The Golden Thread

by Ravi Somaiya

  The crowd fanned out through the afternoon like one fevered consciousness. Each man silently dared the next to pick up a stick, or a stone, to become the savages the Belgians told them they were.

  They graffitied a sign at a school: BE CLEAN, BE POLITE, BE HONORABLE became BE DIRTY, BE IMPOLITE, BE DISHONORABLE. There was a glee in destruction for its own sake. In doing the certified, universally acknowledged worst possible thing instead of pleading politely once more for incremental change. The warning shots of the police, ringing now into the vast blue sky, meant nothing. The crowd had simply ceased to accept their authority.

  At that moment, the soccer match at the Stade Roi Baudouin ended. About twenty thousand supporters, their faces daubed with white, feathers in their hair, dancing, drumming, and screaming, poured out onto the avenue. Their cries soon merged with those of the rioters, as fans and fighters formed one amorphous wall of destruction.

  Two men in white shirts buzzed past on a scooter and skidded to a halt, the two-cylinder engine rattling as it idled: Lumumba, scheduled to give the speech that caused the riot, and his friend and ally Joseph Kasavubu, a politician with ambitions to restore the mythical kingdom of the Congo.9 (They had risen together through one of the only political organizations allowed by the Belgians: the Boy Scouts.) The two gazed with disbelief at the rage of their people, released at last. Kasavubu gunned the bike, and they disappeared in a haze of exhaust smoke.

  Lieutenant General Émile Janssens, unflinching as stones and bottles rained down, also watched the crowd spread out in front of him. Janssens was a veteran of the Belgian army who headed the new version of the Force Publique—the thousands-strong Belgian army that had enforced such a brutal reign of colonial terror.

  By 1959, it was a national army, and most of its soldiers were black Congolese. But they were led exclusively by white Belgians who enforced a strict discipline. They remained the ultimate arbiter in the Congo.

  Janssens had grown used to his power. He surveyed the fires burning out of control. The slicks of dark blood, peppered with shards and fragments of his city. He watched looters, some trailing yards of vivid floral fabric as they ran from smashed stores. The word had come down from the Belgian officials who ran the city that the riot zone now extended about seven miles.

  Pictures of Janssens from his youth reveal a small, sensitive-looking soldier. Over years of careful conditioning and military campaigns in Ethiopia and in Europe during World War II, he had turned his fear into disdain for the fearful, and his sensitivity into contempt for those in pain.

  The transformation was etched on his face. Weathered and ruggedly handsome, with a low brow and a suspicious gaze like the actor Robert Forster, he was by 1959 the very picture of a general commanding his troops.

  He ordered his soldiers to open fire with live rounds. Other Belgians, too, colonial officials mostly, felt themselves fill with terror that they would fall victim to this post-colonial rage. They grabbed their hunting rifles and joined in, gazing down the oily barrels of their guns and firing into the dusk.

  Night near the equator comes fast. At around 6 p.m., after four crazed, terrible, brutal hours, the red ball of the sun plunged below the horizon and Leopoldville fell dark, save for the flickering orange light of the flames.

  Darkness achieved, on a strictly temporary basis, what no quantity of bullets could: The crowd dispersed as quickly as it had risen up. The wave had broken. But it would swell again. The riots continued for days.

  A procession of European cars, their windows hanging from their frames, their bodywork crumpled like tinfoil, limped and rattled toward the Red Cross hospital. They crunched to a halt outside the stately white building ringed with verandas, to form a spontaneous monument to the bruised dignity of their occupants.

  The Congolese wounded made do with whatever treatments they had on hand. Feticheurs—witch doctors who created elaborate figures and masks for healing and destruction—were still active in 1959. The scale and success of their efforts is not recorded; only that as many as three hundred Congolese were dead.

  “We killed them because they were thieves, because they were pillagers,” Janssens said. “If they don’t keep quiet, we are ready to recommence the sport.”

  Years later, when the war was over, and when Belgium was nothing more than a bitter memory in Africa, they found Janssens in Brussels at the foot of a statue of King Leopold II. “Sire,” he was heard to say, “ils vous l’ont cochonné.” They’ve made you dirty.10

  Footnotes

  1 There are two nations with the name Congo: the Republic of the Congo, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This book is about the latter.

  2 The line, like all of the best lines, is too good to be true: Livingstone died too soon afterward to confirm or deny it, and Stanley tore out the pages of his diary that referred to the meeting.

  3 By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain and France alone had claimed rights over modern-day Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria, Southern Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Guinea, Ivory Coast, and Niger.

  4 The pineapple was such a status symbol that a business emerged renting them to people who could not afford to buy them, so they could at least show them off at parties.

  5 The modern Congolese flag retains the motif.

  6 For a full and astounding account of this period of Congolese history, see King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild.

  7 Epidemiologists think that HIV spread into the world from Leopoldville at about this time, propagated by the movement of people through the city.

  8 A wonderful and detailed recounting of modern Congolese history, as seen by the Congolese themselves, can be found in David Van Reybrouck’s Congo.

  9 His picture could be seen on posters around town with the slogan roi kasa, or “King Kasa,” underneath it.

  10 He eventually became a far-right politician.

  Chapter 1

  “That’s independence”

  The United Nations is so ubiquitous, and so often dismissed as a pointless, hand-wringing bureaucracy, that we forget what it is for.

  The name itself was coined by Franklin D. Roosevelt for a declaration on New Year’s Day 1942 by twenty-six nations1 that they would continue to fight the Axis powers with every means at their disposal, and that none would make a separate peace.

  After the war, representatives of fifty countries, shaken by the specter of the grubby, selfish, destructive part of humanity, gathered in San Francisco.

  Over two months, they negotiated—with the care and determination that only people who have recently lived through horror can muster—a better way. On June 25, 1945, they voted on the final charter. A show of hands was deemed insufficient for such a moment, and so the delegates, about three thousand of them, stood up to show their assent. The next day they brought the International Court of Justice into existence and signed the United Nations charter, which opens thus:

  WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small…

  When Roosevelt’s successor, Truman, addressed the delegates, he described the charter as a victory against war itself. “If we fail to use it,” he said, “we shall betray all those who have died so that we might meet here in freedom and safety to create it. If we seek to use it selfishly—for the advantage of any one nation or any small group of nations—we shall be equally guilty of that betrayal.”

  By July 1960, as the Congo was dragged over a precipice, Dag Hammarskjöld had been UN secretary-general for seven years. He believed in his mission with a sincerity that his enemies, men of expedience rather than principle, simply could not grasp. He carried the charter with him at all times, in a small and worn booklet. And he tried to apply it as precisely and fairly
as he could. It would not have occurred to him to do anything else.

  He was, on the surface, every inch the deft diplomat. He was nearly six feet tall, and looked at least a decade younger than his fifty-five years. His face, halfway between handsome and possum-like, gave away nothing.

  His hair, sandy with graying edges atop a high forehead, was swept back neatly. His suits, elegantly cut, were always immaculate over a crisp shirt and tie, or bow tie. His shoes were polished to a shine that stopped discreetly short of showiness. He smoked, on occasion, a pipe.

  He was trained as an economist. He loved to figure out the system, the essence, of a thing before forming a plan and executing it with precision. He spoke very fast, in a distinct lilting Swedish accent, the words tumbling out as if they could not keep up with his thoughts. He walked even faster. His security detail dreaded keeping up with him.

  Those who worked closely with him admired him greatly—but as one admires a view or a monument. They recalled his capacity to work virtually without sleep. His tendency to see the good in nearly anyone. His ability to talk with deftness and perception about nearly anything—medieval literature, economics, painting, poetry—in fluent Swedish, English, French, or German. He numbered John Steinbeck, Barbara Hepworth, and W. H. Auden among his friends. But very few felt they really knew him.

  Sture Linnér, a Swedish mining executive, Greek scholar, and UN official whom Hammarskjöld counted among his closer friends, once recalled being invited to dinner at his Manhattan apartment. It was a classic duplex on the Upper East Side, built around a grand, curved staircase, that he had elegantly decorated with Scandinavian furniture and art including works by Matisse and the Swedish painter Bo Beskow.

  He came and opened the door himself, no servants around. We had a simple meal while he played recordings of Bach in an adjacent room. Not a word was said during dinner. After we had finished, he said let’s go to the library. And we continued listening. Toward 11 o’clock I said that it was time to say goodbye. He said I think so. And he kindly escorted me to the door. He hadn’t said anything. When we shook hands, he looked at me and said, “I want you to know that the talk we had tonight is one of the most enriching I have had in a long time.”

  Hammarskjöld seems only to have been truly free with animals, and with those in severe pain. He recalled an incident in Stockholm, when he was thirty and working as an official in the Swedish treasury. He often worked through the night, and was walking home through the island city, with its clarifying gusts of Baltic wind and pale northern light, at dawn.

  He saw a man nearby throw a package to a woman. The woman took the package and walked away. And then the young man walked over to the water, dotted with squares of ice and viscous with cold, and threw himself in. By the time Hammarskjöld got to him, he was floating facedown, unconscious. Hammarskjöld pulled him to shore with a nearby boat hook.

  He had recently come out of the army, he told Hammarskjöld. The bundle he had thrown to the woman contained love letters she had written him. But she had found somebody else while he was away and wanted her letters back.

  Hammarskjöld prevented him from running back to the water and persuaded him to get a cab home. It was one of four occasions on which he had witnessed suicides or attempted suicides. He was fascinated, his diaries reveal, with self-inflicted death, with resisting its temptations, and with the balance of the animal and the civilized that exists in all of us.

  As secretary-general, years later in 1960, unbeknown to all but a small circle of friends, he kept a monkey in his grand Manhattan apartment. It had been presented to him earlier in the year, in Somaliland, an autonomous territory that was once part of Somalia, on one of the last stops of a monthlong tour of Africa. It was a vervet, a chittering baby the size of a small dog, its animated little face framed with a fluffy ring of white hair. It proved within seconds to be an irrepressible ham, playing shamelessly to whoever was near it.

  Hammarskjöld couldn’t resist it. Maybe it was a reaction to the grueling schedule of pleasantries on the tour; the shaking hands and standing near buildings, statues, and boats in Senegal, Kenya, Ghana—twenty-seven stops in twenty-four different nations or regions—smiling alongside freshly spruced local dignitaries; the small talk. (He hated small talk. He called it “the hell of spiritual death.”)

  He named the monkey Greenback, for the greenish tint in its fur, and made arrangements to have it smuggled back to America. Greenback was as comfortable in Manhattan as Truman Capote would have been joining a vervet troop in the jungles of Somalia.2 But the monkey quickly found a feeling of safety on the windowsill, playing with the dangling curtain cord or staring out into the snowy New York night, watching the cars.

  On the same tour of Africa, Hammarskjöld had grown profoundly concerned about the Congo. It was, he had discovered, catastrophically seductive to world powers. It was right in the middle of Africa, with two prime airfields. It had the world’s purest uranium. The head of the largest Belgian mining company, Union Minière, had been given the American Medal for Merit for supplying the Manhattan Project. And it had the best supply of cobalt—vital for circuits in the American and Russian nuclear missiles that carried nuclear payloads.

  The first national elections had taken place in May 1960. Each new African party made lavish promises. Their pamphlets pledged the perfect, the impossible. “When independence arrives,” said one, “the whites will have to leave the country. The goods left behind will become the property of the black population. That is to say: the houses, the shops, the trucks, the merchandise, the factories and fields will be given back…”

  Patrice Lumumba narrowly gained the most votes. He was the only candidate that appealed to all regions, and all tribes, partly because he campaigned, using brightly colored vans playing music and blasting political messages, more broadly than his rivals.

  His supporters considered him passionate and honest, and with an advanced grasp of social justice and a plan for advancement for his people based in his Christian values. They held that he was the Congo’s best chance for a functioning democracy on its own terms.

  He would be prime minister, and his friend and ally Joseph Kasavubu would be president. The Force Publique would be renamed the Armée Nationale Congolaise (ANC) and run by a thin, ascetic soldier named Joseph Désiré Mobutu. The rest of the cabinet was formed of their allies.

  Parliament sat for the first time on June 24, 1960. It was made up of hundreds of new politicians, most of them taking public roles for the first time. The new government sent tremors through the network of corporations that had been extracting the Congo’s natural resources unimpeded for decades. Belgium had let them operate with near-complete autonomy. When they chose to be benevolent—as they did when building homes and providing education and health care for their thousands of workers—nobody stood in their way. When they chose to drive those same workers like slaves to exhausted deaths, they were allowed to do so. They craved continuity and the election of a leader sympathetic to capitalism.

  Continuity is not a word that anyone ever applied to Lumumba. His supporters would have said, with pride, that he could not be controlled or diverted but would relentlessly do what he felt was correct in any given moment. His detractors would have said the same, but with horror.

  The Belgians, the Brits, and the Americans saw him as a dangerously left-leaning firebrand. In military radio transmissions between Belgian officials who remained in the country, his code name was “Satan.” General Janssens described him thus: “Moral character: none; intellectual character: entirely superficial; physical character: his nervous system made him seem more feline than human.”

  On June 30, 1960, Hammarskjöld watched as Leopold’s successor, King Baudouin of Belgium, stood up in a white military uniform festooned with medals and, with the bitterness of a reluctant divorcée, declared the Congo free at last.

  “The independence of Congo constitutes the completion of the work that arose from the genius of King Leopold II,” he s
aid, “that was undertaken by him with undaunted courage and set forth by the determination of Belgium.” He asked that the Congolese show that Belgium was right to have offered independence, and said that he would offer counsel if asked.

  Lumumba stood to give his own unscheduled riposte. “The fate that befell us during eighty years of colonial rule,” he said, “is not something we can eradicate from our memory, our wounds are still too fresh and too painful. We have known grueling labor, demanded from us in return for wages that did not allow us to eat decently, to clothe ourselves or have housing, nor to raise our children as loved ones.

  “We have known mockery and insult, blows that we underwent in the morning, in the afternoon and evening, because we were Negroes,” he continued. “We have seen our raw materials stolen in the name of documents that were called legal, but which recognized only the right of the most powerful.” He spoke of magnificent houses for the whites, and hovels for the blacks, and railed against the apartheid that meant separate white movie theaters, restaurants, and shops. Lumumba’s supporters broke into applause. The king went as pale as his dress uniform. He never forgot the slight.

  The plan was for the Congolese army, with twenty-five thousand well-drilled and beautifully turned-out soldiers, to remain a bulwark for law and order. But though it had been renamed the Armee Nationale Congolaise (ANC), and was no longer the Force Publique, its role as overseer had never been forgotten by the black Congolese.

  Its uniformly white officers, about six hundred of them, had spent years brutalizing both their men and the populace they nominally protected, often with a stiff whip called a chicote made from dried hippopotamus hide that could leave a man hobbled for life.