A Negro, John Chilembwe by name, was sent to America by a small mission nearby. After having had a good education, he returned to his native land. He could find no position in any mission, so he built a church of his own with money raised from his fellow blacks. Most of the white men in Africa hate Africans who are educated and wear European clothes. His own treatment at the hands of the white planters and missionaries and his readings of the Bible, especially the story of the national struggle of the Jews in the Old Testament, inspired Chilembwe to lead a revolt against the European oppressors (“the Philistines”).
Support for the revolt came mainly from the workers on the estate and, according to plan, the five European heads of the estate were killed. Their wives and children, however, met with great kindness. The blacks spent money to get eggs and milk for the white children, and banana leaves were held over their heads to protect them from the sun on their journey away from the estate.
The Europeans, frightened for their lives, ran to the military camps. But Chilembwe did not go very far. Just after he had preached a sermon in the church, with the estate manager’s head on the pulpit, white police and soldiers appeared. The rebels took to the jungle, but were rigorously hunted down. Among those captured alive, about twenty were hanged, and all the rest sentenced to life terms. Chilembwe himself, old and nearly blind, was shot down in the long grass with the other leaders.
Six years after, in 1921, the greatest of the religious type of revolt occurred in the Belgian Congo, and shook the whole colony. The leader was Simon Kimbangu, a carpenter and a convert to Christianity. In the spring of 1921 he had a dream in which he was directed to go out and heal the sick. Kimbangu’s influence immediately became very great among the native Christian converts. He appealed to the natives to leave the mission churches, controlled by their European masters, and to set up their own independent church organization under his guidance. To every African such a movement is an instinctive step toward independence and away from the perpetual control of Europeans. Negroes flocked in large numbers to Kimbangu, chiefly from the Protestant but from some of the Catholic missions as well. They declared they were tired of paying money to European churches.
The Government at first watched the movement uneasily but with tolerance. But the prophet’s policy was soon seen to be detrimental to European interests in its implications. The natives left the plantations to listen to the Prophet, in much the same way as the Negro slaves in the West Indies a century before had been wont to plead religion and religious meetings as a convenient excuse for leaving the plantations at all times and without permission. The Negroes followed Kimbangu in such large numbers that industry was disorganized. Key plantations, upon which Government depended for the food for native employees in public utilities, were deserted. There was apprehension lest the natives should attempt to seize the lower Congo railway, which was indispensable to the colony. The fixing of Wednesday instead of Sunday as the day of rest created further dislocation. Worse still, as in all religious movements, minor “prophets” sprang up in the wake of the master, all professing to work miracles, but all more extreme than the Prophet himself. Their preachings tended to become more and more anti-European. Wealthy natives in Kinshasa gave the movement financial and ideological support. Native students from the British and French colonies joined the movement and spread radical doctrines among the rank and file. The movement became so threatening that in June 1921 the Belgian Government ordered Kimbangu’s arrest.
Like a true prophet, Kimbangu escaped and this served only to strengthen his hold upon the masses. He stayed in one village and was visited by thousands of his followers, yet remained free until September, a striking testimony to his own influence and the strength and solidarity of his organization.
He was eventually tried by court-martial in October. It was held that Kimbangu’s organization had aimed at overthrowing the Belgian regime, and that religion was only a means of inciting the population. Kimbangu was sentenced to death, his lieutenants to sentences of imprisonment varying from one year to life-time, while a girl, Mandobe, described as the most revolutionary woman in the Congo, received two years. The Negroes reacted with great violence. Strikes immediately broke out everywhere, to such an extent that European traders at Thysville petitioned the King that Kimbangu should be publicly hanged. The Africans threatened that Kimbangu’s death would be followed by a general massacre of the whites and the Home Government commuted Kimbangu’s sentence to life imprisonment and deported many of the minor leaders. The movement has been crushed but the natives continue to expect the reappearance of their “Messiah” and with it the departure of Europeans from the country.
We can conveniently deal here with the revolt of Africans in Kenya under the leadership of Harry Thuku. Harry Thuku, officially described as a man of base character, was very young, in his early twenties. He was a sort of petty clerk, and therefore had a little education, but he did not agitate in the name of God. He protested against high taxation, forced labor and other grievances. His propaganda touched even the smallest village and the state of an African colony is usually such that any strong leadership wins immediate support. The Thuku movement spread with great rapidity. It was estimated that at one meeting in Nairobi over 20,000 workers were enrolled.
Such a movement was too dangerous to be tolerated, and the Governor ordered mobilization of the native regiment, the King’s African Rifles, to suppress it.
The Government supplemented force with trickery. It persuaded the chiefs to sign a proclamation appealing to the masses to return to work, and pledging the Government to reduce taxation and raise wages. This drove a wedge into Thuku’s organization. The more timid accepted these promises, the movement subsided and Thuku was arrested. The arrest at once brought the masses out again, ready for a general strike. Crowds swarmed round Thuku’s prison demanding his release. The soldiers were ordered to fire upon the crowd, and more than 150 were killed. The Negroes, however, were not intimidated. The Government circulated a rumor that Thuku would be transferred to another prison. This put the crowd on the wrong trail while Thuku was removed to a more remote and safer place. Hundreds were arrested, heavy fines were imposed, which in view of the low wages of the colony could only be liquidated by months of unremitting and unremunerative toil. All associations were declared illegal, and Thuku himself was shipped to Kismay on the Somali border, without trial.
The Congo
The Kimbangu movement took place in 1921. The Belgians, however, feared that there would be repetitions of the Kimbangu movement in a more extreme form. They were not mistaken. Indeed conditions in the Congo seem to produce an especially bitter and conscious type of revolt without any religious trimmings.
The difficulty here is to get accounts written in any detail. The British send out their punitive expeditions against revolting tribes and do not necessarily mention them in the annual colonial reports. But if the revolt awakens public interest, a commission will investigate and make a report. This report will frequently clash violently with the accounts of participants, eyewitnesses, correspondents of newspapers, native and European, and persons living in the colony at the time. The French and Belgians, however, publish little of this kind, and it is only indirectly that one can gain official confirmation of the vast revolts that have shaken the Belgian Congo since the days of Kimbangu. Thus, in the summer of 1932, M. Vandervelde, at one time Prime Minister of Belgium, spoke of the outrages in Belgian colonial administration and the revolts of the natives. In the course of his speech he said that lest he might make a mistake he had departed from his usual custom and was reading a part of his speech from notes. He told in detail the course of one revolt.
Three agents, sent to recruit workers in a Negro village, found only the women. The men, warned of their coming, had fled. The agents made the women kill cattle to feed them, then raped some of them. Some days after one of the Negroes, as is the custom in the Congo, demanded compensation. He was refused and lost his temper. He threw himself
upon the white and bit him in the breast. This savage behavior gained him a severe flogging from his masters, who had him whipped until he bled, then handed in an indictment against him. An investigation began, but the natives fell on the official and cut him to pieces. Followed the inevitable punitive expedition to restore law and order and the damaged prestige of the whites. The officer in command found that the natives had fled into the bush. To continue with the expedition meant that they would remain there and many children would starve to death. The Governor was adamant. “We must,” he telegraphed, “carry out an act of authority and defend the prestige of the Government before the population.” The instruction was carried out. The natives fought back. They had only lances and other primitive weapons, but they fought for weeks. They died, says M. Vandervelde, in hundreds. But Lukutate, a native worker from Elizabethville, writing in the Negro Worker of July 1932, states that they died in thousands. Whole tribes, not knowing the effects of modern weapons, attacked the soldiers almost empty-handed. They starved in the forests. Some died under the whip, others were shot without trial in front of the women and children so as to warn them that blacks must never make rebellion against their white masters.
M. Vandervelde’s account tallies very closely with that written by the Congo native. The files of the Negro Worker give many accounts of these revolts, and The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers, by George Padmore, contains a great deal of coordinated information which is not easily obtainable elsewhere.
In 1924 there was a revolt in French Congo, lasting several days and suppressed by the French military authorities. In 1928, however, another revolt broke out, more class-conscious and better organized than the last. This lasted four months. The natives, despite the fewness of their arms, inflicted a number of defeats on the French troops, capturing a large section of the infantry. The fighting capacity of the revolutionaries, despite their handicaps, amazed even their enemies. The French shot all suspects, and whipped old men and women publicly in the villages as a warning. But by April 1930 the natives were rebelling again. A white French revolutionist and several natives were arrested at Brazzaville, capital of the Middle Congo, and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for attempting to organize a trade union. The natives, hearing of the sentence, went on strike and demonstrated before the court. The police attempted to break up the demonstration, but were attacked with stones. The soldiers were called out and without warning opened fire. The unequal fight continued until the natives were inevitably defeated. But the natives wounded the Governor of the Middle Congo, the troops had to occupy the native quarters of Brazzaville, and for days all business in the town was at a standstill.
This movement had definite Communist tendencies. What the authorities fear most is a combination of the workers in the towns and the peasants in the interior. Such a movement, however, has not yet taken place. The size of the territory, the differences of language, make such organization a task of great difficulty. Yet railways are linking the different portions of the territory, and in both French and Belgian Congo, French is becoming a lingua franca among those natives who get the chance to learn a little. Between 1921 and 1931 the whole temper of revolt in these territories has risen steadily. Since the war each succeeding revolt has been more fierce, more concentrated than the last.
Nor has the mandatory system made any essential difference. Rwanda-Urundi, formerly a part of German East Africa, is now mandated territory under the Belgian Government. Land alienation, or more precisely, taking away the natives’ land, forced labor in the Katanga copper mines, all these typical features resulted in such a dislocation of local production, that the fields were not tilled and in 1929 a famine broke out in the district of Rwanda. Under the whip of hunger, the natives rose in revolt and the movement spread from Belgian Rwanda to British Uganda, where the tribes on the frontier also took up arms. The daughter of the King of Rwanda was one of the leaders of the revolutionaries, who made their first stroke at Gatsolon. There they killed a group of Belgian soldiers, officials, and native chiefs who were friendly with these whites. Belgian troops armed with modern weapons were brought to the scene, and against them the natives, armed only with spears and knives, battled for weeks. The masses of natives fled from the double scourge of famine and machine-guns. Where they fell, some of the bodies, still living, were devoured by wild animals. As was inevitable, the revolt was beaten down. The leaders fled through the swamps until they reached the Uganda frontier. There the British arrested them and handed them over to the Belgians. Over 1,000 tribesmen were shot and a Belgian regiment and a British detachment of the East African Rifles were stationed in Kiforte, the center of the revolt.
The difference between the native under Belgian imperialism plain and simple, and Belgian imperialism carrying out the mandate of the League of Nations, is that the Belgian Government presents a report at Geneva on the working of the mandate. The native, however, is not likely to know this.
The Union of South Africa
The post-war period in South Africa has given us at least two clearly-marked types of Negro revolutionary activity, the Bondelzwarts revolt and the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union. The Bondelzwarts revolt belongs in spirit to the early tribal revolts, that of the tribes beating their heads against a wall.
The Bondelzwarts are a tribe of Hottentots inhabiting the extreme southern portion of South-West Africa. They have actually never been fully conquered by Europeans, and their history is full of struggles against the Germans. After their last rebellion against the German Government, the leaders of the tribe, Jacobus Christian and Abraham Morris, were compelled to leave the territory and reside in the Cape Province. When the Germans were defeated during the war, Jacobus Christian asked the new authorities for permission to enter. He was refused. But in 1919, disregarding the Government’s order, he returned to his native country. In April 1922, Abraham Morris, the other exiled leader, also returned home with a group of followers. On entering the territory he handed over his gun to the police, as required by the law. But the magistrate was not satisfied with that, and considering him a dangerous character, sent the police to arrest him and five of his followers. Morris resisted the arrest, and the people threatened to use violence on his behalf. When called upon to assist the police, all headmen refused, and the people working on the neighboring farms abandoned their work and began to assemble at Haib, the headquarters of Jacobus Christian.
On May 12, Major van Coller with a police force was sent to effect the arrest of the “five criminals.” He sent a message to Jacobus Christian to come and see him at Dreihoek, but, seeing the trap, Christian refused. The discontent of the people suddenly crystallized around their leader’s arrest. Patrols of armed Hottentots forcibly collected arms from isolated European farmers, and at one farm, as the Administration later stated, “European women were forced to prepare and pour out coffee for the Hottentots.”
On May 16, Jacobus Christian sent a statement to the Administrator stating that the five men would immediately report to the magistrate on condition that he received an assurance, in writing, from the Administrator, that no further steps would be taken against his people. This the Administrator refused to do, and both sides prepared for an armed struggle. Haib, the headquarters of the Bondelzwarts, was placed under martial law by Jacobus Christian. Armed pickets guarded all the roads and passers-by were subjected to the scrutiny of these guards. When Major van Coller, being unable to make Christian come to Dreihoek, was compelled to go to see him at Haib, he, a Major of the South-West African police, was stopped by armed pickets who allowed him to go to see the leader only after close examination. In his report he afterward stated that the Bondelzwarts were all assembled and “judging from their dispositions they are prepared to meet an armed force. They gave attentive hearing and showed no hostility toward us, but there was visible demurrance when they were told that arms and ammunition were to be surrendered.”
The struggle broke out on May 26, 1922. The forces of the rebels were v
ery poor. The tribe had only six hundred men capable of bearing arms, and these six hundred had only about one hundred rifles. Against this ill-armed force, the South African Government sent 445 well-armed men, equipped with artillery, machine-guns, mechanical transport, and two airplanes. Yet the fighting lasted for nearly two weeks. The Bondelzwarts at first evaded big battles and tried to elude the Government forces. But they were surrounded and one big battle was fought in the mountains. Only the use of airplanes, something new and unexpected to the black warriors, compelled them to surrender. The number of killed will probably never be known. This was essentially a tribal revolt of the old prewar type. But the resistance reached a pitch of calm determination to fight and die rather than give in, which makes it one of the most significant of African risings.
The Bondelzwarts revolt was an anachronism in 1922. The Union of South Africa is marked by a new type of political action—not the instinctive revolt of primitive tribes, but the militant action of the proletariat in the towns. Far more than in Sierra Leone and Gambia, South African industry has brought the natives together in factories, mines and on the docks, and the circumstances of their employment tended to drive them toward industrial organization in the modern manner. There is also the influence of the Russian Revolution. The South African Communist Party was founded only in 1924, but it had its origin in a previous organization which was already in existence in 1920. It directed its propaganda chiefly to the natives. But whereas in Sierra Leone and Gambia the Negro intelligentsia of the Left for the moment are more vocal than effective, the South African system allows very few of these to exist and drives even the few that are there into militant opposition. From these post-war conditions and the economic and political crisis of 1919 sprang the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union of South Africa.
A History of Pan-African Revolt (The Charles H. Kerr Library) Page 9