The Golden Thread

by Ravi Somaiya

  It pitted a black Congolese independence movement, roused to rage by centuries of genocidal colonial exploitation, against white colonialists willing to die to keep an Africa, and a way of life, they considered theirs.

  It pitted the Soviet Union, eager to seize advantage and make allies in Africa, against Britain and America, willing to do whatever it took to prevent the Congo falling into the clutches of an empire they equated with the Third Reich.

  And underneath it all lay the torrents of money that corporations, especially mining companies, had been able to extract from the Congo, and which they used to amass influence and connections that made them pseudo-governments in their own right.

  The factions were united on only one point: that Hammarskjöld, and the United Nations, stood in their way.

  Footnotes

  1 The other occasion was for the Swedish poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt in 1931.

  PART ONE

  Tar man fan i båten får man ro honom iland. If you take the devil in the boat, you must row him ashore.

  —Swedish aphorism

  But they hated the town for the intruders who had ruled in it and from it; and they had preferred to destroy the town rather than take it over.

  —V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

  Prologue

  “Godzilla”

  The Congo1 is shaped like a real human heart, messy and organic and the size of Western Europe. It tilts counterclockwise across the lower half of the African continent and borders nine other nations.

  From above, shortly before dawn in January 1959, it appeared as an unsettlingly vast swath of darkness. As the first red glow of the sun hit, it turned into the wet, dark green of an ancient forest.

  It was wreathed with mist, and studded with irresistible riches. Those who lived on its borders spoke of it as a dark, dangerous place. People who entered, the legend held, either returned wealthy and brutal or disappeared entirely.

  On its eastern edge, where a row of active volcanoes spat and burbled, and the world’s largest lakes gradually turned a dark blue in the morning light, the ground was marbled with gold. Oil and gas deposits were so abundant they occasionally leaked out unbidden, poisoning the locals.

  On its western edge, near the modern-day border with Angola, the land was riven with veins of diamonds, both industrial and ornamental.

  In the far south, toward the point of the heart, lay Katanga, a region the size of France that is one of the most naturally rich areas on earth. Under the tan-colored dirt of its cool hills were ores of copper, nickel, tin, tungsten, and cobalt so pure, they haunted the dreams of mining geologists. Bilious yellow rocks of uranium ore littered the ground. It was the source of countless fortunes.

  The Congo River, the deepest and fastest on earth, which loops for three thousand miles across the north of the country, has its sources in those hills. It feeds 1.4 million square miles of fragrant, outrageously fertile land known as the Congo Basin. Crops will grow anywhere you plant them there. And its rain forests and swamps host a wild, chaotic, crawling, flying, swinging, jumping ecosystem, featuring buffalo, elephants, chimpanzees, gorillas, and a thousand species of birds. Some Congolese scraped their yards to smooth dirt to avoid ants and snakes wending relentlessly toward their homes through the undergrowth.

  The river eventually bursts through a channel on the west coast, into the South Atlantic, near Leopoldville, a port city of about three hundred thousand and the capital of a nation that has never really submitted to being governed in the Western sense of the word.

  The city sits on the south bank, where the river is nearly a mile wide, and clumps of green-and-purple water hyacinth drift past on the coppery water. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Leopoldville was often described by non-Africans as the pride of Africa. Pictures show white, modernist high-rise buildings arrayed along handsome boulevards, broken up with landscaped lawns and grand plazas. On the ground the architecture often feels like a temporary intrusion that the pale-reddish dirt and profusion of plants are working to dislodge.

  Avenue Prince Baudouin ran down from the river. It was a determinedly straight line that betrayed the attempts by the Congo’s Belgian colonial rulers both to impose rigor, and to name it after themselves. It went on past the giant Stade Roi Baudouin, a shallow concrete bowl like a half-buried amphitheater rising from a patch of lush green grass.

  Inside, at 2 p.m. on Sunday, January 4, 1959, a soccer match between a local team, Victoria Club, in vivid green-and-black-striped shirts, and their crosstown rivals, FC Royal Leo Sport, was nearing its climax, and the voices of tens of thousands of fans echoed through the sweltering tropical afternoon.

  South of the stadium, where Avenue Prince Baudouin met Avenue de la Victoire, a separate crowd of about four thousand young black Congolese men had gathered, spilling out into the broad intersection. Some of them were wearing Stetson hats, rakishly tied neckerchiefs, and cowboy-style jeans. All of them emanated a suppressed anger—a giddy, terrifying kind of potential energy.

  Only the first brave souls were acting on it. As white Europeans drove past in Peugeots and Mercedes, they shouted “attack the whites” and “independence.” The cars swerved, with a squeal of rubber, as rocks rained down on them.

  Slightly away from the main throng, one young man had pulled his fist back to throw a punch that would loose decades of hatred and frustration. It would also begin a war that would come to kill at least a hundred thousand Congolese and one United Nations secretary-general.

  It is possible to trace the motivations of that delirious blow virtually step by step back to 1482, when a Portuguese explorer named Diogo Cão, navigating his ship through the South Atlantic, noticed that the sea had turned from a cobalt blue to a rusty ocher.

  He had found the mouth of the Congo River, pushing back the ocean. After he landed, he erected a monument proclaiming the Congo discovered.

  It came as news to a population of two or three million native Congolese who lived in loosely linked polygamous village tribes, ruled over by local kings, busy growing bananas and yams, and raising goats, pigs, and cows.

  They measured time by the cycles of the moon, and distance in marching time. They had no written language, but communicated across long distances using drum rhythms long before Morse and his code. They had a history of their own—of conquest, triumph, tragedy, of empires rising and falling—every bit as vivid as the Europeans who claimed them as property.

  The white men began to take people. They loaded them onto ships. Between 1500 and 1850, one stretch of Congolese coastline 250 miles long sent four million people on slave transports. They were bound for the sugar plantations of Brazil or the Caribbean, or for the cotton plantations of the American South.

  The slave trade had barely ended, in 1874, when a self-styled grand explorer, Henry Morton Stanley, arrived in the Congo with a walrus moustache, a pith helmet, and ambition in his eyes.

  He had come to fame three years earlier, spinning a career as a writer and adventurer from his discovery of a lost explorer, David Livingstone, who had disappeared—from European and American view, at least—while seeking the source of the Nile.

  Stanley claimed he had located Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in 1871 and that he had the presence of mind to greet him with the line, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”2

  By 1874, he had a new assignment: to send more tall tales from Africa for the New York Herald and the London Daily Telegraph. They were a hit, and he fed a frenzy for global exploration, and global commerce, and added fuel to a race among European nations to claim colonies.3

  The Congolese called him bula matari—stone breaker—because he could blow up rocks with dynamite. They marveled that his entire body was covered in cloth except for his head and arms, and that his canoe rowed itself. Stanley described them in turn, privately, as “filthy, rapacious ghouls.” In his stories he portrayed them as noble savages, obsequious in the face of his obvious superiority.

  In Brussels, a gangling and
overweening princeling with a long, gray beard that made him look like an authoritarian Santa followed each turn of Stanley’s tales, and each new colony claimed, with breathless rapture.

  At forty, King Leopold II had ruled over Belgium for ten years. He had grown to dislike, even resent, all the things he had—the palaces, the jewels, and the toys. He grew obsessed, instead, with colonialization and a new phenomenon, globalized business. Plummeting transport costs and a fashion for the exotic4 combined to make it worth shipping tea from India or ostrich feathers from South Africa to the capitals of the West.

  Leopold had calculated that if he found the right colony and allied himself with global companies keen to strip it of its natural assets, the profits were potentially endless. He tried to obtain Fiji. He lusted after the Argentine province of Entre Rios. He attempted to lease part of what is now Taiwan. But he came to realize that he could not merely buy a colony. He would have to take one.

  He did not have an army. Nor did he have the political clout of a nation like Britain or France behind him. In order to claim territory, he had to resort to cunning. So he disguised his desire to pillage as a heartfelt wish for the furtherment of the noble savages and chiefs Stanley had depicted in his stories. He called it a fight against slavery, for the rights and lives of black Africans.

  He started a society—the Association Internationale Africaine—with the stated aim of studying the blank spot in the middle of Africa by establishing outposts there. It meant he had license to explore, and to plant his flags, in the Congo. He hired Stanley, who put together a large team of subordinates.

  Leopold’s agents began to travel the country, negotiating with village chiefs. They persuaded them to sign contracts promising all rights to all lands, for all time, and offered bales of cloth, crates of gin, livery uniforms, coral necklaces, caps, or military coats in exchange. Many agents signed dozens of these treaties a month.

  With every agreement, the white men put up a flag—a blue field, with a yellow star. It represented the darkness in which the Congolese had wandered, and the light of civilization that Leopold had bestowed on them.5 In 1885, he was recognized by Germany, Britain, and the United States as the official ruler of the Congo Free State.

  In London and New York, bicycles and cars had begun to fill the streets. Passengers marveled at the wonder of riding on rubber tires instead of hard wood and metal wheels. The demand for rubber spiked. And the value of the rubber vines and trees that grew wild in the Congo spiked with it.

  Leopold spied an opportunity. He tasked every Congolese village with gathering rubber—three or four pounds, tapped painstakingly and cleaned, every two weeks, to be presented to Belgian officials and soldiers who now made up an army called the Force Publique. They passed it on to private companies that had signed generous export deals.

  Congolese men exhausted themselves to meet ever-increasing quotas. They were seen as another commodity, a human resource to be tapped until it gave out. If they failed to produce, or were caught transgressing, the Force Publique wielded a power that a modern corporation could only dream of. Some men had their hands held against trees and beaten to a jelly with rifle butts. Others were not so lucky.

  And rubber was not the only commodity in demand. Congolese elephants were harvested for their tusks. Lever Brothers, a British company, built an empire on soap made from Congolese palm oil extracted by forced labor. It later merged with a Dutch company to form Unilever.

  Several of the deadliest mass murderers in history were Force Publique officers. One, René de Permentier, had the jungle around his house cleared so he could more easily target-shoot black passersby. Léon Fiévez, a district commissioner, had killed 572 people after four months in the job. He collected the severed heads of his victims for display at home.

  Leopold operated with impunity. He was seen merely as an eccentric philanthropist. His excesses were forgiven because his aims were seen as laudable. In 1897, 267 Congolese traveled to Tervuren, in Belgium, as exhibits in a colonial exhibition there. They built huts by a pond in a park, and played at being themselves for families curious to see black skin and marvel at the benevolence of Belgium.

  At around that time, a young Englishman, Edmund Dene Morel, visited the Congo on assignment for a shipping company. He noticed that the ships leaving were laden with rubber and ivory. The ones arriving were filled only with soldiers and guns. This was not trade, he concluded, but pillage.

  His outrage began a global movement, a campaign against what amounted to a holocaust. By means of exhaustion, sickness, and murder, the regime killed between eight and ten million Congolese—about half of the population—between 1885 and 1908. One Belgian historian estimated that Leopold’s personal profits amounted to more than a billion dollars in today’s money.6

  Fifty years later, nearly half of the Congo’s fourteen million inhabitants were under eighteen. A form of apartheid known as the color bar kept them separate from, and beneath, the hundred thousand or so Belgians who ran the country.

  Life in Leopoldville still came, as it had for generations, on ramshackle white barges that chugged up and down the river. These floating bazaars sold monkeys charred black to preserve them, red grubs stored in moss, smoked crocodile, furniture, and multipurpose necessities like enamel tubs—the essentials to maintain a way of life that existed between a rich tribal history and a bright future that had been promised, but never quite delivered.7

  Millions of black Congolese had moved from their villages to Leopoldville seeking jobs and opportunities to better themselves. But by 1959, mineral prices had dropped and a recession had hit. In Leopoldville, thirty thousand people were unemployed, most of them young men.

  The Belgian government had managed to suppress and divert uprising after uprising. In schools, textbooks avoided mention of American and French revolutions and of civil rights movements around the world. Trade unions had, by law, to be run by a white adviser, making them toothless. There were clubs and associations, but they were limited only to those Congolese who adopted wholesale the lifestyles and mores of the Belgians, and who expressed fealty to them.9

  At first the suppressed frustrations of the young Congolese had been grounded safely in superstition. They had long been told of Mundele Mwinda, a legendary white man who stalked the streets of the city looking for black Congolese. He paralyzed them with his lantern, then took them to Mundele Ngulu, a swineherd who fed and fattened the victims before making ham and sausages of them to feed white children.

  In recent years, that had given way to other forms of release. Movie theaters had begun to open in the black neighborhoods, known as the cité, amid the rows of low, box-like concrete houses in pale green or pale blue.

  They showed Westerns. So young Congolese men began to dress like their new hero, Buffalo Bill. They called themselves bills and were divided into gangs that each ruled an area of the city nicknamed for the American West (Santa Fe, Texas) or for other movies they enjoyed, like Godzilla.

  Nearby, on that Sunday afternoon in 1959, the Congolese rumba, a mesmerizing blend of Cuban and African rhythms, spilled out of tiny bars serving mazout—beer mixed with lemonade. Clouds of marijuana smoke hung thick in the tropical air.

  What had gathered the crowd of thousands that January day was far more potent than legends or movies: the nascent realization that the Belgians did not have any actual right to rule over them.

  Since 1952, Kenya had fought a war to rid itself of the British; Algeria had likewise fought to expel the French. Sudan attained independence from Britain and Egypt in 1956. Tunisia broke free of France three months later. In 1957 Ghana, under its charismatic leader Kwame Nkrumah, was declared free of Britain, too. Guinea, Cameroon, Togo, Mali, and Senegal followed.

  The black Congolese had followed every turn. It felt like hope. Like a release. A week earlier, they had listened rapt to one of a small group of black political leaders, Patrice Lumumba, a wiry former beer distributor who seemed to have modeled his rhetorical style and his
brow-line glasses on Malcolm X, as he spoke of independence for the Congo.

  Another event had been scheduled at the Leopoldville YMCA for 2 p.m. that Sunday. But these gatherings struck a deep and primal fear into European officials and their leaders at home who preferred a docile Africa. At the last moment, the Belgian mayor of the city decided to ban the meeting.

  Some accounts say that one of the young men turned on the manager of the YMCA when he delivered the news. It is more likely that he got into an argument with the white driver of an electric bus, one of the city’s proudest achievements, who had denied him passage.

  His identity is not known. Congolese history lives mostly in the memories of its people, and few have asked them about it, let alone written it down. Perhaps his grandfather had given away his lands and freedoms by signing a cross on a piece of paper he did not understand. Perhaps his grandmother had been cajoled into moving into the home of a local Belgian official, or a series of local Belgian officials, for sex, then shoved into the street pregnant to fend for herself. Or maybe he really wanted to ride the bus.

  A riot is the temporary suspension of civilization. The veneer drops away much faster than anyone expects, and is replaced with a determined, collaborative destruction, both fevered and meticulous, slapstick and terrifying.

  His punch landed like a battle cry.

  The center of the crowd surged forward, toward the fallen bus driver. As each punch and kick landed on the unfortunate man and on the police officers who attempted to intervene, the fringes of the crowd, seeking their own damage to do, spread out. They set cars alight, or rocked them back and forth in small, spontaneous teams until they teetered satisfyingly and crashed onto their roofs with the crunch of crushed metal and powdered glass. With each act of destruction the world of rules, and of consequences for breaking them, retreated.