Mulele started in on his peasant revolt, the first major rural uprising in Africa since independence. He displayed remarkable idealism and great selflessness. He became a sort of Congolese Che Guevara, a leftist intellectual hooking up with the common people. In villages and huts, he instructed them in revolutionary ideology. Time and again he underscored the importance of self-discipline during the revolt. His precepts were based explicitly on the writings of Mao.73 Those who took part in the revolution were to show respect for everyone, including prisoners of war. Stealing was forbidden, as was prayer.74 That which was destroyed had to be reimbursed. “Respect the women and do not toy with them as you might be inclined.” No, the revolution needed daughters as well. In Mulele’s maquis, women received training too.
The weapons available to them, however, were very limited. Mulele did not want to be dependent on foreign powers; the revolt had to support itself. And so the peasants went to war with only obsolete firearms, knives, and poisoned arrows made from bicycle spokes. Schools were torched, mission posts destroyed, bridges sabotaged. The death toll was in the hundreds. Despite the precepts, massacres took place. But the revolution did not catch on. Mulele’s Chinese doctrine was not received enthusiastically everywhere. It was probably too secular. Why weren’t the combatants allowed to pray? The simple farmers from Kwilu did not know what opium was, and were not interested in stories about false consciousness. Their reflexes remained extremely religious and tribal. Mulele’s power base, therefore, never extended outside the tribal territories of the Pende and the Mbunda. The cities were beyond his grasp. The revolt lasted only from January to May 1964, but it was of great symbolic significance. For the first time since Tshombe, Kasavubu’s authority had been openly challenged and Lumumba’s ideology proved very much alive. If Lumumba was a martyr, then Mulele was his new prophet.
IN THOSE DAYS, along the broad streets of Stanleyville, amid the modernistic showpieces beneath a burning sun, one could sometimes see a very old woman. She was eighty, perhaps ninety. Mama Lungeni was the widow of Disasi Makulo, the man who Stanley had bought out of slavery. Her illustrious husband had died in 1941, but she lived on for more than twenty years without him. In 1962 she went to Stanleyville for her granddaughter’s wedding, but poor health kept her from returning to her native village in the rain forest.75
As a young girl she had been the victim of tribal violence, and now, old and stiff, she could only watch as the war returned. She did not know, of course, that the revolutionary comrades-in-arms in Brazzaville had decided to go into action, but she would notice that soon enough. Gbenye’s Comité National de Libération was planning to invade the eastern part of the country. In Burundi, which along with Rwanda had been independent since 1962, the rebels-to-come were being trained by Chinese specialists in guerrilla warfare. The Soviet Union, too, was ready to help. In southern Kivu the rebellion was led by a man by the name of Gaston Soumialot, in northern Katanga by someone named Laurent Désiré Kabila. Their soldiers were very young, mostly boys of sixteen or seventeen, but some of them were barely even in their teens, children too at times. They were more susceptible to magic than to all the Maoist and Marxist-Leninist rhetoric put together. They called themselves simbas (lions) and they believed strongly in martial rituals.
Kabila and Soumialot’s army of liberaton employed a powerful féticheur, Mama Onema, a woman in her sixties. Every young soldier was personally initiated by her. With a razor, she made three little incisions between his eyes. From a matchbox she then produced a black powder—the ground bones and hides of lions and gorillas, mixed with smashed black ants and crushed hemp—and rubbed it into the cuts. He was given a grigri, an amulet he wore around his wrist or neck, meant to give him strength. Each time he went into battle she sprinkled his chest and weapons to make him immune to the enemy. The warriors were expected to abide by a strict code of conduct. They were never to shake the hand of a non-Simba and they were not allowed to bathe, to comb their hair, or to cut their nails, for otherwise they would become vulnerable again. Many of these rules were less bizarre than they might seem. Most of the Simbas had no uniforms and there were almost no firearms. They entered the fray with their chests bared, decked out in twigs and animal skins, and were armed only with spears, machetes, and clubs. That was all they had to bring to bear against Mobutu’s government troops, troops that may still have been a chaotic mess, but a chaotic mess nevertheless armed with machine guns. The magic rules forced the Simbas to abide by a form of military discipline. Sex was forbidden, because otherwise the warriors would go off on a rampage of sexual violence. Panic was forbidden, because otherwise they would run away. Looking over one’s shoulder was forbidden, hiding was forbidden. The Simba warrior had to run straight at the enemy, loudly screaming “Simba, Simba! Mulele mai! Mulele mai! Lumumba mai! Lumumba oyé!” (Lion, lion, water of Mulele, water of Lumumba, long live Lumumba!). If they shouted that, the government forces’ bullets would turn to water as soon as they touched their chests. Anyone shot and killed had apparently violated one of the precepts.76 Nonsensical? Yes, but no more nonsensical than some charges in World War I when soldiers were driven into enemy fire. And the weird thing was that not only did the Simbas believe in their magic powers, but the government soldiers did too. Mobutu’s men were scared to death of these drugged, hysterical madmen who came rushing at them, screaming and wide-eyed.
In May 1964 the Simbas took Uvira and Albertville, two major cities on the western shore of Lake Tanganyika. For Kasavubu and Mobutu, it was a humiliating defeat. The government soldiers tied twigs to the barrels of their own rifles in the hope of neutralizing the Simbas’ magic, but much more frequently they turned and ran. Screaming and ranting, the rebels conquered eastern Congo. They confiscated automobiles and plundered shops. They picked up the guns the government army had left behind in a panic. Soumialot and his boys advanced from Uvira to Stanleyville, a few months’ journey on foot through the jungle. Everywhere they went, in towns and villages, young people joined up. These were people who hated the new independence. The mess created by political intrigues at the top meant that thousands and thousands of young people in the east of the country could no longer go to school.77 Their teachers were paid poorly or not at all. All across the country, teachers went on strike.78 Secondary education, the prime means of social promotion, was a mere shadow of its former self. These were students without teachers. The word révolution for them contained more promise than the word indépendance. They were too young to have a wife, a house, or a plot of land, but not yet old enough to surrender all their dreams. They had nothing to lose. They were rebels without a cause, young lions, the ones who had lost most from independence. And they were horrifying killing machines.
Mama Lungeni saw the rebels come to town. In early August of 1964 they took Stanleyville. The stronghold of Lumumba and Gizenga was theirs once more. They went in search of those who had squandered independence. Évolués, intellectuals, and the rich became the brunt of their attacks. Around the statue to Lumumba, some 2,500 “reactionaries” were murdered. The Simbas cut out their hearts and ate them, to keep the dead from coming back. Other cities, too, witnessed their extreme cruelty. “Butter, butter!” they shouted in Tshombe when a machete split an enemy’s skull and the brains ran out.79 Babies and children were taken from their parents and laid in the burning sun for days, until they died.80 In Kasongo they disemboweled a few elderly people and forced bystanders to eat their intestines.81 In addition, they were pronouncedly anti-American, anti-Belgian, and anti-Catholic. The American consul at Stanleyville was forced to tread on the American flag and eat a piece of it.82 Anyone carrying an object with “MADE IN USA” on it ran the risk of being slaughtered. It became a game to set the beards of Belgian missionaries on fire and then extinguish the flames with a beating. Many of the Simba had a background in the secret Kitawala cult, which had always been prominent in eastern Congo.83 They bitterly hated white people. Any number of nuns at the missions were raped and murdered; missi
onaries were sometimes tortured and then butchered.84
Mama Lungeni was afraid she would never be able to return to the Protestant mission at Yalemba where Disasi was buried. That was where she hoped to die and be laid to rest beside him. But on September 5, 1964, the rebels announced the formation of a new state. Their territory was to be called the République Populaire du Congo, in analogy to the People’s Republic of China. The various militias were fused to form the Armée Populaire de la Libération (the People’s Liberation Army). Gbenye, the man from Brazzaville, became the new republic’s president; Soumialot became defense minister; the post of commander in chief of the armed forces went to General Nicholas Olenga. One-third of Congo was in their hands. Mama Lungeni could not get away.
FOR KASAVUBU, this was a complete affront. It made Mobutu look like a fool, with his troops that kept turning on their heels and running. In his attempts to modernize the army, he received assistance from Cuban fighter pilots, men who had fled from Castro’s regime and were determined to obstruct left-wing revolutionary uprisings wherever they could. But even that could not turn the tide. Was Congo about to fall prey to communism after all? The Americans would not be happy about that. What if Katanga were to be retaken? What if Tshombe came back from Spain and joined up with the rebels? He had enough means and troops to do so. Then two-thirds of Congo would be in the hands of the revolutionaries.
What happened then was one of those unlikely twists of fate so exclusive to Congolese political history: Tshombe did come back and . . . he sided with Léopoldville, the regime he had fought against for two and half years! It was an about-face to beat all about-faces, but not, when one ruled out things like integrity, entirely illogical. Mobutu and his comrades in the Binza Group (most particularly Foreign Affairs Minister Justin Bomboko, intelligence service chief Victor Nendaka, and national bank director Albert Ndele) realized that Tshombe could still mobilize his Katangan guardsmen and mercenaries.85 All he had to do was bring them in from across the Angolan border. If they were to align themselves with the rebels, Léopoldville would be lost. Better to have a troublemaker in the house who pissed out the window, they decided, than a troublemaker in the garden who pissed in.
Tshombe, in turn, had always longed for a power base in the capital. The offer made him by Mobutu and company was the perfect opportunity to end his exile in Madrid and add a new entry to his political curriculum vitae. Obsequiously, he wrote to Kasavubu: “During this difficult period that stands before us, from which the country must emerge stronger than ever in order to deal with the enormous tasks that lie before us, I renew my offer to place myself fully at your disposal in the service of the fatherland.”86
For the first time since independence, Lumumba’s three enemies formed a troika: Kasavubu as president, Mobutu as commander in chief, and Tshombe as prime minister. In July 1964 he replaced Adoula and promised the people “a new Congo within three months.” At the huge soccer stadium in Léopoldville, he was cheered on by thirty to forty thousand spectators. In Stanleyville, shortly before it was taken by the rebels, he even laid a wreath at the monument to Lumumba, the man he himself had helped to murder.87
Tshombe had two aces in the hole: his mercenaries of yore and the American military. The soldiers of fortune included Colonel Mike Hoare, a South African of Irish descent, nicknamed “Mad Mike”; Colonel Bob Denard, a Frenchman who was without a doubt the twentieth century’s most notorious mercenary; and Jean Schramme, otherwise known as Black Jack. This latter man was not your classic mercenary, but a plantation owner in Katanga who had decided to dedicated himself to “saving” Congo. In disreputable cafés in Brussels, Paris, and Marseille, new troops were recruited. They signed contracts that stipulated how much they would receive in damages for the loss of a toe (30,000 Belgian francs), a big toe (50,000 Belgian francs), or a right arm (350,000 Belgian francs). Or how much their widow would receive (1 million Belgian francs).88
The Americans placed a fleet of aircraft at Léopoldville’s disposal: thirteen T-28 fighters, five B-26 bombers, three C-46 cargo planes, and two small twin-engined passenger planes. All World War II surplus, but good enough to wage war against bare-chested boys who believed in their own invulnerability.89 While the mercenaries started in on a ground offensive, along with Katangan guardsmen, Congolese government troops, and Belgian officers, the Americans harassed the Simbas from the air. Their strongholds fell, one by one.
The Simbas reacted furiously. Appalled to find that they could actually be killed, they blamed their losses on the season’s rain, which washed away their magic powers.90 Like men possessed, they went in search of broadcasting equipment among those whites who had remained behind, for they believed that this was how the enemy was receiving its information. Anyone found to possess a transistor radio or even a ballpoint pen became suspect. They took hundreds of Europeans from what remained of rebel territory and held them hostage in the Victoria Hotel in Stanleyville. They threatened to murder them all. That was the starting sign for a large-scale military operation by the Belgians and Americans. It consisted of an offensive on the ground (Operation Ommegang) and one in the air (Operation Dragon Rouge). On November 24, 1964, 343 Belgian commandoes were dropped into Stanleyville and seized the airport. Meanwhile, ground troops moved into the city. Two thousand Europeans were freed and evacuated aboard fourteen C-130s; about one hundred were killed during the operation. In the days that followed, the Simbas retaliated by murdering ninety clerics and laypeople in the interior.91 The number of Congolese killed has never been established.
Mama Lungeni escaped by the skin of her teeth. At 5:30 P.M. on the day Stanleyville was liberated, she heard the roar of aircraft engines and locked herself in her house along with her family. “A little later one of the planes flew over our neighborhood, Tshopo,” one of her sons recalled. “Just above our home it fired a missile that landed about ten meters from the house. A section of the projectile disappeared into the ground, while the shrapnel blasted against the front door and blew out all the windows.” At that moment, Mama Lungeni was sitting in the parlor, across from the door. She fell into a swoon. “Everyone, the children and the grandchildren, began shouting: Mama is dead! Grandma is dead! We carried her out to the yard, and soon she began breathing again and opened her eyes.”92
After Stanleyville was taken, the rebels scattered across the interior. Two of Mama Lungeni’s daughters, who lived beside the river, came to get her in a canoe. But the mission at Yalemba was still no safe place to be. Terrified as they were of the American bombers, the people fled their villages.
The people ran away into the jungle or to the islands. Mama Lungeni and her children were among the refugees in the forest, but conditions there were terrible. They had to keep building temporary huts to stay out of the rain, and moved from place to place. Mama Lungeni was exhausted and had to be carried. Her daughter Bulia and her granddaughters Mise and Ndanali took turns with her on their back, while the little ones, Naomi, Toiteli, Maukano, Moali, and their little nephew Asalo Kengo walked along behind and carried their baggage.
Because of the bad conditions and the dangerous situation, they decided to leave the forest and take shelter on the island of Enoli, in the middle of the river, where Uncle Anganga and his family lived.93
The old woman ended where she had begun: amid the misery of war. One day after evening prayers, she went to sleep. A heavy thunderstorm rolled in. At three in the morning, her eldest daughter, who slept next to her, lit the lantern. Mama Lungeni had passed away. It was May 1, 1965. Her body was taken by canoe to Bandio, the place where Disasi was abducted in 1883. The gong sent news of her death to the surroundings. People came out of the equatorial jungle to attend her funeral. She was buried beside her husband.
AND THE CIVIL WAR RAGED ON. Léopoldville was slowly gaining ground. But just as the rebels were reaching the end of their rope, they received help in the east from an unexpected source. The badly organized revolution had never paid serious attention to diplomacy, and the suppor
t from sympathetic countries like Egypt, Algeria, China, and the Soviet Union remained at a minimum. But suddenly, in April 1965, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, no one less than Che Guevara himself stepped onto dry land! He had been flown over from Cuba and brought more than one hundred well-trained Cuban soldiers with him. In order to avoid detection, those soldiers were all of African origin, descendants of Central African slaves. Now they had come to help Kabila and his Simbas retake Congo. El Che noticed soon enough, however, that the flame of revolution no longer burned so brightly among his Congolese charges. The sound of loud dance music echoed from their secret camps in the bush, where women and children loitered. The Congolese comrades loafed about and had no training whatsoever. They had no desire to dig trenches, because holes in the ground were for corpses. Target practice didn’t interest them at all, because they were unable to close only their right eye. They preferred shooting from the hip.94 “One of our comrades said jokingly that in Congo all conditions were unripe for revolution,” Che Guevara sneered in his diary.95 The few times they actually made it to the front, the Cubans witnessed “the pitiful spectacle of troops that advanced but, once the fighting began, scattered in all directions and tossed aside their costly weapons in order to run faster.”96 Kabila himself stayed in Tanzania the whole time and appeared briefly only two months later, after which he disappeared again quickly. Che admitted that Kabila was the only one with leadership ability—but a true revolutionary commander, that was a different thing altogether. “He must also possess a serious attitude concerning the revolution, an ideology that serves to channel his actions, and a willingness to make sacrifices that is expressed in deeds. So far, Kabila has not shown himself to possess any of this. He is still young and may perhaps change someday, but I am not at all reluctant to state here, in writing that will see the light of day only many years from now, that I seriously doubt whether he is capable of winning out over his shortcomings.”97 Kabila would continue to hang around in the maquis for more than thirty years. By the time he ousted Mobutu in 1997, El Che was long dead.
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