The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  A similar surge of nationalist protest erupted in Tunisia, France’s other protectorate in the Maghreb. The demand for independence there was led by an energetic lawyer, Habib Bourguiba, who had endured numerous bouts of prison and exile since founding the Neo-Destur party in 1934. When France resumed its grip over Tunisia in 1945, Bourguiba left for Cairo, hoping to raise support from the Arab world. Returning to Tunisia in 1949, he cajoled the French into implementing reform. A new French administration in Paris agreed in 1950 to measures moving Tunisia towards internal autonomy. But the reforms were thwarted largely by resistance from the white community numbering 250,000. Bourguiba planned to take the issue to the United Nations, but was arrested, held first in a prison in the Sahara, then transferred to La Galite, an island in the Mediterranean uninhabited except for a few lobster fishermen. After two years he was moved to another island, Groix, off the coast of Brittany, and interned there until a new French administration decided to send him to Chantilly, near Paris. In the meantime, political violence in Tunisia steadily mounted.

  Then Algeria caught fire. On 1 November 1954, a day when French colons were due to celebrate the festival of All Saints, bands of nationalist guerrillas launched a series of coordinated attacks, seventy in all, across a wide area of Algeria. Their targets included police posts, barracks, government installations and the private property of grands colons and Muslim ‘collaborators’. Leaflets scattered on the streets announced that a new nationalist movement called the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) had embarked on a revolutionary struggle for independence and would fight on until it had won.

  The French authorities ordered severe reprisals. Police made indiscriminate arrests, incarcerating hundreds of Muslims, including moderate nationalists uninvolved with the rebellion. Punitive expeditions were launched in the Aurès mountains, a traditional bandit stronghold which the FLN had made the main focus of its guerrilla operations. Security forces repeatedly conducted ratissages against Algerian communities, brutally ‘raking’ them over for signs of guerrilla support.

  France’s repression had only a temporary impact. In 1955, the FLN renewed its offensive, concentrating on ‘soft’ targets. Hundreds of Muslim officials were tortured, mutilated and murdered. White civilians were attacked. The French poured in reinforcements, expanding their forces to 100,000 men, double the number stationed in Algeria at the start of the rebellion. Their ratissages became ever more brutal; collective punishment was enforced against villagers; thousands were sent to internment camps. Both sides resorted increasingly to terror tactics. Month by month, Algeria descended into an inferno of violence.

  Rather than face a contagion of wars in the Maghreb, the French government decided to rearrange its priorities. Morocco and Tunisia were ultimately dispensable. Algeria, the centre of French interests and investment, considered as much a part of France as the mainland itself, would be held at all costs. In 1955, Ben Youssef returned from exile to popular acclaim in Morocco, duly recognised by the French government as His Majesty Mohammed V; and Bourguiba was released to lead an interim government in Tunisia. In March 1956, Morocco gained independence as a united kingdom; and Tunisia became an independent republic. For Algeria, six more years of terrible civil war lay ahead.

  While France’s hold over the Maghreb was disintegrating, the rest of its African empire – L’Afrique Noire – remained staunchly loyal to the Union Française. Two prominent African politicians, Léopold Senghor of Senegal and Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire, played a crucial role in keeping black Africa firmly within the French fold. Both rose to become ministers in the French government as well as political leaders in their home territories.

  Senghor achieved distinction not only as a politician but as a gifted poet and as an intellectual in the grand French manner. As one of nine African deputies attending the Constituent Assembly in Paris in 1945, he helped draft the constitution of the Fourth Republic, endorsing the emphasis it placed on the ‘indivisible’ nature of the Union Française. In 1948, he formed his own political party in Senegal. As a Catholic in a predominantly Muslim country, and as a Serer rather than a member of the dominant Wolof group, he became adept at building coalitions, seeking support without appealing either to ethnic or religious affiliation. His inclination for persuasion and compromise became part of Senegal’s political culture, with lasting impact.

  Houphouët-Boigny had also attended the Constituent Assembly in 1945, gaining renown for his campaign to end forced labour. A graduate of the École Normale William Ponty in Senegal, he had become one of the richest African cocoa planters in Côte d’Ivoire and favoured close ties with the French business community.

  While upholding French rule in Africa, both Senghor and Houphouët-Boigny nevertheless pressed for greater African advancement within the Union Française. Fearful that the kind of violence afflicting Algeria might surface elsewhere in Africa, the French government conceded major reforms in 1956, agreeing to a universal franchise and a single college for elections. France also allowed its African territories a considerable measure of internal autonomy. In place of the two federations of French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, each territory acquired its own prime minister, cabinet and assembly with control over such matters as budgets, the civil service, public works and primary education. The number of deputies that black Africa sent to Paris increased to thirty-three.

  Further reforms were proposed in 1958 after de Gaulle assumed power as president of the Fifth Republic. De Gaulle offered black Africa full internal autonomy within a new Franco-African Community leaving control only of foreign affairs, defence and overall economic policy in French hands. The offer was put to a referendum in September 1958. African territories were given a choice of voting ‘Yes’, which would commit them to permanent membership of the Community, or ‘No’, which would mean ‘secession’ and the loss of all French assistance. The vote in eleven territories went overwhelmingly in favour of joining the Community. But Guinea defied de Gaulle. The young Guinean leader, Ahmed Sékou Touré, a trade unionist, campaigned vigorously for a ‘No’ vote, describing de Gaulle’s offer as blackmail. Four days after the vote, Guinea was proclaimed an independent republic.

  De Gaulle’s reaction was swift and vindictive. Ignoring polite overtures from Touré, he terminated all French aid. French civil servants and army units, including army doctors responsible for providing health services to the civilian population, were withdrawn. In a mass exodus, some 3,000 administrators, teachers, engineers, technicians and businessmen left the country. They took with them any French government property they could carry and destroyed what had to be left behind. Government files and records were burned; offices were stripped of furniture and telephones, even of their electric light bulbs. Army doctors took away medical supplies; police officers smashed windows in their barracks. When Touré moved into the former governor’s residence, he found that the furniture and pictures had been removed and the crockery wrecked. Cast into isolation, Touré turned to the Soviet Union and other communist countries for assistance.

  De Gaulle’s Franco-African Community survived for less than two years. Other African leaders began to press for independence. De Gaulle at first resisted the demands, but he came to recognise that independence was, as he said, ‘a sort of elementary psychological disposition’. In 1960, the eleven members of the Franco-African Community were launched as independent states: Dahomey (later Benin); Niger; Upper Volta (later Burkina Faso); Côte d’Ivoire; Chad; the Central African Republic; the French Congo (Brazzaville); Gabon; Senegal; Mali; and Mauritania. Two other territories, Cameroun and Togo, administered by France under a United Nations mandate, were also given independence.

  Other than Côte d’Ivoire, not one of these states was economically viable. Chad, Niger and Mali were landlocked, mostly desert, thinly populated and desperately poor. Mauritania consisted of no more than desert inhabited by nomads which until 1954 had been ruled from the Senegalese city of Saint Louis. Even Senegal,
the second wealthiest country in L’Afrique Noire, relied heavily on French subsidies.

  To ensure that the new states survived and that French interests there were protected, de Gaulle adopted a benevolent approach, signing agreements to cover a wide range of financial and technical assistance. France supplied presidential aides, military advisers and civil servants to staff government ministries. The French treasury supported a monetary union, underwriting a stable and convertible currency.

  Indeed, many of the changes that occurred were no more than ceremonial. The new states were run by elite groups long accustomed to collaborating with the French and well attuned to French systems of management and culture. Their ambitions above all lay in accumulating positions of power, wealth and status now accessible as colonial rule came to an end.

  In its final stages, the war in Algeria became a cauldron of terror and counter-terror carried out ruthlessly by both sides. By March 1962, one million Algerians, 18,000 French troops and 10,000 pieds-noirs had died. Exhausted by the violence, de Gaulle reached a deal with the FLN agreeing to Algeria’s independence, telling the cabinet it represented ‘an honourable exit’. But in a last paroxysm of violence, white extremists took revenge on the Muslim population, bombing and murdering at random, destroying schools, libraries and hospital facilities, attacking florists’ stalls and grocery shops, determined to leave behind nothing more than ‘scorched earth’. Whatever slim chance of reconciliation between pieds-noirs and Algerians there had been was snuffed out.

  In the mass exodus that followed, more than a million pieds-noirs fled to France, many leaving with no more than what they could carry in suitcases. Farms, homes and livelihoods were abandoned en masse. After 132 years of la présence française, French rule ended in chaos and confusion, leaving Algeria in the hands of a revolutionary government.

  63

  THE CONGO BET

  The demise of Belgian rule in the Congo came in a climate of suspicion, fear and foreboding. The Belgians never devised any coherent policy for bringing independence to the Congo. When faced suddenly with an outbreak of violence, they reacted with surprise and alarm, uncertain of what course to take. As the demands of Congolese nationalists became ever more insistent, they improvised with reforms, hoping to stem the tide. Finally, fearing the possibility of a colonial war, they simply handed over power as rapidly as they could.

  The speed with which Belgium agreed to Congolese demands for independence in 1960 was based on a gamble known as le pari Congolais – the Congo Bet. Because of Belgium’s determination to insulate the Congo from political activity, no Congolese had acquired any experience of government or parliamentary life. No national or even provincial elections had ever been held. Only in 1957 had the Belgians permitted Congolese to take part in municipal elections in principal towns. The lack of skilled personnel was acute. In the top ranks of the civil service no more than three Congolese out of an establishment of 1,400 held posts and two of those were recent appointments. By 1960 the sum total of university graduates was thirty. Indeed, the largest complement of trained manpower was priests: of those there were more than six hundred. At the end of the 1959–60 academic year, only 136 students completed secondary education. There were no Congolese doctors, no secondary school teachers, no army officers.

  The Belgians calculated that because of the inexperience of Congolese politicians, they would be satisfied with the trappings of power while leaving the Belgians to run the country much as before. Congolese would head government ministries, but the core of the colonial state – the bureaucracy, the army and the economy – would remain in Belgian hands. To ensure a favourable outcome in elections leading to independence, the Belgians also planned to support the activities of ‘moderate’ pro-Belgium parties and thwart the ambitions of radical nationalists. ‘If we have a little luck,’ said Belgium’s minister for the Congo, August de Schryver, in May 1960, a few weeks before independence, ‘we shall have won the independent Congo bet.’

  Only eighteen months before, the Belgians had been supremely confident about their hold over the Congo. The only protests about Belgian rule had come from groups of évolués seeking greater status for themselves. ‘The essential wish of the Congolese elite,’ Patrice Lumumba, a 31-year-old postal clerk, wrote in 1956, ‘is to be “Belgians” and to have the right to the same freedoms and the same rights.’ But in January 1959, with a suddenness that shook Belgium to the core, Leopoldville was torn by vicious rioting. The immediate cause of the violence was a decision by local authorities to refuse permission for a Bakongo cultural group to hold a scheduled Sunday afternoon meeting. But subsequent Belgian investigations showed that unemployment, overcrowding and discrimination had produced a groundswell of frustration and discontent. They also pointed out that French offers of self-government for the French Congo, on the other side of the river, had inflamed Congolese opinion against Belgian rule. To help restore calm, the Belgian government announced a programme of political reform, starting with local elections. It also added a vague promise about independence as being the eventual goal of Belgian policy. But having taken that momentous decision, it then fell into protracted debate about the wisdom of the move.

  Across the Congo, political activity, denied to the Congolese for so long, burst out in wild and hectic profusion. By November 1959 as many as fifty-three political groups were officially registered; a few months later the number had increased to 120. Almost every party sprang from ethnic origins. Some were based on major groups such as the Bakongo, the Baluba, the Balunda and the Bamongo; others were of only local importance. The vast distances in the interior of the Congo hampered the formation of nationally-based movements. Katanga, for example, lay a thousand miles south-east of Leopoldville. More important to many aspiring Congolese politicians than the idea of national independence was the hope that, with the departure of the Belgians, they might revive ancient African kingdoms which had existed before the days of Belgian rule.

  Nowhere was this ethnic ambition more pronounced than among the Bakongo of the Lower Congo region around Leopoldville where a nascent cultural movement, Abako – the Alliance des Ba-Kongo – grew into a militant political organisation championing the Bakongo cause. Its leader, Joseph Kasa-Vubu, a conservative évolué who had once trained as a priest, set his sights on reuniting the Bakongo people divided by the boundaries of the Belgian Congo, the French Congo and Angola and rebuilding the old Kongo empire which had last flourished in the sixteenth century.

  In Katanga, the Congo’s richest province where the giant copper industry was located, similar tribal associations burgeoned into political parties. The most prominent was the Confédération des Associations Tribales du Katanga, otherwise known as Conakat, supported mainly by the Lunda. Its leader, Moïse Tshombe, was the son of a wealthy Katangese merchant, related by marriage to the Lunda royal family. Conakat favoured provincial autonomy for Katanga, worked closely with Belgian groups pursuing the same interest and advocated continued ties with Belgium.

  Only one party, the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC), founded in Leopoldville in October 1959 by a group of young évolués, stood out as the champion of Congolese nationalism. Its leader, Patrice Lumumba, was an energetic organiser and powerful orator, well known for his articles in journals and newspapers. A tall, thin, intense man, born a member of the small Batatela tribe in Kasai province, he had made Stanleyville (Kisangani) in north-east Congo his main political base.

  By the end of 1959, the Belgian authorities faced growing disorder. Rival factions competed for support with reckless abandon. In the Lower Congo, the Bakongo refused to pay taxes and abide by administrative regulations. In Kasai province, a tribal war erupted between the Lulua and the Baluba. In Stanleyville, rioting broke out after Lumumba delivered a speech there. Alarmed by the possibility of further violence, the Belgian government sought to regain the initiative by inviting the leaders of thirteen political parties to a conference in Brussels to discuss the terms and timetable for independence.
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  The conference in January 1960 was the first occasion on which the Belgians had consulted Congolese opinion. Belgian negotiators hoped to obtain an agreement which would lead to a phased transfer of power over a period of about four years but found themselves faced with a united front of Congolese delegates, excited by the prospect of power and position, demanding immediate elections and independence on 1 June 1960. The most the Congolese were willing to concede was an extra thirty days of Belgian rule. Fearing the alternative would be an Algerian type of war, Belgium agreed to the independence of the Congo on 30 June.

  The Congo Bet soon came unstuck. Despite Belgian support, moderate parties fared poorly in the May elections. The largest single tally of seats went to Lumumba’s MNC which gained 33 out of 137 seats. But nearly half of the MNC vote came from just one province, the Stanleyville hinterland. In two crucial areas, Leopoldville and southern Katanga, the MNC won few votes. In the wheeling and dealing that followed, the Belgian authorities showed themselves unduly reluctant to allow Lumumba to form a government, turning instead to Kasa-Vubu. But when Lumumba managed to obtain majority support in the Chamber of Deputies – 74 out of 137 seats – they were obliged to call on him. The eventual outcome achieved five days before independence was a cumbersome coalition of twelve different parties which included bitter rivals. Kasa-Vubu, still harbouring dreams of Bakongo autonomy, was chosen as a non-executive president. Lumumba, seething with resentment about Belgian intrigues during the election campaign, became the Congo’s first prime minister. In Katanga, secessionist activity was gathering momentum.

  The result, perhaps inevitably, was disaster. But the disaster was compounded by one fatal event after another until the Congo, within weeks of its independence, had become a byword for chaos and disorder.

  Only a weekend of celebrations intervened before the new government was faced with its first crisis. In the ranks of the Force Publique, the Congo’s 25,000-man army, resentment over low pay and lack of promotion had been simmering for months. Soldiers contrasted their own dismal prospects with the sudden wealth and influence of civilian politicians, former clerks and salesmen, driving around in large cars and spending money freely. While the government was headed by Congolese, the army remained under the control of the same 1,100-strong Belgian officer corps. The Force Publique commander, General Emile Janssens, a tough, right-wing career officer, was adamant that there would be no acceleration in the Africanisation programme. To make the point clear, after dealing with an outbreak of indiscipline, he wrote on a blackboard at army headquarters: ‘Before independence = after independence.’ A protest meeting of soldiers that night ended in a riot.