The First Republic was characterized by a jumble of the names of Congolese politicians and military men, European advisers, UN personnel, white mercenaries, and native rebels. Four of those names, however, dominated the field: Joseph Kasavubu, Lumumba, Tshombe, and Mobutu. In terms of complexity and intensity, the ensuing power struggle between them was like one of Shakespeare’s history plays. The history of the First Republic is the story of a relentless knockout race between four men who were asked to play the game of democracy for the first time. An impossible mission, all the more so when one considers that each of them was hemmed in by foreign players with interests to protect. Kasavubu and Mobutu were being courted by the CIA, Tshombe at moments was the plaything of his Belgian advisers, and Lumumba was under enormous pressure from the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Nations. The power struggle among the four politicians was greatly amplified and complicated by the ideological tug of war taking place within the international community. It is hard to serve democracy when powerful players are constantly, and often frantically, pulling on the strings from above.
What’s more, none of these men had ever lived under a democracy in their own country. The Belgian Congo had had no parliament, no culture of institutionalized opposition, of deliberation, of searching for consensus, of learning to live with compromise. All decisions had come from Brussels. The colonial regime itself was an executive administration. Differences of opinion were kept hidden from the native population, for they could only undermine the colonizer’s prestige. In his seemingly unassailable omnipotence, the highest authority, the governor general with his white helmet decked out with vulture feathers, seemed more like the chieftain of a feudal African kingdom than a top official within a democratic regime. Is it any wonder then that this first generation of Congolese politicians had to struggle with democratic principles? Is it strange that they acted more like pretenders to the throne, constantly at each other’s throats, than like elected officials? Among the historical kingdoms of the savanna, succession to the throne had always been marked by a grim power struggle. In 1960 things were no different.
And in fact, wasn’t it all about who was going to take over from King Baudouin? Kasavubu was the first and only president of the First Republic. The dress uniform he had designed for himself was an exact copy of Baudouin’s. Léopoldville and Bas-Congo supported him en masse. Only rarely was his position as head of state openly called into question, but in 1965, Mobutu—whose own ceremonial uniform later proved to be a copy of Baudouin’s as well—shoved him aside.
Lumumba’s power base lay to the east, with Stanleyville as its center. He was the most popular politician in Congo, but he resented having to bow to Kasavubu as president. He would only survive the first six months of the First Republic, but after his death his intellectual legacy continued to play a major role in Congolese politics.
Tshombe was perhaps even more resentful. His party had received the short end of the stick during the formation of the new government. He himself had no choice but to settle for the position of provincial governor general of Katanga in Elisabethville. And even though that position—in terms of square kilometers and industrial importance—was comparable in weight to that of a German chancellor in a united Europe, he had to face the fact that the true center of power lay elsewhere, in Léopoldville.
On the day of independence itself, Mobutu, finally, was the least significant of the four: he was Lumumba’s private secretary. He had no major city backing him, as the other three did, let alone a powerful people like Kasavubu (among the Bakongo) or Tshombe (among the Lunda). He came from a small tribe in the far north of Équateur, the Ngbandi, a peripheral population group that did not even speak a Bantu language like the rest of Congo. At twenty-nine he was also the youngest of the group (Kasavubu was forty-five, Tshome forty, Lumumba thirty-five). But five years later he was lord and master. He would develop into one of the most influential persons in Central Africa and one of the richest men in the world. The classic story of the errand boy who becomes a Mafia kingpin.
DURING THE FIRST ACT OF CONGO’S INDEPENDENCE, Patrice Lumumba was incontestably the pivotal character. All eyes were turned on him after his inflammatory speech during the transfer ceremony. When the curtain went up on the Congolese drama, he was a dynamic people’s tribune, adored by tens of thousands of common folk. Only a few scenes later he was despised, spit upon, and forced to eat a copy of his own speech.
July 1960. The dry season. A cobalt blue sky. The independence party had lasted four days. The army, the Force Publique, kept order as always. The newly independent Congo may still have been sailing against the current—the political institutions may still have been in their infancy, governmental experience may have been null, the challenges were perhaps enormous—but the armed forces were solid as a rock. The officers’ corps was still Belgian: a thousand Europeans maintained command over twenty-five thousand Congolese. The chief commander was still General Émile Janssens, the man who had so rigorously quashed the 1959 riots. Without a doubt the most Prussian of all Belgian officers, he was a great soldier with a rigid mind: discipline was sacred to him, protest was a defect, chaos the sign of weak character. He had to put up with being answerable to Lumumba, who was not only prime minister but had also been made minister of national defense. Concerning him, Janssens would later write: “Moral character: none; intellectual character: entirely superficial; physical character: his nervous system made him seem more feline than human.”1 That was how things lay: Congo was independent, true enough, but the Belgians not only ran things economically, they also maintained a total grip on the military apparatus.
Fireworks had graced the night sky on Thursday, June 30, but by Monday, July 4, things were already awry. Congo’s existence as a stable country lasted only a few days. During the afternoon parade at the Leopold II barracks, a few soldiers refused to obey orders. General Janssens intervened and did what he had always done in such cases: demoted the recalcitrant elements on the spot. This time, however, that move backfired. The next day some five hundred soldiers gathered in the mess hall to express their dissatisfaction. The soldiers were tired. For the last eighteen months they had been zigzagging across the country, putting down minor insurrections. They yearned for opportunities for advancement within the military hierarchy, for better pay and less racism. Shortly before independence, they had written:
No one has forgotten that within the Force Publique we, the soldiers, are treated like slaves. We are punished arbitrarily, because we are Negroes. We have no right to the same advantages or facilities as our officers. Our two-person rooms are extremely small (7.5 m2 [about 79 square feet] of floor space) and have no furnishings or electricity. We eat very little and our food in no way complies with the rules of hygiene. The wages we are given are insufficient to meet the current cost of living. We are not allowed to read newspapers published by blacks. One need only be caught with a copy of Présence Congolaise, Emancipation, Notre Congo . . . to receive two weeks in the brig. After this unjust punishment one is then transferred to the disciplinary camp at Lokandu, where one is taught to live in military fashion . . . . In the Force Publique our officers live like Americans; they have better housing, they live in big, modern houses, all furnished by the Force Publique, their standard of living is very high, they are arrogant and live like princes; all this in the name of prestige, because they are white. Today it is the unanimous desire of all Congolese soldiers to have access to positions of command, to receive a respectable salary and to put an end to every form of discrimination within the Force Publique.2
Radical military reforms were needed to counter so much frustration, but General Janssens had no intention of countenancing them during the tumultuous months before and after independence. The first batch of Congolese officers was in training at the Royal Military School in Brussels, and a school for noncoms had been set up at Luluabourg. Within a few years those men would be on active duty, but until then everything would remain the same. On
Tuesday morning, July 5, Janssens went to the Leopold II barracks and gave his troops an unambiguous lesson in military discipline: the Force Publique was there to serve the country, that’s how it had been in the days of the Belgian Congo and that’s how it would be now. To underscore his message, he wrote in big letters on the chalkboard: “Avant l’indépendance = après l’indépendance” (before independence is the same as after independence). That was not a good idea. The slogan stuck in the soldiers’ craws. They had watched as Congolese civil servants, from one day to the next, were assigned top administrative positions, they had seen how well the politicians did by themselves during the big turnover. One of the new parliament’s first acts, after all, had been to decide that they had a right to a 500,000 franc honorarium, almost twice the amount earned by their Belgian colleagues.3 The soldiers awoke with a start to the fact that independence was doing them very little good.
The mutiny within the army is often explained by referring to Lumumba’s inflammatory speech. But that remains questionable: the soldiers were as angry with their own fresh-faced politicians as they were with their white superiors. They wanted to vent their rage not only on General Janssens, but also on Lumumba himself! To them he was not so much a hero as a defense minister who had never served, an intellectual in a dress suit and bowtie who was out to cut a dashing figure while their fate remained unchanged, despite all his glorious promises.4
That very same day, July 5, the mutiny jumped the gap to the garrison town of Thysville, barely a two-hour drive from the capital. Things there took a much more violent turn. Hundreds of soldiers rose in revolt. They beat up their officers and forced them, with their wives and children, to take refuge in the mess hall. Meanwhile, the soldiers occupied the munitions dump. Outside the barracks, along the road to the capital, heavy rioting was seen in the Madimba-Inkisi district. This time the soldiers did not turn on their white officers, but on white civilians. A number of European women were subjected to sexual violence. One of them was raped sixteen times within a five-hour period, in the presence of her husband, mother, and children.5 The rumors reached the capital only a few days later.
Meanwhile, Lumumba did all he could to stop the mutiny in his army. He took three successive measures, each with the best of intentions, but also with consequences far beyond what he could oversee. On July 6, in the company of General Janssens, he inspected the troops at the Leopold II barracks. On that occasion he promised to promote each soldier in rank. “The private second class will become a private first class, the private first class will become a corporal, the corporal will be a sergeant, the sergeant will become a sergeant first class, the sergeant first class will be sergeant-major, and the first sergeant-major will become adjutant.”6 It did not have the desired effect. “Lokuta!” the soldiers shouted, “lies!”7 They weren’t about to be appeased that easily. For them, it was all about the officers’ corps.
Two days later, Lumumba took things a step further. He dismissed General Janssens and appointed Victor Lundula to replace him as chief commander of the armed forces, with Mobutu as his chief of staff. The Africanization of the army top brass, that should boost the troop’s morale, shouldn’t it? Then he moved on without hesitation to his third measure: the accelerated and drastic Africanization of the officers’ corps. The soldiers were allowed to nominate their own candidates. In this way, at one fell swoop, sergeants and adjutants became majors or colonels. And to emphasize this break with the past, the Force Publique was now given a new name: the Armée Nationale Congolaise (ANC).
These decisions did help to calm things down a bit, but the final result was disastrous: after only one week, the newborn Republic of Congo no longer had a functional army. The new state’s most solid pillar had toppled. In today’s demilitarized Europe, where the NATO invisibly safeguards its members, it is hard to imagine the importance of a standing army for a nascent state. The state can only become a state when it assumes the monopoly on violence (be that social, tribal, or territorial). In the turbulent Congo of the 1960s, the army was vitally important. But the Force Publique, the colonial army that could look back on crucial victories in the first and second world wars, was reduced in the space of one week to an unruly mob. The supreme command was now in the hands of two reservists: Lundula, the mayor of Jadotville, who had served as a sergeant-medic fifteen years earlier, and Mobutu, a journalist who had worked for a spell as a sergeant-bookkeeper and had recently become Lumumba’s confidant. Once the two men had driven together through the streets of Léopoldville on a scooter, now they were the prime minister and chief of staff of a vast country with a ragtag army. That Mobutu might also be the confidant of the Belgian and American intelligence services was a suspicion Lumumba refused to entertain. It was a refusal that would soon cost him his life.
Lumumba’s attempts to mollify the mutineers remind one of Belgium’s attempts to pacify social unrest in the 1950s: confronted with a rebellious element in society, he also made too-hasty decisions that consisted of important concessions meant to buy social stability. But once again, the result was the exact opposite of what was intended. The resentment was not dammed, but actually continued to spread.
“OUR WOMEN ARE BEING RAPED!” The rumor spread like wildfire through Congo’s European community. On July 7 a train full of Belgians who had escaped Thysville arrived in the capital. For many, their stories went beyond even the worst nightmare scenarios. Some of them had been spit upon, humiliated, and jeered at; many of them felt threatened. But it was the rumor of sexual violence that caused the most panic. In colonial society there was no greater gap than that between the African man and the European woman (the reverse, contact between a European man and an African woman, was a matter of course). Jamais Kolonga had become a national celebrity by dancing with a white woman. Longin Ngwadi had told King Baudouin that he wanted to marry a European. Before 30 juin, naive souls had believed that they could buy a Belgian home and a Belgian wife. The white woman was inaccessible, and it was for that very reason that she generated such intense curiosity. In the late 1950s a Belgian colonial was privy to a humorous, yet telling, incident:
The post office at Katana had a native postmaster. One day the postmaster came to me and said: “Sir, they have cheated me.” And I replied: “Tell me what you mean.” “Well, sir (all this was said in Swahili), look here, I have a catalogue from the Au Bon Marché in Brussels and look at this picture here. (The picture showed a lovely girl with a beautiful bra.) I ordered it, and do you know what they sent me? An empty bra.” Our postmaster told me later that he had thought he would get the girl along with it; the price was much more reasonable than that for the dowry of a native woman.8
White females in colonial Congo were almost always married women or nuns. Their sexual availability was negligible. Sexual violence after independence was a brutal way to nevertheless claim the most unattainable element in colonial society and to deeply humiliate the former rulers. Clichés abounded on both sides: if the white woman was a semimythical being for many Congolese men, then many Europeans still had semimythical conceptions of African sexuality. The clichés influenced the events. The rapes were hideous, but their frequency stood in no proportion to the panic they caused among the Europeans. Everyone was goading everyone else with horror stories.
Not a single European had been killed, but the result was a large-scale exodus. An estimated thirty thousand Belgians left the country within a few weeks.9 Between Léopoldville and the Beach, cars were backed up for kilometers to catch the ferry to Brazzaville. Lots of Volkswagen beetles, lots of pickups, lots of Mercedes with with the CB sticker (for Congo belge) still on their bumpers . . . Elsewhere the cars were simply left behind. Before independence, Brussels had asked as many Belgians as possible to remain at their posts in the colony—young Congo would be badly in need of their expertise—but two weeks later Belgium was advising its citizens to return home, or at least to bring their wives and children to safety. Sabena organized an airlift that within three weeks took tens of
thousands of Europeans out of Congo. It was a hallucinatory withdrawal. Some ten thousand civil servants, thirteen thousand private-sector workers, and eight thousand colonists (plantation owners) left the country.
We know today that this mass psychosis bore no relation to the actual danger. It was like a movie theater emptying out after someone has shouted “Fire! Fire!,” while in reality the flames are limited to an overfull ashtray. “See what I mean, look at that fire!” the moviegoers shout on their way to the exit, apparently not realizing that the fire is being fed precisely by the draft they are creating themselves. The situation was serious, without a doubt, but there was no reason for a general evacuation. But reason had gone out the window. At a certain point, every wave of panic achieves an energy that can no longer be tempered. Just as the barracks at Luluabourg had been vacated in 1944 due to irrational fear of a vaccination campaign, so too did the European inhabitants of Congo leave the country due to a misjudged security risk.
But there were also those who kept a cool head. In the village of Nsioni in Bas-Congo, I spent a few days in 2008 with the old physician Jacques Courtejoie. As a child in Stavelot (in the Belgian province of Liège), he had witnessed the Ardennes Offensive (the Battle of the Bulge) in 1944 as it passed within three hundred meters (about four hundred yards) of his parents’ home. A lesson in level-headedness. He had lived in Congo since 1958, always on his own, always unmarried, as a missionary of science, a one-man repository of humanism, dedication, and optimism. He had educated and trained half a dozen people from that same area; he gave them responsibility and self-assurance. The booklets and posters with medical information they made together were distributed all over Congo: books about tapeworms, eye disease, and domestic rabbit breeding; posters with information about washing one’s hands, tuberculosis, and breastfeeding. Rarely had I seen a man serve the cause of human dignity so straightforwardly and under such difficult circumstances. An unsung Dr. Albert Schweitzer. From the very first day of his stay in Congo, Courtejoie had been averse to colonialism. “In July 1960 I heard the reports on the radio. Panic was breaking out everywhere, everyone was running away. I tried to stay calm and rational. I really saw no reason why I should leave.” He was one of the few who stayed. After three months of independence, Congo had only 120 physicians.10
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