Mortal Wounds

Before June 30, the Congo was already mortally wounded. First there had been the divisive personal and political rivalries, then the tribal conflicts, and then the demonstrations of the unemployed. Finally, on July 5, it was the army’s turn to add to the country’s calamities. The Congolese soldiers refused to obey any longer the commands of their Belgian officers. They mutinied.

The chief source of their fury was the rule that the highest rank that a Congolese could hold in the army at that time, after fifteen years of service, was sergeant, or first sergeant. A few months earlier, at the Belgians’ Round Table, Patrice Lumumba had raised the “serious problem” of the Africanization of the army’s upper echelons.

A Belgian, General [Émile] Janssens, in particular, was detested by his Congolese troops. Scornfully, he had announced that he had “thrown out independence.” “That,” he said, was “for the civilized.”

With a ferocity that accurately reflected what they’d learned from the Belgians, the army went into revolt. Congolese blood was spilled as the men turned against their officers. The Belgians’ reprisals greatly resembled techniques of the Nazis, by whom they had been trained. Lumumba tried to halt the riots, making personal appeals to each side for calm and reason.

The ship of state was listing dangerously as bad news continued to pile up everywhere. On July 4, I was in Conakry [in Guinea] when I received the prime minister’s telegram asking me to return to the Congo. On July 8, I was back in Leo with my friends.

Lighting the Power Keg

At the airport, the Belgian police were still on duty. When I arrived, the man who examined my passport said to me in an aggressive tone, “You’ve been expelled from the Congo. You can’t come back.”

Georges Grenfell, a minister of state and member of Lumumba’s MNC [Congolese National Movement], was beside me. He had been sent to Ghana to take part in the festivities there for the proclamation of the republic. We sat together on the plane after he boarded at Accra, and now he interceded for me.

“Are you still trying to make the law here? Where do you think you are, in Belgium? This is the independent Republic of the Congo. In-de-pen-dent, you understand? Yes, this woman was expelled, but the new government of the Congo has brought her back. Does that displease you? Hand me the phone.”

The Belgian police officer hesitated, marking time. “Whom do you wish to phone?” “The prime minister, Patrice Lumumba.” “And your name?” “State minister Grenfell.” The police officer was perplexed. “Has no one come to meet you?” “Perhaps they did. But the plane was eight hours late, you know.”

He let us pass. We took the aviation company’s car and arrived at Leo just at curfew. Lumumba received me with open arms and these words: “You’re eight days late! Have you heard the news?”

“That the army revolted? Yes, I heard it in Dakar. From Modibo Keïta. Tell me . . . what happened?”

“It was General Janssens’s statement that lit the powder keg. The men just couldn’t bear it any longer. They had been working for starvation wages as it was. The idea that they would continue to be commanded by the Belgian officers was simply intolerable.”

“And at this time!”

“The men had been taught to shoot. Even their own brothers. And they had arms and ammunition. So they took their revenge wherever they could find it. On the Congolese population as well as on the Europeans. The revolt spread through the city blindly, like a disease. It has been terrible.”

“And now? How are things now?”

“As of today, they are a little better. I spent the day talking to the soldiers, with [Congolese president Joseph] Kasavubu. We managed to calm them. Camp Leopold has been quiet ever since.”

Defying Fate

Patrice seemed exhausted. Still, he had the courage to laugh as he spoke to me, that laugh that was the trademark of his hope and idealism. In spite of everything, he laughed, to defy fate.

“And you?” he asked me. “What news have you?” “In Guinea I saw President Sékou Touré, and [Kwame] Nkrumah. I asked them to give us technical help.”

The news of the revolt was frightening. But the Belgian press made it even worse than it was, aggravating the situation so as to justify the Belgians’ sending parachutists to establish order. The first act of these Belgian troops was to disarm the Congolese soldiers. This happened on the very evening that Moïse Tshombe announced the secession of Katanga. It was a reconquest, pure and simple.

In Léopoldville, the Belgian paras, in combat clothes, took control everywhere. Machine guns were stationed at the crossroads. Radio-controlled jeeps blocked the major boulevards. N’djili Airport was surrounded by the paras to assure the evacuation of the Europeans who, baggage in hand, were fleeing for Belgium.

There was a fantastic traffic on the beach too, where boats were rented by whites fleeing to Brazzaville, to [Congo-Brazzaville leader Fulbert] Youlou’s great profit. The panic in this exodus was terrible to behold. Hundreds of cars were abandoned in the streets, giving a terribly sad appearance to this city, which was armed like a fortress.

If the Congolese mistreated the Belgians, it was often to try to keep them from leaving the Congo. They did not want the whites to go. Throughout the country, there was the revolting spectacle of violence and woes of every kind.

Hate breeds hate. The word “macaque” (a species of monkey) was used as an epithet for blacks by the Europeans, even by the children. And the Congolese thought that the word “Falamand,” a corruption of “Flamand” (Flemish), said with terrible scorn, was the supreme insult.

At N’djili Airport there were incidents between the blacks who worked there and the Europeans who were fleeing. Several Congolese were killed. General Janssens declared, “This will teach a lesson to those who were lucky enough to escape our bullets. If they don’t shut up, we are ready to begin the sport again.”

Katanga’s Secession

The Assembly of Deputies tried to find a means of regaining control of the country, but found itself paralyzed. With the secession of Katanga, the Belgians’ plan for keeping control of their economic interests in the Congo moved ahead with diabolic success.

The idea of Katanga as a separate republic was really like a vulgar caricature of a ministate in an operetta. The Belgians were quite serious about it, however, as they saw in the secession a means of escaping the nationalization of Katanga’s rich mines. It would also, the Belgians believed, draw other provinces with tribal aspirations into secession after it.

Thus Belgium would officially let go of the Congo, whose enormous needs and continued indebtedness, aggravated by the flight of capital and the repatriation of the gold and credit reserves, had put it in the red for a long time. But it would keep the prize, Katanga, and through its secession [Belgium] hoped also to gain later the other two useful provinces of Kasai and Kivu.

I cannot speak of Katanga without mentioning its extraordinary reservoir of minerals, as yet hardly touched: gold, cobalt, chrome, platinum, pewter, industrial diamonds, diamonds for jewelry, manganese, nickel, rare metal, uranium, asbestos, lead, tungsten, and germanium. Above all, Katanga produced copper, about 350,000 tons a year, from a vein three hundred kilometers wide of the purest copper ever found.

The Congo was only in the fifteenth day of its sovereignty when the president, Kasavubu, and the prime minister, Lumumba, decided to make a tour through the country to calm the people and find a solution to the many problems that had hit the young nation so hard.

Tirelessly Lumumba mounted the platform, speaking to the people. Often he used demagogic language. It was the lesser of the evils. This was a race against the clock. He had to avert the ruin into which the country was plunging.

When the presidential plane returned to N’djili Airport near Léopoldville at the end of the tour, the Belgian ambassador refused to give Lumumba and the chief of state the honors of arrival, on the pretext that he wanted to avoid any provocation of disorder among the Belgian refugees who were waiting at the airport to leave. There was, in fact, a scandalous scene.

One of the Belgians pulled the prime minister’s beard and slapped him. “President of monkeys,” the European women screamed at the top of their voices. “We will come back.” “Bastard . . . murderer . . . son of a bitch . . .” Others spat in his face.

Lumumba remained dignified. He always was and always would be dignified. When I heard of this disgraceful event, I asked myself who the savages in this case were: Were they in the skins of the blacks, or the whites?

***

Lumumba’s victory was ephemeral, and he knew it. Soon after this, there was to appear in the halls of power the sinister figure chosen earlier by Belgium and the United States to replace him: Mobutu.

Like the secession of Katanga, carried out by Tshombe, the takeover of the Congo by Mobutu had been prepared at the Round Table. It was with the treachery of these two creatures that the Congo’s ruin was prepared.

Mobutu, an army sergeant and member of the MNC, was a minister without portfolio in Lumumba’s government. After the army’s revolt, Lumumba made him a colonel. His earlier activities, I learned later, had included being a spy for both the Belgian intelligence and the US Central Intelligence Agency.

It was not enough that Lumumba had the Belgian government and all its unscrupulous maneuvers to deal with. The young state, because of its riches and its evident weakness, also became the pawn of the two giants of politics, the East and the West. The echoes of the Cold War found a new sounding board in the Congo, this bastion of international trusts. Here, communism and capitalism faced one another like the rhinoceros and the elephant.

The fabulous Union Minière, it should be pointed out, was controlled by three groups of stockholders: the Belgian corporation, the special Board of Katanga, and an Anglo-American company, Oppenheim de Beers, through the intermediary of the Tanganyika Concession Ltd.

Firmly supported by his two principal backers and sure of the complicity of the United Nations, Mobutu carried off his coup d’état of September 14, after buying, with millions of francs, acquiescence to his rise to power. The theme of his right to the takeover, the hook with which he insured the cooperation of the West, was anti-communism. Because of him, many Congolese died, including its own best son. It is true that copper has the color of blood and mud.

The days that followed Mobutu’s seizing of power were like a modern apocalypse. The Congo was on the edge of madness. Kasavubu had at least pretended to conform to the constitutional laws drawn up by Belgian lawyers. Mobutu made no such pretenses. Democracy was completely overthrown and replaced by a military dictatorship.

The National Assembly was closed by Mobutu’s orders and rigorously guarded by soldiers. The last session of the assembly was the one in which Lumumba had been confirmed. The casques bleus prevented Lumumba from speaking to the people on the radio. [Justin] Bomboko, minister of foreign affairs, produced a crop of freshly milled young Congolese technocrats who acted as the “shock troops,” appearing everywhere to justify Mobutu’s takeover.

Bomboko was, at that moment, a man to be reckoned with. In a press conference the morning before the coup d’état, he announced the measures deemed necessary to prevent communist penetration in the Congo. These measures involved the expulsion of certain undesirable elements: the Ghanaian and Guinean contingents, the Egyptians, Félix Moumié, a Cameroon leader, and . . . Madame Blouin.

Lumumba’s Calvary

When the order for my expulsion was announced on the radio, my mother was stricken by a heart attack. She was hospitalized immediately.

I was supposed to leave the city within twenty-four hours, but Joséphine’s condition was so serious that I phoned Mobutu to tell him that I could not leave her in such a critical state. He informed me that an order for my arrest had been issued by the chief of state, Kasavubu, and sent to him for execution. But he would allow me another forty-eight hours.

[Antoine] Gizenga was arrested and placed in an underground prison twenty-five kilometers from Leo. Hearing of this, the Moupende warriors, the most fearsome in the Congo, prepared to liberate their chief. They sent warning telegrams to Mobutu: “If Gizenga is not released tomorrow, all the missionaries and Europeans of Kwilu will be killed.” Gizenga was released instead of being transferred, as planned, to Katanga, where he would of course have been put to death.

Lumumba’s calvary began with Mobutu’s takeover. From then on, the conspiracies against him were carried on openly. Each day, Kasavubu crossed the river to Brazzaville to consult with Youlou and the Belgian embassy there on decisions for the young republic.

Lumumba knew that his life was in the hands of Mobutu. Fearing Mobutu’s intentions, he put himself under the protection of the United Nations, which stationed guards around his residence. But Mobutu’s troops, with machine guns, also encircled the residence of Lumumba.

It was then that I remembered an appeal that Lumumba, heartbroken, had made on the radio, to the people one day:

My Congolese brothers! You’re selling your country for a glass of beer! A tragedy is engulfing our country, and the dancing continues at the Cité Congolaise. Léopoldville is a cheap cabaret where the people think only of their pleasures — dancing and beer.

The Congo was sinking, the Congo was dying, and the best of its children was soon to be assassinated. Still the Congo danced. Perhaps the heart was less festive, but the dancing did not stop. Before the curfew, around the crates of beer, the Congo danced. Cut off in his residence, Patrice Lumumba lived his last days with courage and daring.