclusion.” Most companies chose for Belgium, fearing as they did fiscal instability in Congo or, even worse, nationalization. From the time of Leopold II on, Congo had been a test plot for the free-market economy. Companies there enjoyed a generous fiscal regime with almost no government interference. Huge conglomerates, with the Generale Maatschappij in pole position, had experienced a period of unbridled capitalism. Even in those cases where the colonial state was the major shareholder, for example the influential Comité Spécial du Katanga, the government left the actual running of affairs to the businessmen. With independence on the horizon, many business leaders now feared that their days of autonomy and excellent relations with the government were numbered. They remained active in Congo, but chose for a registered office in Belgium, effectively placing their company under Belgian rather than Congolese governance. That transfer cost the Congolese treasury a vast amount of tax revenue.
During this second round of talks, the status of the “colonial portfolio” came up as well. The term referred to the huge package of shares the Belgian Congo held in many colonial companies (mines, plantations, railroads, factories). What was to be done with that? As soon as the Belgian Congo became Congo, those shares would obviously become the property of the new state. The Belgian politicians and business leaders didn’t think that was a good idea. They convinced the Congolese delegates that it would be better if those government participations were taken away from the state and transferred to a new Belgian-Congolese development company. It was a sly way to keep a hand on the purse strings.72 Here too, Congo paid for its delegation’s lack of economic experience. People who had been allowed to study only psychology were being asked to made crucial macroeconomic decisions. “Second-rank figures,” then-prime-minister Gaston Eyskens opined.73 One of them was the journalist Joseph Mobutu. He had been sent to negotiate by his friend Lumumba, and the experience was to haunt him for the rest of his life. He said of it later:
And there I sat, a silly, unmannered journalist, at the same table with the great white sharks of Belgian finance! I’d had no financial training whatsoever, and the other members of my delegation, who represented the other Congolese movements, hadn’t either. It is not one of my fondest memories. From April 26 to May 16 we negotiated inch by inch, but I became like one of those cowboys in a western who lets himself be bamboozled time and again by professional con men. We talked until late at night, and the next day we discovered that the Belgian parliament had meanwhile made decisions that rendered the negotiations obsolete. We had to fight for everything . . . . Of course we let ourselves be rolled. Our partners in the discussion used a whole series of legal and technical ruses to successfully safeguard the hold which the multinationals and the Belgian capitalists had on the Congolese pocketbook.74
The worst was yet to come, but only a few weeks later. On June 27, 1960, three days before independence, the Belgian parliament—with the endorsement of the Congolese government, no less—disbanded the Comité Spécial du Katanga.75 Congo could not have made a worse blunder! With that, the new state lost control over mining giant Union Minière, the motor of the national economy. How could that have happened? The CSK was essentially a public enterprise that awarded concessions in Katanga to private companies in return for shares. It held a majority share in Union Minière and therefore the power of control. Historically, that right to a government say in the company’s dealing had rarely been used: the colonial state had always relied on the competence of the business world. Now that Congo was on the point of becoming independent, however, there was a chance that the new state would actually involve itself in the activities of Union Minière and all its subsidiaries. By disbanding the CSK, that possibility was effectively blocked. In all their disaffection with the Moloch of Western capitalism, the Congolese delegates to the economic round table had no problem with that, and Lumumba’s new government would soon adopt that same line of reasoning . . . . Congo remained a part owner, but as minority shareholder had far less power and received far less of the profits than the big Belgian trusts, such as the Generale. In that way it not only missed out on many millions of dollars, but also on the opportunity to let the industry work in the service of the country itself.
Dancing with ignorance, the country moved toward the precipice of independence. The political keys were already in its pocket, but the economic ones were now safely tucked away in Belgium. Nevertheless, one day after this unbelievably cunning move, the two countries signed a “pact of friendship” that spoke of aid and assistance.
FINALLY, IN LATE MAY, the long-awaited national elections were held. The turnout was huge, the results predictable. After Patrice Lumumba’s MNC, the biggest winners were the regional parties, with or without separatist tendencies. The Abako won in Bas-Congo, Conakat in southern Katanga, and Balubakat in the north, Kalonji’s MNC in Kasai, Cerea in Kivu, and the PSA in Kwilu. The latter two were not true tribal parties, but provided the ethnically highly splintered regions of Kivu and Kwilu with a sort of super-tribal élan. The electoral map of Congo in 1960, therefore, was largely identical to the ethnographic maps drawn up by the scientists half a century before. This tribal reflex should not be seen as atavistic. Were pan-European elections to be held in Europe today, after all, there is a great chance that most of the French would vote for a Frenchman and most Bulgarians for a Bulgarian. In a vast country like Congo, where the greatest part of the population had no more than a primary school education, it should come as no surprise that many voted for candidates from their own region. The three strongest figures to come out of the elections were Kasavubu, Lumumba, and Tshombe. Kasavubu held sway over the western part of the country, Lumumba over the northwest and center, and Tshombe over the far south. That corresponded with the major cities: Léopoldville, Stanleyville, and Elisabethville. The smaller parties divided among themselves the countryside that lay between.
This fragmentation made it no easier to form a representative coalition government. No one party had an absolute majority (Lumumba’s resounding victory only secured about one-third of the parliamentary seats from five of the six provinces; he made absolutely no headway in Katanga), and even a rudimentary coalition with only a few partners was ruled out. The n
egotiations were going to take a long time. What’s more, the Belgian government was quite disappointed to see that Lumumba, whom they considered a seditious demagogue, had been able to win over so many voters. This concern went so far that Brussels even appointed a new minister resident, W. J. Ganshof van der Meersch, and sent him to Congo to supervise the formation of a new government. In his wake, new Belgian troops were also sent to the colony. Lumumba had little patience with these demarches and made no effort to disguise it. The two men irritated each other no end. Kasavubu was the first to be appointed to try and form a new government, but when that failed the job was given to Lumumba. He was faced with the almost impossible task of bringing together all the widely diverse individuals into a single political team. Up until one week before independence, the new minister resident still had hope that Lumumba would not become prime minister.
But on June 23 the first Congolese cabinet became a fact. It numbered twenty-three ministers, nine deputy ministers, and four ministers of state, posts that were divided among no less than twelve political parties. The way things go with difficult compromises, this feat produced more shouts of pain than of joy. Bolikango, the gray eminence from Équateur who had led the common front in Brussels, saw the office of president slip through his fingers at the last moment. Lumumba, after all, needed the support of the Abako, and received it by means of a compromise: if Kasavubu would repress his separatist urge, he could become the head of state. Lumumba, the big winner, therefore, did not become president himself, but only prime minister, even though his party had won 33 of the 137 parliamentary seats and Kasavubu’s only 12.
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