Katanga 1960-63 E-Book

Christopher Othen

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 485

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

In King Leopold II's infamous Congo 'Free' State at the turn of the century, severed hands became a form of currency. But some in the Belgian government had no sense of historical shame, as they connived for an independent Katanga state in 1960 to protect Belgian mining interests. What happened next was extraordinary. It was an extremely uneven battle. The UN fielded soldiers from twenty nations, America paid the bills, and the Soviets intrigued behind the scenes. Yet to everyone's surprise the new nation's rag-tag army of local gendarmes, jungle tribesmen and, controversially, European mercenaries, refused to give in. For two and a half years Katanga, the scrawniest underdog ever to fight a war, held off the world with guerrilla warfare, two-faced diplomacy and some shady financial backing. It even looked as if the Katangese might win. Katanga 1960–63 tells, for the first time, the full story of the Congolese province that declared independence and found itself at war with the world.

Leseprobe

For my parents

CONTENTS

Title

Dedication

Katanga Confidential

Dawn

1  A Slice of African Cake

2  Keys to the Congo

3  The Piano Player

4  Emperor Msiri’s Ghost

5  

L’Affaire du Sud-Kasaï

6  Assignment – Léopoldville

7  We Are the United Nations

8  Les Affreux

9  The Rhodesian Connection

10  Pissing Blood in Katanga

11  The Counter-Revolutionaries

12  Sold up the River

13  Cocktails with Crèvecœur

Dusk

14  Rumpunch

15  I Am Prepared to Die Fighting in My Own Home

16  Katanga against the World

17  The Last Flight of the Albertina

18  

Un Africain Blanc

19  The Work of American Gangsters

20  Clear Victory

21  Mr Brown from Poland

22  The Black Eagle

23  Occupation: Warlord

24  The Flying Horror

25  Christmas in Elisabethville

26  Katanga ’63

27  

Vers L’Avenir

Select Bibliography

Plates

Copyright

KATANGA CONFIDENTIAL

An Introduction

Bruges, October 1999

Somewhere in this Belgian city of canals and rain and gothic spires, 84-year-old Gérard Soete is finally ready to tell the truth about a murder.

A crew from French-language television station RTBF are in Soete’s home to catch the moment on film. Cameras, cables and tripod lights crowd his living room. An interviewer makes notes on a clipboard. The crew huddle around a monitor.

Leathery and bald, the former colonial police commissioner shows the camera a small wooden box and spills its contents on the coffee table. Two off-white cubes, like eroded dice, roll around.

‘They believe that he will come back from the dead,’ he says.1

Soete laughs.

‘If he does, he’ll have to do it without these.’

The off-white cubes are human teeth.

***

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is an artificial state, created by Europeans drawing lines on a map in the nineteenth century.

Almost all modern African nations are the same. Only a few bear any resemblance to their pre-colonial existence. Rwanda’s mountain borders have maintained continuity between its ancient kingdoms and current republic. Ethiopia was occupied only briefly by outsiders and its territory has changed little since the days of Emperor Menelik II. The rest of the continent got diced up by Europe’s nineteenth-century land grab like an onion on a chopping board.

In February 1885, King Léopold II of Belgium helped himself to a chunk of Central Africa. The Congo Free State’s 900,000 square miles made it the largest country on the continent and twelfth largest in the world. It stretched from the Mountains of the Moon in the north-east, down to the red dirt of Katanga’s southern copper belt, and as far west as the narrow snout of land where the River Congo poured into the Atlantic Ocean with such force it carved a 100-mile long trench in the seabed.

Over 250 tribes called this territory home when Léopold created the Free State. The new nation’s borders sliced some tribes in half, bisecting the Bakongo along the Angolan frontier and stranding many Lunda in Rhodesia. It fenced together others who had been enemies for centuries. Léopold did not care about ancient feuds between Lunda and Baluba, Baluba and Lulua, Lulua and Basongye. The hatred remained, old hands reaching for old throats.

Europeans, who put nationality above everything, never appreciated the importance of tribal loyalty. For many Congolese, it governed marriage, morality, friendships and war. If a Lulua asked another Lulua for money he would get it, even if they were strangers. If a Lulua were stupid enough to ask a Baluba, the panga machetes would swing.

The spilt blood would have meant nothing to the Belgian king. His Congo Free State was a moneymaking machine, rich in natural resources. Its most disposable parts were human. Léopold’s soldiers worked the Congolese like slaves and crushed any resistance by burning villages and killing families.

In 1908, international outrage forced Léopold to hand over the country to professionals in the Belgian government. Their rule was less violent but more paternalistic. They treated the natives like children, justifying it with the phrase dominer pour servir (dominate to serve).2 The new administrators held the Congo together for fifty-two more years, milking its assets and telling themselves they were helping Africa, until Brussels reluctantly granted independence in June 1960.

When the Congo fell apart in a pandemic of army mutinies and gang rape a week after going solo, Europeans blamed the unwieldy size of the new nation and its warring tribes. The July secession of Katanga, a rich mining province in the south, seemed proof that the Congo was too big to function as a country. Africans had a simpler explanation. They accused Belgium of masterminding the break-up to protect its investments. The term ‘neo-colonialism’, a continuation of empire through intrigue and espionage, was born.

Also in the mix were Soviet technicians at the controls of Ilyushin Il-14 transport planes, CIA agents hiding behind dark glasses, United Nations peacekeepers from a hundred countries and air-conditioned Swiss bank vaults that swallowed up diamonds and francs, no questions asked.

And one thing more dangerous than the rest put together: white men with guns.

***

If you were thirsty in Brussels, perhaps in the mid 1980s, there was always 42 rue du Marché au Charbon. Officially called LaRenaissance, regulars knew it as Bar Simba, the only place outside Katanga you could get a Simba beer, straight from the Elisabethville brewery.

Today it is a gay bar, but Bar Simba used to be a military pub famous for giving free drinks to any soldier who donated his cap badge. Green Berets, SAS and Navy SEALs had all dropped by to take advantage of the offer.

Not every customer was a career soldier. If you limited yourself to a few Simbas and stayed off the Chimay Trappiste, a lethally strong black beer, you might notice the map of Katanga province on the wall. You might see the similarity between Charles Masy, the bald and moustached owner, and the slim, crop-haired young man in the photographs hanging by the bar. You might overhear some of the regulars talking about their adventures in Angola, Biafra, the Congo and Yemen, throwing around words like ‘Les Affreux’ and ‘Les Mercenaires’.

It would not take you long to realise that Bar Simba doubled as a hangout for old mercenaries. No fighting for them any more, but a lot of talking. Veterans of Africa, like Masy, argued bitterly about the United Nations, the USA, the USSR. Old grudges from Congo politics lived on: the settlers versus the merchants, the Walloons versus the Flemish, the Belgians versus the French, the British versus the rest.

As the evening came in and Masy helped himself to a Simba or two, he would tell his patrons about the time he was arrested by the Rhodesians in ’63 and questioned about his adventures in Katanga.

‘Finally, they asked me: How many did you kill? I was fed up with their games so I said: Not enough!’3

And through the rest of the night, the refrain from drunken, middle-aged men. Les Mercenaires. Les Affreux. We could have won. You understand? We could have won. If it hadn’t been for the UN bastards. For the American bastards. For the bastards in Brussels. For the African bastards. We could have done it. We could have made a new country.

That new country was Katanga. The man who hired them was Moïse Tshombe, a Congolese politician. To some, a hero of national self-determination; to others, a villain, responsible for those unplugged teeth Gérard Soete kept in a wooden box.

***

Moïse Tshombe was born to be a businessman. Just not a very good one. The son of a tough-minded Congolese capitalist, Tshombe went bankrupt so often before independence that people in his home province of Katanga stopped counting. Short, happy, with a face as round as a dinner plate, the millionaire’s son always tried to bounce back. Import and export, a chain of general stores: his father had to bail him out every time. It was not until the 1950s that Tshombe discovered his real talent lay in politics. Katangese politics.

Katanga had always been different. Rich in copper, tin and uranium, the vital ingredient in atomic weapons, the Congo’s southern province only joined the rest of the country six years before the Second World War. It felt separate, with its 32,000 white immigrants (more than any other province), its massive mineral wealth and its social services provided by Union Minière, the mining corporation that had built modern Katanga from the ground up and had no love for the government in the national capital Léopoldville. It even looked different. Where the rest of the country was covered in lush jungle, Katanga had red dirt roads, scrappy patches of vegetation and parched baobab trees.

Tshombe’s Conakat party agitated for secession before the Congo’s independence. The men in Brussels humoured him, because secessionist threats were useful for keeping other Congolese politicians in line, but most never expected him to go through with it. The Rhodesians held secret meetings with Conakat in Salisbury hotel rooms, but their African federation was already falling apart. When Tshombe made a new country out of Katanga in July 1960 he had to do it himself.

A man alone. Except for Union Minière, which preferred a stable secession to the chaos that ripped apart the Congo when it sailed from Belgium. And except for the white mercenaries who came pouring into Katanga, drawn by the smell of money like starving dogs to the back door of a restaurant kitchen. And except for the Belgian ‘ultras’ in Elisabethville, the Katangese capital, who saw communism everywhere: in the Congo’s new leaders, in Washington, even in their own government, despite the military advisors Brussels sent to help Tshombe when it realised he was serious about independence.

Western Europe tried to stay neutral in the conflict. Everyone else from America to the Soviet bloc lined up to condemn the secession. They saw Tshombe as a puppet of the Belgians.

‘I simply prefer the support of little Belgium,’ said Tshombe, ‘to that of big America or big Russia.’4

It was the Cold War. The men in Washington and Moscow did not think Tshombe should get to choose who supported him.

But Katanga’s chief opponent was the United Nations, the peacekeeping organisation that drew support from around the world. Under Dag Hammarskjöld, a Swedish civil servant who had become Secretary General in 1953, the UN entered the Congo to stop the post-independence chaos. It found itself knee-deep in blood when a mission to protect the Baluba of northern Katanga, who had remained loyal to Léopoldville, mutated into a crusade to end Tshombe’s secession. Katanga was not the UN’s first shooting war (Korea had that honour), but it became the most controversial.

Tshombe’s new nation went toe to toe with the UN’s multinational troops. His gendarmes in camouflage gear, helped by grass-skirted jungle guerrillas and led by Belgian advisors, directed on the ground by truckloads of mercenaries, declared themselves willing to die for an independent Katanga.

Over the next two and a half years many would die. The UN claimed it acted only in self-defence. But to the outnumbered Katangese and their small gang of international supporters, it seemed the organisation had become the enforcer of a new world order, crushing anything in its path. Jet fighters over Elisabethville, mortar shells dropping in the streets, shock waves blowing in hospital windows, bodies buried in unmarked graves.

The backlash from the conflict was so strong that the United Nations would not go to war again until Yugoslavia at the end of the century. And it lost Hammarskjöld, the UN’s brightest star, in mysterious circumstances near the Rhodesian border, an event some believed to be conspiracy rather than accident.

Tshombe’s country is now dirt beneath the fingernails of history, but while it lived the Katangese cause divided the world. Even now it divides the Congo from Europe. If you want to see an African diplomat rage, praise Tshombe. Want to start a bar fight in Kinshasa? Wave a Katangese flag. The events of 1960 are the ground zero of CIA-sponsored African dictatorships, private military contractors, conflict diamonds and global corporations picking clean the bones of Third World countries.

The arguments continue. Neo-colonialism or independence. Imperialist power games or secession. Murder or necessary measure.

Those off-white cubes on Gérard Soete’s coffee table? They once belonged in the mouth of Patrice Lumumba, the independent Congo’s first prime minister and arch-enemy of Tshombe.

‘He had good, strong teeth,’ Soete told the television interviewer.5

So he kept them as a souvenir.

***

This book would not have been possible without Nicholas Bołtuć, Agnieszka Egeman, Rebecca Lewis, my brother Phillip and nephew Jacob, Tron and Tristian Tyrie, and Peter Wood. Very special thanks to Rysiu, Lilly, Jazz and Bella. And, above all, to Magdalena Wywiałek.

Invaluable help came from Interviewee A, an anonymous former member of the Compagnie Internationale, who provided first-hand information about this short-lived but important mercenary group; Terry Aspinall, founder of www.mercenary-wars.net, who smoothed introductions to former soldiers of fortune; Hans Bloemendaal who sent useful documents, including a rare Katangese pamphlet picked up during a long career in the province; Leif Hellström, a Swedish writer and expert on Congo mercenaries, who shared information and photographs from his own research; Denis Kurashko and Thomas Mrett provided some otherwise inaccessible books; Tommy Nilsson, former Swedish UN soldier and Malmö police detective, was generous with his time, memories and photographs; Victor Rosez shared his experiences of fighting with the Katangese gendarmes as a teenage schoolboy; Jacques Saquet talked about being a radio operator in Elisabethville’s Belgian consulate; J.P. Sonck, an expert on the secession, answered many questions and provided background on the lesser-known characters involved; John Trevelyn (a nom de guerre), Welsh veteran of the Katangese forces, spoke in depth about his time as a volunteer in Tshombe’s army.

If you have further information about Katanga or the Congo in the period 1960–67, please contact me via my website: www.brightreview.co.uk.

NOTES

1  ‘Assassination: Colonial Style – Patrice Lumumba, an African Tragedy’, CBC Documentary, 2007.

2  ‘Congo: Boom in the Jungle’, Time, 16 May 1955.

3  ‘Brussels’ Bar Simba’, Soldier of Fortune, August 1987.

4  Roberts, John, My Congo Adventure (Jarrolds, 1963), p. 77.

5  ‘Assassination: Colonial Style’, CBC.

DAWN

1

A SLICE OF AFRICAN CAKE

The Birth and Death of the Belgian Congo

Today it is Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But it used to be Léopoldville, a port city with 4 miles of quays and jetties poking into the black water of the River Congo, hundreds of boats tied up and bobbing on the tide. If you watched the river long enough, said the locals, you would see the bodies of your enemies float past.

Léopoldville’s Ndjili airport, a cross-hatch of runways and white modernist terminals, lay on the eastern outskirts of the city. On Thursday 30 June 1960, it was thick with crowds watching the skies for a royal visitor.

The DC-6 airliner carrying the king of the Belgians touched down with a squeal of tyres in mid-morning. Reporters jostled for position as the aeroplane door opened and Baudouin I, wearing a white dress uniform with gold buttons, emerged into the grey-sky, oppressive humidity of the Congo.

‘Vive le Roi!’ shouted Belgians in the crowd, faces glossy with sweat.1

The 29-year-old Baudouin I had been doing this for nearly a decade. He was a veteran of the parades, state visits and official occasions that made up the daily life of a ceremonial monarch. The young king looked good in his uniform – even if the glasses and neat black hair gave the impression of a bookworm – had a strong speaking voice and could be relied upon by the Belgian government not to do anything embarrassing.

Gravitas and statesmanship mattered to a country still split over the wartime decision by Baudouin’s father, King Léopold III, to remain in Nazi-occupied Brussels when he could have fled to London. Léopold believed he was standing by his people but some Belgians, and the country’s Allied liberators, thought it closer to collaboration.

After the war, Léopold exiled himself to Geneva. When he returned home in 1950, strikes and riots tore the country apart. French speakers in the south pulled down the Belgian tricolore and replaced it with a strutting Wallonian rooster. Poorer, Dutch-speaking Flanders remained loyal. Civil war loomed. Léopold bought peace by passing the throne to his son Baudouin and retreated into his hobby of entomology, spending his days netting rare insects in exotic places.

The royal house survived but a guillotine blade hung over its neck, ready to drop at the first jolt. Baudouin I understood this and had proved himself a talented royal workhorse capable of looking regal and avoiding controversy.

Today, more than any other, he would need those qualities.

The jewel in Baudouin’s inherited crown was the Belgian Congo, close to a million square miles of steaming jungle that hid huge reserves of cobalt, copper and diamonds. White settlers had lived here since the nineteenth century, chopping out roads, building factories and digging mineshafts. The Congo had made Belgium rich.

A piece of prime real estate in the heart of Africa, the colony bordered Rhodesia, Angola, the French Congo, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Uganda and Tanganyika. It divided into six provinces: Équateur in the north-west, Orientale in the north-east, Léopoldville to the east and Kivu to the west, with Kasaï wedged in between, and Katanga hanging down to the south. Baudouin ruled a land that dominated the world copper and cobalt markets, had supplied the uranium that built the first atomic bombs, owned a decent share of the industrial diamond traffic and had profitable interests in palm oil and other sectors.

But now all that was at an end. The Second World War had showed Africans their colonial rulers were not invincible. Nationalist movements formed and demanded self-government. When European powers ignored them they experimented with civil disobedience, then violent revolt.

By the late 1950s, British soldiers were fighting dreadlocked Mau Mau guerrillas in Kenya, Portuguese forces battled Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola – MPLA) partisans in their flagship colony and France was in a bitter war with Algerian independence fighters.

‘The wind of change is blowing right through this continent,’ said British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to an unenthusiastic white audience in South Africa, ‘and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.’2

Slowly and reluctantly, western nations disengaged from their colonies. Today was Belgium’s turn to say goodbye. After seventy-five years, the Belgian Congo had been granted self-government and Baudouin I was in Léopoldville for the official handover ceremony.

It was Independence Day.

King Baudouin was greeted on the runway by Joseph Kasa-Vubu, the new Congolese president, surrounded by his ministers. Patrice Lumumba, both Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, towered over them, a gangly praying mantis of a man with goatee, glasses and a neat side parting razored into his hair. Then there was an inspection of Congolese troops and their Belgian officers before Baudouin and his entourage were guided into a convoy of black limousines. The king placed his ceremonial sword, all polished steel and dark hilt, on the seat behind him.

The cars set off along boulevard Albert I, towards the city centre. The Congo’s new flag, dark blue with seven yellow stars, flew from lamp posts. A few Belgian tricolores snapped in the wind high on official buildings. The king had visited Léopoldville before. In 1955, huge crowds of Africans and Europeans had cheered him. Four years later, Congolese nationalists heckled his speeches.

Today, the sweaty crowds were thinner and whiter. Women in pastel outfits and elaborate hats waved as the convoy drove past. Men with a filterless cigarette hanging from a lower lip lifted up children to see over the fence of Congolese soldiers lining the pavements. The newsreels caught them all in sweeping shots then panned back to the king standing next to President Kasa-Vubu in the back of an open limousine.

The new president, a short and fat-cheeked 50-year-old with some Chinese blood in him thanks to a long-dead labourer on the Léopoldville–Matadi railway, was leader of the Alliance des Bakongo (Bakongo Alliance – Abako) party. Belgian officials had once considered Kasa-Vubu too introverted to be an effective politician; his supporters preferred to see him as aloofly dignified. In 1957, he surprised everyone by campaigning for mayor in Léopoldville’s Dendale district elections wearing a leopard skin and waving a sword. He won. Three years later, he was president.

As the convoy rolled towards the Palais de la Nation, Baudouin made a good show of listening to Kasa-Vubu’s commentary on the sights of the Congolese capital. The Congolese president was pointing out office blocks in the distance when an African man in jacket and tie ran out of the crowd on the right side of the avenue. He dodged the motorcycle outriders and ran up behind the limousine.

The outriders went for their guns as he reached for the king.

Léopoldville was founded in 1881 as a trading post on the banks of the River Congo, the waterway that winds like a giant snake through the country. Thirty-five years later, the trading post had grown big enough to replace Boma, a port town in the far west, as national capital.

The city was named after the man who created the Congo: Léopold II, Baudouin’s great-grand-uncle. The old king, who had eyes like black olives and a waterfall of white beard down his chest, first heard about the jungles of Central Africa in 1878 from his morning newspaper, crisply ironed by the royal butler. It was full of the exploits of a man called Stanley.

Nine years previously, the New York Herald had sent Henry Morton Stanley, a Welsh journalist with a bad temper, in search of a missionary lost in Central Africa for three years. The missing man, Dr David Livingstone, was a Scot determined to save Africans from Arab slavers, find the source of the White Nile and shine the light of Christian capitalism on the jungle. These were the days when so little was known about the heart of Africa that cartographers left the region blank on their maps. Livingstone’s disappearance was headline news.

‘Draw £1,000 now, and when you have gone through that, draw another £1,000,’ the Herald’s owner told Stanley, ‘and when that is spent, draw another £1,000, and when you have finished that, draw another £1,000, and so on – but find Livingstone!’3

Stanley found him near Lake Tanganyika. The missionary was so short of supplies he had been eating lunch in a roped-off enclosure to entertain the locals in exchange for food. Sick but determined to complete his expedition, Livingstone refused to be rescued. Stanley turned defeat into victory with some self-mythologising despatches and a snappy one-liner (‘Doctor Livingstone, I presume?’).4 He returned home a celebrity with a taste for African adventure. Three years later, Livingstone was dead of dysentery near Lake Bangweulu and Stanley had a new quest following the River Congo to the sea.

The Herald journalist was the first to map the twisting river. It nearly killed him. Of the 356 men who started the expedition, hacking through jungle so dark that day and night melted together, more than half died on the way. Stanley was the only European to survive.

Léopold II read about the Welshman’s adventures at the royal breakfast table. The future suddenly seemed clear. He would create a new country out of that blank space in the African interior. And Stanley would help him.

European powers had been gobbling up Africa since the 1870s, turning vast areas into colonies and protectorates. They convinced themselves they were stopping cannibalism, introducing the rule of law, freeing slaves and teaching the true word of God. But the driving force was always money. Africa provided materials unavailable at home, like diamonds, palm oil and rubber, and opened up new markets for European goods.

Belgium had been sidelined in the land grab. The government in Brussels did not share Léopold’s enthusiasm for empire building and refused to finance any overseas projects. The king would have to use his own money. He considered Fiji or part of Argentina, but Africa remained his dream.

On 10 June 1878, Léopold invited Stanley to his palace overlooking the Parc de Bruxelles. After tea and flattery, the king made his offer. To put together a colony he needed Central Africa’s emperors, headmen and warlords to sign up with the Association Internationale Africaine (International African Association – AIA), an organisation Léopold had created to bring Europe’s version of civilisation to the continent. It was a front group: the king had no interest in civilising anyone. The small print would give Léopold absolute power over the other party’s territory.

Stanley, a social climber from the wrong end of the class system, was happy to do the king’s dirty work. Back in Africa, he persuaded 500 chiefs to sign shaky crosses on contracts they could not read. He returned home to find that quarrels over the division of Africa’s wealth had brought Western Europe to the verge of war.

‘We don’t want war because whoever will win the natives will suffer through the struggle,’ Stanley wrote to a friend, forgetting all the Congolese porters he had shot when they tried to desert his expeditions. ‘Why should the natives suffer? What have they done?’5

The 1884 Conference of Berlin calmed the situation by establishing rules for European powers seeking a place in the sun. Behind the scenes, Léopold hustled the participants into agreeing that Stanley’s treaties gave him rights to Central Africa.

Foreigners had been nibbling at the fringes of the Congo for centuries. In 1482, the Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão made contact with the Kingdom of Kongo, a trading nation on the shores of West Africa. The Bakongo people who lived there worked iron and copper but had failed to invent the wheel. They opened up to gifts and Catholicism. In 1518, the son of Emperor Afonso Mvemba a Nzinga became a bishop.

Slave trade disputes ended the Portuguese connection in the seventeenth century but other foreigners had more luck. While Léopold lobbied in Berlin, a blind Afro-Arab slaver from Zanzibar called Tippu Tip ruled parts of the eastern Congo.

A year after it began, the Conference gave Léopold II his territory. The Belgian king became the private owner of 900,000 square miles of jungle. He bought off Tippu Tip and called his new country the ‘Congo Free State’.

‘A slice of this magnificent African cake,’ said the king. He ate until he was sick.6

It took five years for the world to realise that something had gone badly wrong in the Free State. George Washington Williams, a black American lawyer and journalist, visited the country in 1890, where he saw women in chains, men with stumps in place of hands. He had hoped to lead black Americans back to Africa. Instead he wrote an open letter to Léopold about the abuse. Other whistleblowers followed, like Edmund Morel, a Liverpool-based shipping clerk who did business with companies in Antwerp, and Roger Casement, British consul to the Congo.

Léopold II had turned the Free State into a ruthless meeting between the capitalist hammer and the imperialist anvil. His agents toured the country, offering natives European goods in exchange for ivory and rubber. At first, the Congolese were happy with the arrangement but soon discovered that the king had a limitless appetite. Léopold imposed quotas when demand exceeded supply and sent in native bosses called capitas to terrorise the locals.

If the capitas failed, they were replaced by the Force Publique, an army of native conscripts under white officers. The soldiers amputated villagers’ hands, burned down their huts and killed anyone who resisted.

‘Don’t take this to heart so much,’ a Force Publique soldier told a horrified Danish missionary. ‘They kill us if we don’t bring the rubber. The Commissioner has promised us if we have plenty of hands he will shorten our service.’7

In twenty-three years, millions of Congolese died from violence or disease. In a country without a census, accurate figures are difficult to establish but the population dropped by somewhere between 15 and 50 per cent.

International outcry at the bloodshed ended Léopold II’s African dream. Williams’s open letter shocked Europe. Morel founded the West Africa Mail to expose Léopold’s activities and wrote Red Rubber, an indictment of the Free State. Casement’s lectures, full of graphic first-hand accounts, appalled British audiences. The king claimed ignorance and offered reform but in 1908, under pressure from socialist politician Émile Vandervelde, handed control of the Free State to the Belgian government. Léopold could not understand why his subjects had not supported him.

‘Small country, small people,’ he said. He died the next year.8

A more benevolent, but still imperialist, rule began. Belgium deflected responsibility for the Free State onto excesses by sub-contracted Congolese and promised a new dawn.

Baudouin I was proud that his great-grand-uncle had carved out a new country in the jungle. He was even prouder of Belgium’s subsequent role in the Congo. But the Congolese never forgave Léopold.

The new Belgian colonial regime imported medicine, industry and advanced agriculture. Civil servants taught hygiene, opened schools and inoculated the Congolese against diseases that had decimated their ancestors. Roads and railways were cut through the jungle. Land was cleared and cultivated. Cities rose into the sky.

The Belgians laid 3,256 miles of railroad transporting 9,000 freight cars; put down 121,299 miles of road for 60,000 vehicles and 800,000 bicycles; sailed 1,400 ships along 9,057 miles of waterways; built 6,000 hospitals and medical centres with 86,000 beds; and ran a powerhouse economy that increased the Congo’s gross national product by nearly 5 per cent every year from 1920 onward.9

The official information service, Inforcongo, pumped out press releases telling the world that, thanks to colonialism, the Congolese were becoming more like Europeans every day. The idea took literal form in Hergé’s 1930 comic strip Tintin in the Congo, where the boy reporter gives grateful natives a geography lesson about their homeland: Belgium. Hergé was embarrassed about it later.

‘I only knew things about these countries that people said at the time: “Africans were great big children … Thank goodness for them that we were there!” etcetera,’ he said. ‘And I portrayed these Africans according to such criteria, in the purely paternalistic spirit which existed then in Belgium.’10

Life outside the comic strip was less idyllic. The Congolese remained low-level drones in the hive, taught just enough to do their jobs, and were rarely promoted. Whites kept them at arm’s length. In big towns, Africans lived in native districts, aureoles of mud huts and brick bungalows known as la cité, and risked arrest if they broke curfew. A few Congolese achieved success (Moïse Tshombe’s father became a dollar millionaire in Katanga) but a wall of racial preference held back the rest.

‘The white man is good!’ sang Congolese workers in Léopoldville. ‘The white man is kind! The white man is generous!’11 In the mosquito dusk, as they trudged home and left the capital to Europeans sipping Primus beer outside cafés, they sang another verse:

But the work is hard!

And the pay is small!

Ai Brothers! All together!

Belgians boasted that their laws banned racial discrimination but everyone knew the police looked the other way when bars and businesses refused to serve Africans. Other laws were equally toothless. Whites who used the racist insult sale macaque (dirty monkey) rarely received a fine. Congolese risked jail if they said sale Flamand, an insult that cut deeper by reminding the Flemish that in Africa, as in Belgium, they took orders from Wallonian bosses.

Prison time was harsh. The 10 per cent of Congolese men who found themselves behind bars every year were at the mercy of their jailers.12

‘Seven days of jail meant seven times four strokes of the whip,’ said an anonymous Belgian warder. ‘I always managed to find an excuse to give the whip to the prisoners. Maybe you find this shocking, but it was like that.’13

Settlers also tried a spiritual lash to keep the Congolese in line. Belgian Catholic missionaries had been martyring themselves in remote mission stations since the days of the Congo Free State, bringing the word of God to a people who preferred jungle spirits and ancestral ghosts. Priests achieved some influence over their flock, helped by church management of schools and hospitals, but even outwardly devout natives clung to a belief in magic. The most Christian Congolese could be driven into a state of terror by a fetish made by the local witchdoctor.

‘It doesn’t matter what diplomas you give them,’ said an unhappy priest. ‘A native can get good marks in his exams, complete his courses, become a teacher, even a lawyer or a doctor. Underneath he’s still a savage.’14

Where Christianity did take root, it twisted into strange shapes, entwined with magic and politics. Simon Kimbangu was an African Baptist preacher who claimed to heal the sick and raise the dead. He told his followers that independence one day would come to the Congo.

‘And the white will become black,’ he said, ‘and the black will become white.’15

In 1921, the Belgians charged him with sedition, gave him 120 lashes with a hippopotamus-skin whip and jailed him for life. He died behind bars thirty years later. But the Église de Jésus-Christ sur la Terre par le Prophète Simon Kimbangu (Church of Jesus Christ on Earth by the Prophet Simon Kimbangu) kept growing, and when the Belgians finally legalised it, thousands of Kimbangists rushed to worship openly.

Brussels caged Kimbangu because he threatened its control of the Congo’s natural wealth. The rubber market had collapsed before the First World War but Belgian corporations still got fat on copper, diamonds, cobalt, uranium, gold, manganese, cotton, coffee and palm oil.

‘An investors’ paradise,’ claimed a 1952 issue of America’s Fortune magazine.16 Belgian settlers raised a Primus to the prosperity they thought would never end.

In the mid-fifties, Antoine Van Bilsen, a university professor in Antwerp, took a risk and wrote a speculative article about independence for the Congo. Van Bilsen, a pre-war member of Verdinaso (a far-right Flemish separatist group) and no liberal, endorsed a handover of power sometime in the 1980s under UN supervision. The reaction to his article revealed the discontent boiling beneath the Congo’s calm surface.

‘An irresponsible strategy,’ said Colonial Minister Auguste Buisseret of the Parti Libéral (Liberal party), ‘which sets dates that show he knows nothing and understands nothing about Africa.’17

The Belgian establishment thought Van Bilsen a dangerous radical. The growing Congolese nationalist movement, led by Kasa-Vubu’s Abako, saw him as a reactionary imperialist. Abako masqueraded as a language preservation society to get around a ban on home-grown political parties and wanted immediate self-rule.

‘Rather than postponing emancipation for another thirty years’, said Kasa-Vubu, ‘we should be granted self-government today.’18

Buisseret had no time for Congolese nationalism but was smart enough to understand that something had to be done to calm the storm. He legalised native political parties and allowed some low-level democracy. Hundreds of groups came to life, bubbling up, dividing and recombining like bacteria under a microscope.

The British and French were already decolonising across Africa. Morocco and Tunisia in 1956. Sudan and Ghana in 1957. Guinea in 1958. In 1959, Congolese nationalists rioted in Léopoldville, angry that their turn had not yet come. Fifty died. Kasa-Vubu, Lumumba and other rising stars of Congolese politics demanded the right to govern themselves.

Belgian Prime Minister Gaston Eyskens could see the colony turning into another French Algeria, where a lengthy guerrilla war was bleeding men and morale from the mother country. His coalition of Parti Social Chrétien (Christian Social party) and Libéral politicians agreed to free the Congo.

Independence was fixed for 30 June 1960. Baudouin I flew to Léopoldville for the official ceremony. His bodyguards finalised security precautions.

The royal motorcade rolled through the streets of the capital towards the Palais de la Nation.

Kasa-Vubu was pointing over the trees to the tall office blocks, usually crewed by Belgian administrators who commuted in from suburban bungalows far bigger than anything they could have afforded in Europe, when a Congolese man in black jacket and tie ran up behind Baudouin, hands reaching out.

The man dipped into the back of the limousine and pulled the king’s ceremonial sword off the back seat. As the car moved on, he danced around the road, pumping the sword in the air over his head with both hands. Africans in the crowd laughed; Europeans scowled. The king continued to wave. Officers of the Force Publique wrestled the sword back and arrested the thief.

Independence Day had started badly for Baudouin I. Things were about to get worse.

NOTES

Background for the Congo under Léopold II and subsequent Belgian colonialism comes from Colin Legum’s Congo Disaster (Penguin, 1961) and The Congo: Plunder and Resistance by David Renton, David Seddon and Leo Zeilig (Zed Books, 2007).

1  ‘Congo: Freedom at Last’, Time, 30 June 1960.

2http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/news/421.htm.

3  Tyler, Rev. Josiah, Livingstone Lost and Found (Mutual Publishing Company, 1873), p. 329.

4  Renton, Seddon and Zeilig, The Congo: Plunder and Resistance, p. 18.

5  Legum, Congo Disaster, p. 21.

6  Nzongola-Ntalaja, Georges, The Congo from Leopold to Kabila (Zed Books, 2004), p. 16.

7  Forbath, Peter, The River Congo: The Discovery, Explorations and Exploitation of the World’s Most Dramatic Rivers (Harper & Row, 1977), p. 374.

8  Gondola, Ch. Didier, The History of the Congo (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002), p. 50.

9http://www.urome.be/en/econgchiff.htm.

10  Farr, Michael, Tintin: The Complete Companion (John Murray, 2001), p. 22.

11  Green, Lawrence G., ‘Africa’s “Heart of Darkness” Today’, The Living Age, 1 August 1929.

12  Waldron, D’Lynn, extract from The Secret in the Heart of Darkness: The Sabotaged Independence of the Belgian Congo (http://www.dlwaldron.com/Luluabourg.html).

13  Renton, Seddon and Zeilig, The Congo: Plunder and Resistance, p. 61.

14  O’Brien, Connor Cruise, To Katanga and Back (Simon & Schuster, 1962), p. 160.

15  O’Donoghue, David, ed., The Irish Army in the Congo 1960–64 (Irish Academic Press, 2006), p. 11.

16  Gibbs, David N., The Political Economy of Third World Intervention (University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 60.

17Le Potentiel, 20 February 2006.

18  Coleman, James S., and Carl G. Rosberg, Jr., Political Parties and National Integration in Tropical Africa (University of California Press, 1964), p. 565.

2

KEYS TO THE CONGO

Independence Day in Léopoldville

Patrice Lumumba took the microphone in the Palais de la Nation. The words poured out in a lava flow of rage.

We have known ironies, insults, blows that we endured morning, noon, and evening, because we are Negroes. Who will forget that to a black one said ‘tu’, certainly not as to a friend, but because the more honourable ‘vous’ was reserved for whites alone?1

European diplomats listened, their faces smooth masks of polite interest. Belgian Prime Minister Gaston Eyskens, black hair slicked back on his head and teeth like an Angler fish, looked discouraged. Yesterday he had presented Lumumba with the Order of the Crown, Belgium’s highest decoration.

We have seen our lands seized in the name of allegedly legal laws which in fact recognized only that might is right. We have seen that the law was not the same for a white and for a black, accommodating for the first, cruel and inhuman for the other.2

The independence ceremony was almost over. The king and President Kasa-Vubu had given their speeches and were preparing to leave. Baudouin still had a cemetery to visit and a 500-strong open-air lunch before the flight home. Kasa-Vubu and the new Léopoldville establishment needed time to prepare for that evening’s Independence Day party. Philippa Schuyler, the famous bi-racial American pianist, had been booked to entertain them. The Force Publique had returned Baudouin’s sword. Everything was on schedule.

Then Lumumba began his impromptu speech.

We have seen that in the towns there were magnificent houses for the whites and crumbling shanties for the blacks, that a black was not admitted in the motion-picture houses, in the restaurants, in the stores of the Europeans; that a black travelled in the holds, at the feet of the whites in their luxury cabins.3

The circular hall’s air conditioning vents hummed. Lumumba’s finger wagged up and down as he spoke. He seemed to be conducting an imaginary orchestra.

We have known the atrocious sufferings of those who were imprisoned for their political opinions or religious beliefs and of those exiled in their own country. Their fate was worse than death itself.4

The king sat tight-lipped as Congolese politicians applauded around him. Some wore western suits and ties, others beaded caps dangling animal horns. A few whose skulls had been bound as babies had pointed heads.

Who will forget the rifle-fire from which so many of our brothers perished, or the jails in to which were brutally thrown those who did not want to submit to a regime of injustice, oppression and exploitation which were the means the colonialists employed to dominate us?5

The Congolese prime minister’s words were being broadcast live to the country by radio. Lumumba’s finger rose and fell as he talked, rose and fell.

Patrice Émery Lumumba would tell anyone willing to listen that his struggle with Belgium began one afternoon in the early 1950s as he walked through Léopoldville with a freshly minted Carte du Merité Civique (Civil Merit Card) in his pocket. The card officially made Lumumba an évolué, the term used in Belgian to denote educated Congolese. Évolués saw themselves as the green shoots of a Congolese intelligentsia; Brussels saw them as filler material for low-level teaching and civil service jobs.

The Congo had the best literacy rate in sub-Saharan Africa, with a quarter of its 13 million population able to read and write. Education ended abruptly when students became teenagers. Too much schooling, thought the men in Brussels, would spoil them. Of the 1.6 million native children who passed through primary school, less than 4 per cent would go on to further education. Only Africans with very good connections made it into the Congo’s two universities: Léopoldville’s University of Lovanium, opened in 1954 with a working nuclear reactor in its basement, and the University of Elisabethville, whose half-finished campus sat north of the Katangese capital. Most of the 763 students were white.

The authorities made grudging concessions to Congolese who climbed the educational rock face. In 1948, Brussels introduced the Carte du Merité Civique for any native who could prove he was ‘living in a state of civilisation’.6 The card offered mild legal benefits but failed to impress the Congolese. Ten years later, only 1,557 had been given out.

‘Those who get it are disappointed,’ said a Belgian lawyer in Elisabethville. ‘Those who don’t get it are bitter.’7

Lumumba applied. Despite only four years of primary school while growing up in Kasaï province, he had achieved good grades at a government training college that prepped workers for the post office. In Léopoldville, the Carte du Merité Civique officials checked his education, his skill with a knife and fork, and that he had only one wife. Lumumba lied about the wives (he had four) and passed. He was now, in the eyes of Belgium, officially civilised. The day he collected the card, a white woman passed him on the street. Their eyes met.

‘Sale macaque,’ she said.8 Dirty monkey.

That was the moment Lumumba decided Belgian rule had to end in the Congo. He was two days away from his thirty-fifth birthday when he made his speech at the Palais de la Nation. He had been to prison twice, once for politics and once for embezzling money. He liked bow ties and brandy, rhetoric and weed, and wanted freedom for his country above everything.

As independence approached, Belgian men put furniture into storage and sent their families back home. In smoky bars they talked about government betrayal over a tableload of Primus beer. Brasserie de Léopoldville; the Only Beer for Sportsmen. They were afraid the Congolese would rise up and boil them down for glue.

‘You see pantomimes of throat cutting and menacing gestures,’ said a young Belgian colonial policeman. ‘It is the ingratitude of the blacks. Look at all we have done for them – why, there is not a city like Léopoldville in the whole of Africa.’9

They swapped stories about what independence meant out in the bush. One tribe waited by the graves of their ancestors, expecting the dead to rise on 30 June. Another, remote in the jungle of Orientale province, turned cargo cult and built a wooden mock-up of an aeroplane.10 Their witchdoctor had prophesied that independence would bring a flood. The tribe climbed inside and refused to leave. Soon they were up to their ankles in piss and dysentery.

Only Jan Vansina, a balding 30-year-old lecturer in African history at the University of Lovanium, had anything positive to say about independence. He had watched his black students moved to quasi-religious ecstasy by the thought of freedom.

‘They were dazzled by the vision of a grand future, tinged with millenarian fervour,’ said Vansina. ‘They saw before them a new Jerusalem in which they were to be the new priesthood, idealistically offering all their talents to raise the splendour of the future nation, while also basking in the kind of prestige accorded Catholic saints: confessors or martyrs.’11

Few Belgians shared Vansina’s optimism, but after another round of beers, the older ones admitted they were prepared to stay and work for Africans they had previously employed. Younger drinkers felt sick at the thought.

But going back home was not easy. Congolese whites had a reputation as arrogant racists in the motherland. No one wanted to hear them complain about a planton (office boy) dodging work or a zamu (watchman) sleeping through his shift, or listen to yet another story about the domestic help stealing from the kitchen. A few Brussels shops had signs in their windows: ‘No Colonials’. Someone in the bar remembered a story about a friend of a friend who had stones thrown at him in the Wallonian countryside because his car number plate was Congolese.

Young or old, Belgian drinkers agreed on one thing: their problems had started with Patrice Lumumba.

Lumumba’s journey to prime minister began a few years after his epiphany on a Léopoldville street. Now a postal clerk with wives and children to support, he moved to Stanleyville and made a name for himself in the city’s cercles (discussion groups), the closest Congolese could get to nationalist activism. In 1955, a local representative of Belgium’s Parti Libéral, unusually sympathetic to anti-colonialism, took notice of the fiery young debater and arranged a three-week study trip to Brussels.

When Lumumba returned home, horizons widened, Stanleyville police arrested him for embezzling 126,000 Belgian francs from post office funds. He got twelve months in prison. He had been arrested for similar offences on two previous occasions but this time his post office bosses refused to squash the charges.

Lumumba left prison in July 1956 to discover that Auguste Buisseret had legalised political parties. The plans Lumumba dreamed up in jail for his future had not involved democracy; he believed many Congolese were ‘dull-witted illiterates’.12 But he was too smart to swim against the current. In 1958, employed as publicity director of a Léopoldville brewery, Lumumba took over journalist Joseph Ileo’s Mouvement National Congolais (National Congolese Movement – MNC) with the help of his old Kasaï friend Albert Kalonji, a balding accountant with a Hitler moustache, and veteran trade unionist Cyrille Adoula.

The MNC was a 2-year-old party with Congo-wide ambitions and no time for tribal politics. It polled best in Kasaï and Stanleyville, where Lumumba remained well known. To boost support, the MNC formed an alliance with Antoine Gizenga’s Parti Solidaire Africain (African Solidarity Party – PSA), a group from the north-east with big ideas about pan-African unity. The Congo’s other political parties preferred to target tribe and province.

Joseph Kasa-Vubu’s Abako, the oldest independence movement, represented the Bakongo people from Léopoldville province. Abako had been around since 1950 as a vehicle to preserve the Kikongo language; original leader Edmond Nzeza Nlandu was obsessed with the idea of his mother tongue being swamped by the growing number of Lingala-speakers. Kasa-Vubu took over in 1954 and steered the party in a more political direction.

The Van Bilsen controversy made Abako the loudest voice on the Congolese scene but its politics confused voters. Sometimes Kasa-Vubu hinted at resurrecting the fifteenth-century Kongo kingdom for a future in which the rest of the country had only a vague role; in other speeches, he offered the Bakongo people as leaders of a united Congo. Neither path had much support outside Léopoldville province.

A nebula of other parties hung around the political stars. Down in Katanga, Moïse Tshombe’s Confédération des Associations Tribales du Katanga (Confederation of Katanga Tribal Associations – Conakat) represented tribes from the south of the province; Jason Sendwe’s Association des Baluba du Katanga (Baluba Association of Katanga – Balubakat), a split from Tshombe’s party, gathered together those from the north. In the rest of the country, the Union des Mongo, Alliance des Bayanzi, Centre de Regroupement Africain and over a hundred others had their share of supporters. Out in the bush, tribal chiefs exercised their own kind of power through subordinate chiefs, regional heads and village elders.

In December 1958, Lumumba broke away from the pack when he got an invitation to the All-African People’s Conference in Accra, capital of newly independent Ghana. Lumumba made friends with Kwame Nkrumah, the conference host and Ghana’s prime minister. A former lecturer in political science, the big nosed and balding Nkrumah was a leftist who believed he could steer a course between Western Europe and the Soviets.

‘The only colonialist or imperialist I trust,’ said Ghana’s leader, ‘is a dead one.’13

Lumumba got home in the last days of 1958, radicalised. Thousands heard him call for independence at an MNC rally in Léopoldville.

Kasa-Vubu’s Abako organised its own rally for Sunday 4 January to snatch back the spotlight. Thousands of Abako supporters turned up at a Léopoldville YMCA to find that the authorities had banned the event. The crowd turned violent, burning cars and stoning policemen in two days of rioting. The Force Publique cleared the streets with live ammunition. Fifty protestors lay dead when the gun smoke drifted away. Blood pooled on the pavements. Force Publique commander, Lieutenant General Émile Janssens, a 58-year-old Belgian usually seen in shorts and knee-high socks, did not apologise.

‘This must serve as a warning,’ he said, ‘to those lucky enough to escape our bullets’.14

Janssens’s words made things worse. Black workers of the Huileries du Congo Belge (Oil Mills of the Belgian Congo) rioted in Leverville, sparking rolling demonstrations in Luluabourg, Matadi and Stanleyville through the first half of the year.

In June 1959, the political landscape was shaken further. Kasa-Vubu announced that he wanted a secessionist Bakongo state. Then the MNC split over Kalonji’s enthusiasm for a federal Congo. Lumumba remained a nationalist. A leadership struggle divided the MNC into two factions, each hanging onto the name. The Congo seemed about to fragment before it achieved its independence.

That summer, the Belgians, overwhelmed by popular feeling against them, announced self-rule in five years. The Congolese refused to wait that long. Under Abako influence, parts of Léopoldville province stopped paying taxes. Baluba and Lulua tribes clashed in Kasaï. In October 1959, police arrested Lumumba when a riot killed twenty people at an MNC conference in Stanleyville. By the time of his January trial, the Belgians had caved in and agreed to independence later that year. They flew the Congo’s forty-three most important political leaders to Brussels for a round table conference and freed Lumumba from prison to join them.

The top hotels, talented chefs, obsequious whites and pretty girls asking for autographs failed to smooth over disagreements between the different factions. Kalonji’s MNC and Tshombe’s Katangese wanted a federalist system with autonomy for the provinces; Kasa-Vubu was still talking about an independent Bakongo state but was prepared to compromise for a juicy political job; Lumumba and the Belgians wanted the country in one piece. Lumumba quickly fell out with the Katangese delegation.

The MNC leader mocked Tshombe’s white advisors, all right-wingers, but made excuses for his own Serge Michel, a 50-year-old Frenchman sentenced to death by Paris for helping Algerian rebels and widely believed to be a Soviet agent.

‘He has a white skin,’ said Lumumba, ‘but a black heart’.15

The tame Belgian leftists advising Abako and Gizenga’s PSA ran for cover as Conakat and the MNC threw threats at each other.

‘If you spend one day in Katanga’, one of Tshombe’s cronies told Lumumba, ‘you will piss blood.’16

The issues were buried but not solved when Lumumba used every scrap of charisma to negotiate a consensus on May elections with independence the next month. Federalism was not on the menu. Congolese men would cast their votes for Provincial Assemblies and a national Chamber of Representatives, then the Provincial Assemblies would elect eighty-seven members to a national Upper Senate. The electorate would not include prisoners, black women, the insane or whites.

Lumumba had avenged the insult from the woman who passed him on a Léopoldville street. Sale macaque. The Belgians had agreed to hand over the keys to the Congo.

There were strange signs as the elections approached. In Katanga, Colonel Remy Van Lierde, a Second World War fighter ace in charge of Kamina military base, claimed to have seen a 50ft-long giant snake while on a helicopter trip.

‘It was very dark green with his belly white,’ he said. ‘It could easily have eaten up a man.’17

He produced a fuzzy black and white photograph as proof. In neighbouring Kasaï, the Bushong people, descendants of the once-great Kuba Empire, were overrun by witches. They resurrected ordeal by poison, with survival proving innocence, and tried 500 old women before police stepped in. A story circulated in Orientale province that pygmies near Lake Tele had speared to death and eaten a ‘Mokele-mbembe’, a small brontosaurus the size of an elephant. None of that stopped the men of the Congo going to the polls for the first time in their history. May’s results reflected the fragmented political scene.

Lumumba’s MNC, which used a cow emblem to guide illiterate supporters to the right spot on the ballot paper, emerged the biggest party but had only 26.6 per cent of the vote, winning thirty-six of the available 137 seats in the Chamber of Representatives. Antoine Gizenga’s PSA got 12.6 per cent of the vote and thirteen seats. Kasa-Vubu’s Abako took 9.5 per cent of the vote and twelve seats. Albert Kalonji’s MNC faction got eight seats, Moïse Tshombe’s Conakat the same. Jason Sendwe’s Balubakat got seven. A galaxy of other parties divided the remainder.

The Belgians asked Lumumba to form a government. After weeks of haggling, including some drama when Kasa-Vubu announced that his Bakongo people were seceding and marched on the Léopoldville Provincial Assembly only to be sent home by a policeman, Lumumba formed a coalition. Kasa-Vubu agreed to forget secession if he was made president. He got the job.

The political trade-offs to create the Congo’s first government broke friendships, squashed some dreams and hurt a lot of feelings. Lumumba’s enemies took consolation in the fact that he had agreed not give a speech at the Independence Day ceremony in the Palais de la Nation. But the temptation to make his mark, with the whole country listening in by radio, was too great to ignore. As the ceremony ended, he climbed on stage and began to speak.

When Lumumba gave up the microphone, Baudouin I marched out of the Palais and directed the royal entourage to the airport. Kasa-Vubu caught up and urged him to stay. An hour of angry discussion followed. Kasa-Vubu pointed out that Baudouin’s own speech at the ceremony had been undiplomatic.

The king had called independence undon (a gift). He had advised the Congolese not to risk their new freedom with reforms.

‘It is your job, gentlemen,’ Baudouin said, ‘to show that we were right in trusting you.’18 Then he called Léopold II a genius.

Baudouin preferred to believe Lumumba’s speech was a premeditated insult rather than an angry ad lib, but was persuaded to stay. He attended an independence mass at the church of St Maria and visited a local cemetery. At lunch under open tents overlooking the river, Lumumba gave another speech, this time not broadcast nationally:

At the moment when the Congo reaches independence, the whole Government wishes to pay solemn homage to the king of the Belgians and to the noble people he represents for the work done here over three quarters of a century. For I would not wish my feelings to be wrongly interpreted.19

Baudouin I smiled politely.

That afternoon, Force Publique soldiers, youth groups and phalanxes of sportsmen paraded through Léopoldville. By the time Baudouin flew out in the early evening, the streets were a stomping whirl of cha-cha songs under a skyburst of fireworks.

The street noise came in through the windows of a Léopoldville house where Philippa Schuyler, in a purple silk dress, ran her hands over imaginary piano keys in preparation for tonight’s performance. The five-finger exercises helped block out memories of the man who had attacked her a few days before.

Celebrations took place across the country: Stanleyville, Luluabourg, Coquilhatville, Bukavu. In Elisabethville, capital of Katanga, new Provincial President Moïse Tshombe attended mass at St Pierre et Paul cathedral before going on to a service at a nearby Protestant church. On the way to a final stop at the city’s synagogue, he laughed off questions from reporters about a political scandal local police had uncovered in the last days of colonial rule.