Tshombe and Kalonji were only regional leaders, but Kasavubu and Gizenga both claimed the legitimacy of a national government. Who would be proved right? Both went in search of international recognition, and their battle was fought out before the UN General Assembly in New York. Congo showed up there, divided into two camps: Kasavubu/Mobutu versus Lumumba/Gizenga. Thomas Kanza, the twenty-six-year-old psychologist, represented the Lumumba government at the United Nations, but President Kasavubu traveled to New York himself to convince the world that he, and only he, embodied the legal authority of the republic. He argued that his dismissal of Lumumba was allowed under the constitution, a claim with which the Americans, Belgians, and many UN officials had little problem. On November 22 the verdict came in: fifty-three countries recognized Kasavubu, twenty-four voted against him, nineteen abstained.46 Cardoso, who worked for Mobutu at the time, remembers it as a triumph: “That’s when we won the seat in the U.N. Kasavubu was the head of our delegation, and Lumumba lost internationally.”47 With that international marginalization, Lumumba’s swansong began.
He was still locked up in his home in the capital. When news of the vote in New York reached him, he realized that his days in Léopoldville were numbered. Would the blue helmets in his garden still protect him, now that the United Nations had voted against him? He was bound and determined to join up with his political friends in Stanleyville. It was nighttime, it was November, the rainy season was in full swing. On November 27 an unusually heavy tropical storm forced his Congolese besiegers to seek shelter. Their attention lagged. Lumumba crawled into the back of a Chevrolet and was driven out of the house in the pelting rain.
The Congolese roads at that point were still in excellent condition. Had his chauffeur driven on steadily for two days, they could have reached Stanleyville. But on the night of his escape, Lumumba hung back in the capital to speak to the people. Along the way as well he stopped in the villages and enjoyed the locals’ warm welcome.48 But it was the rainy season. In the capital, Mobutu found out about Lumumba’s escape and vowed to keep him, at any price, from reaching Gizenga. A successful reunion there could only mean a political rebound, and Mobutu’s Belgian advisers and the CIA wouldn’t like that. The United Nations refused to help search for the fugitive, but a European airline supplied Mobutu with a plane and a pilot accustomed to carrying out low-altitude reconnaissance. It did not take them long to find the convoy, which now consisted of three cars and a truck. On December 1 Mobutu’s troops arrested Lumumba and his retinue as they tried to cross the Sankuru River close to Mweka. Lumumba was flown to Camp Hardy at Thysville, the base where the army mutiny had begun a few months before. From that moment on Lumumba could no longer count on UN protection, but was a prisoner of the Léopoldville regime. When he arrived, without glasses and his hands tied, someone stuffed a piece of paper in his mouth: the text of his famous speech.
What were Kasavubu and Mobutu going to do with him? Hold him in custody forever, like a sort of Simon Kimbangu of the First Republic? Wouldn’t it be better then to have him taken to Katanga. Or Kasai? Hostile provinces, to be sure, but that was exactly why it might be a good idea. He would have no supporters there. Where he was now, the trouble was starting all over again. On January 12 the soldiers at Thysville started another mutiny. The situation grew restless. The Belgian government, in the person of Minister of African Affairs d’Aspremont, endorsed the plan to take Lumumba to Katanga, come what may, as long as it was far from the capital and somewhere no mutineers could come to his rescue. D’Aspremont’s support for the plan also meant a strengthening of the ties with Kasavubu, and Belgium was interested in reestablishing diplomatic relations with Léopoldville. The former colonizer wished to avoid the impression that it sympathized only with Katanga. Reluctantly, Tshombe accepted the arrival of Lumumba and two other political prisoners. At the last minute, d’Aspremont had applied his influence to that end.
At 4:50 P.M. on January 17, 1962, the DC-4 carrying Lumumba and his two confidants, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito, landed at Elisabethville. During the flight the men were beaten. A force of about one hundred armed troops was waiting for them; the soldiers were led by the Belgian captain Gat. A convoy took them immediately to Villa Brouwez, an isolated, vacant mansion belonging to a Belgian, close to the airport. The security inside and outside the villa was in the hands of the military police, led by two Belgian officers. There they received a visit from at least three Katangan cabinet ministers—Godefroid Munongo, Jean-Baptiste Kibwe, and Gabriel Kitenge, charged with internal affairs, finance, and public works respectively—who beat them as well. Tshombe was not with them. At that moment he was sitting in a movie theater, watching a film with the, in this context, preposterously cynical title Liberté (Freedom), from the Moral Re-Armament movement. When the movie was finished, he met with his ministers. There were no Europeans present. The meeting lasted from 6:30 to 8:00 P.M., but all practical measures for the rest of the evening seem to have been taken beforehand. The decision to send Lumumba to Katanga was taken jointly by the authorities in Léopoldville, their Belgian advisers, and the authorities in Brussels; the decision to murder Lumumba, however, was made by the Katangan authorities themselves. Munongo, the grandson of Msiri, the nineteenth-cenutry Afro-Arab slave trader who had taken the Lunda empire by force, played a particularly decisive role.
After the meeting, a ministerial delegation once again left for Villa Brouwez. There the prisoners were loaded into the back of a car. Along with a few other vehicles and two military jeeps, they drove off. Darkness had fallen by then. The convoy drove to the northwest, over the level road through the savanna toward Jadotville. In the glow of the headlights, to the left and right: bushes, the silhouette of a termite mound. After about forty-five minutes the vehicles left the main road. A few moments later they stopped at a secluded spot. The prisoners had to get out. In the wooded savanna beside the dirt road they saw a shallow well that had been dug only hours before. There were a few uniformed black policemen and guardsmen, but also a few men in suits: President Tshombe, the ministers Munongo and Kibwe, and a few of their colleagues. Four Belgians also took part in the execution: Frans Verscheure, police commissioner and adviser to the Katangan police force; Julien Gat, captain in the Katangan national guard; François Son, his subordinate police sergeant; and Lieutenant Gabriël Michels. One by one, the prisoners were led to the edge of the hole. They had been in Katanga for no more than five hours. They were beaten and mishandled. Only four meters away from them stood the firing squad: four Katangan volunteers with machine guns. Three times, a deafening salvo sounded through the night. Lumumba was the last to be dealt with. At 9:43 P.M., the body of Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister tumbled back into the well.49
LUMUMBA’S MURDER WAS KEPT QUIET for a time. Shortly afterward, to wipe out all traces, Gerard Soete, the Belgian deputy inspector general of the Katangan police, dug up the three bodies. Rumor has it that a hand, possibly Lumumba’s, was still sticking out of the ground.50 Soete sawed the bodies into pieces and dissolved them in a tub of sulfuric acid. He pulled two gold-lined teeth from Lumumba’s upper jaw. He cut three fingers off his hand.51 For years, at his house in Brugge, he kept a little box that he sometimes showed to visitors. It contained the teeth and a bullet.52 Many years later, he threw them into the North Sea.
The world received the news of Lumumba’s murder with total dismay. From Oslo to Tel Aviv, from Vienna to New Delhi, people marched in the streets. Belgian embassies in Belgrade, Warsaw, and Cairo were attacked. While a university in Moscow was named after him, in the West the “Lumumba”—a popular cocktail made with brandy and chocolate milk—became popular. Gizenga’s Lumumbist government was promptly recognized by the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, Yugoslavia, China, Ghana, and Guinea-Conakry. In no time, the murdered prime minister was elevated to a martyr of decolonization, a hero to all the earth’s repressed, a saint of godless communism. He owed that status more to the grisly circumstances of his death than
to any political successes. He had been in power for less than two and half months, from June 30 to September 14, 1960. His track record read like a pile-up of blunders and misjudgments. His abrupt Africanization of the armed forces was sympathetic but disastrous; his appeals for military assistance to the United States and the Soviet Union were understandable but frighteningly frivolous, his military offensive in Kasai took the lives of thousands of his countrymen. During his lifetime, Fulbert Youlou and Léopold Sédar Senghor, the first presidents of Congo-Brazzaville and Senegal respectively, already considered his actions quite doubtful.53 On the other hand, here was a man who was barely prepared for his task, who was forced to deal with a rash domestic exodus and a Belgian military invasion, and who watched as the United Nations hesitated about forcefully condemning the Belgian aggression. But with his unfortunate way of responding to true injustices, Lumumba systematically cultivated more enemies than friends. The tragedy of his short-lived political career was that his greatest trump card from before independence—his incredible talent for rousing the masses—became his greatest disadvantage when, once in power, more cool-headed behavior was expected from him. The magnet that had first attracted now repelled.
A number of players share responsibility for Lumumba’s demise. Less than two weeks after independence, Brussels had already indicated that it wanted a different prime minister. After only one month, the United Nations and the United States were eager to get rid of him too. At first the intended ousting was purely a political one, but American and Belgian authorities gradually began thinking about eliminating him physically as well. In fall 1960 the CIA was behind Mobutu’s coup and was charged by sources in the White House with liquidating Lumumba. The Belgian minister of African affairs also provided cover for covert actions aimed at taking him out. All these attempts failed. But when Lumumba was transferred in January 1961 from Thysville to Katanga, it was not merely at the initiative of authorities in Léopoldville and Elisabethville: the logistical and operational planning was carried out by Belgian advisers in Léopoldville (who, among other things, drafted the blueprint of the transfer during a meeting at the offices of Sabena) and received active support from certain government offices in Brussels, particularly the Ministry of African Affairs. That ministry was not unaware of the potentially fatal consequences for Lumumba, yet took no precautions. The same goes for the CIA: when he heard about it, the chief of station in Léopoldville entered no protest against Lumumba’s transfer to Katanga, even though he knew it could have drastic consequences. The actual execution was the work of the Katangan authorities. The role played by their Belgian advisers remains shadowy: we know at least that on the evening of January 17 they were informed that Lumumba had landed at Elisabethville. In any case, they made few attempts to prevent the murders, even though they knew that their influence could have made a difference. A few Belgian military men, who were in charge of the Katangan guardsmen, took part in the killing itself.
The first act in the play of an independent Congo was over. It was characterized by an absolute centripetal force, a nonstop flow of events and complications. And it ended with a few teeth from an inspired African swirling in slow motion to the sandy bottom of a gray, European sea.
IN APRIL 2008 in a beautiful garden in Lubumbashi, I met Mrs. Anne Mutosh Amuteb. At ninety-one she was the oldest Congolese woman I had the honor to interview during my study. She was still an impressive sight. Anne Mutosh was a princess; her grandfather had been the Mwata Yamvo, the traditional king of the Lunda empire. That made her a member of Moïse Tshombe’s clan; in the African sense of the word, she was his “aunt.” To talk with her was to talk with the history of Katanga. She told me that her parents had already learned to read around the year 1900, taught by American Methodists. She herself had been a midwife, but her business talent proved greater than her obstetrical skills. I asked what she considered the best period in her life. She didn’t even have to think about it. “L’époque Belge and the Katangan secession,” she said in her deep voice. “During the Belgian period, everything was well-organized. There was no corruption, commerce went the way it should. I imported textiles from the Netherlands, but also flour and grain. I once placed an order for fifty sacks. That was easy to do back then. During the secession, imports were no problem either. Only when Mobutu came along did things become so difficult.”54
Considering her pedigree, it was little wonder that she favored Katangan independence. The Lunda mourned the loss of their empire and had for a long time dreamed of regional autonomy. In that, they were supported by those Europeans who remained behind. Many former colonials were for the secession. That rhymed with the tendency seen throughout southern Africa to perpetuate white rule. There were great differences between the apartheid in South Africa, Rhodesia, Southwest Africa (later Namibia), and the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, but while the rest of the continent was becoming independent, white, right-wing regimes in the south were tightening their grip on power. Katanga fit that context.55
The Katangan secession constituted the second act of the First Republic. It was proclaimed on July 11, 1960, and came to an end on January 14, 1963. After the murder of Lumumba, on January 17, 1961, it assumed an entirely different complexion. After Tshombe had stood at the edge of that man’s grave, he became the dominant player. Of the four pretenders to the throne of independence, only three were left. Kasavubu and Mobutu had as much blood on their hands as Tshombe, but Lumumba’s death did not drive them closer together. From now on, the power struggle would take place between the three of them.
It is rather amazing that Tshombe became such a central player. After Lumumba’s murder, after all, his Katangan state was the pariah dog of the international community. The Communist bloc expressed its abhorrence; the United Nations decided to act more forcefully. Not a single state ever recognized Katanga, not even Belgium or America. Tshombe’s ability to stay on top for so long, however, had everything to do with the Belgians. Union Minière funded the new state by no longer paying taxes to Léopoldville, but to the local regime. Belgians manned the military, administrative, and economic infrastructure. Behind each Katangan minister stood a Belgian adviser. Professors from Liège and Ghent wrote the Katangan constitution. Key institutions like the Katangan national guard, the state intelligence service, and the central bank were led by Belgians.56 In the lobbies of the Elisabethville hotels one frequently saw white men with a Katangan flag pin attached to their lapels.57
In addition, Tshombe remained in place with the help of a small army of white mercenaries. These “volunteers”—there were never more than five hundred of them—came from South Africa, Rhodesia, and England, but also included Frenchmen who had fought in Indochina and Algeria, veterans of the Foreign Legion. Ragtag types, roughnecks, rabid right-wingers, machos, Rambos, tough guys who drank till they couldn’t remember their own names, let alone the name of the whore they’d ended up in bed with. They came for the money, for the adventure, and for vague ideals of white supremacy. Belgian officers took active part in their recruitment, training, and deployment.58 They formed the creepiest contingent of the Katangan armed forces.
Their adversaries were the UN blue helmets, the Congolese national army, and the Baluba from the north of the province. That sounds more impressive than it was. The United Nations was hesitant about acting on its more forceful mandate. The ANC was still a shambles. And the Baluba waged war with poisoned arrows and machetes.
EXACTLY ONE YEAR after Lumumba was murdered, a twenty-two-year-old Fleming arrived in Elisabethville for the first time. He had never been outside Europe before. He came from a farming village in West Flanders and had just graduated from the polytechnic in Ghent with a degree in technical engineering; his specialism was low-voltage electrical engineering. He had been recruited by the Nouvelle Compagnie du Chemin de Fer du Bas-Congo au Katanga, the BCK. Working on the railroad was not really his boyhood dream. He had applied for jobs with Sabena airlines and with Union Minière, the showpieces
of the Belgian economy. He wanted to become a pilot, but years of diligent study had ruined his eyesight. His name: Dirk Van Reybrouck. Ten years later he would become my father.
The country in which he arrived was called Katanga, not Congo. To him, the rest of Congo was a foreign country. All he had seen of Léopoldville was the Sabena guesthouse, where he had spent the night during a layover. The Katanga where he landed had its own flag, its own currency, its own postage stamps. His registration card made that clear as a bell. It is here before me as I write. The bilious green card was still printed in two languages, French and Dutch. “Congo Belge/Belgisch Congo” is written at the top. Someone had scratched that out with a ballpoint and struck it with a big rubber stamp: État du Katanga.
My father was based in Jadotville, present-day Likasi. He was responsible for the electric locomotives, overhead wiring, and substations along a six-hundred-kilometer (roughly 375-mile) stretch of rails leading to the Angolan border. For independent Katanga, that east-west stretch of tracks was a lifeline.59 Ores and raw materials could no longer be taken north and shipped by way of Léopoldville and Matadi, for that was enemy territory. Everything, therefore, went by rail to the Angolan coast. That Benguela railroad, a single track still served in Angola by steam locomotives, was crucial for Katanga’s imports and exports. My father was often “out on the line,” as they called it. Aboard a draisine, a diesel-driven railroad car that served as his mobile workshop, he would go into the interior for two or three weeks at a time, checking transformers and replacing switches. BCK was a hierarchical company, but during those years the old guard placed a great deal of responsibility in the hands of young employees. “They had already sent their families back to Belgium,” Walter Lumbeeck, one of my father’s former colleagues, told me. “They just wanted to sit out their term and let others do the work. Your father was timid. His job was demanding for someone so young, and at first his French wasn’t too great. But after a while he was able to communicate well with the blacks.”60 He also took Swahili lessons. Years later, at home, our dog was called Mbwa (Swahili for dog), and sugar and tobacco were still sukari and tumbaku.
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