Congo (40 page)

But things would turn out differently. Gradual change made way for a stampede, doddering progress for chaos. Who were the ones responsible? No one in particular. Or rather everyone. This high-speed decolonization was not the work of any one specific person or movement, but of an extremely complex interaction between the various players. It was like a game of Ping-Pong that begins calmly, with a slow tapping of the ball back and forth, and then suddenly accelerates into a nervous rally full of focused volleys, lazy lob shots, grim smashes. and sly feints. Faster and faster the ball flies, so quickly that it becomes unclear for players and onlookers alike exactly what is happening where and when. No one can follow it anymore, no one has an overview, but everyone knows: it can’t go on like this much longer. And that is how things went in Congo too. The only difference being that there were more than two players and actually more than one ball. During the process of decolonization, it was not simply a matter of the Congolese against the Belgians; the blocs were not that monolithic. On the Congolese side there were
évolués
, clerics, soldiers, workers, farmers. The ambitions of people from Bas-Congo were not identical to those from Kivu or Kasai. The dreams of those in their thirties were not those of people in their sixties. But sooner or later they all came to the Ping-Pong table. On the Belgian side one had not only the Belgians in the colony, but also the Belgians in the mother country. There were European liberals, Catholics, and socialists. The church and the royals had interests different from those of the industrialists or the trade unionists. In Congo itself, colonial officials desired different things than did plantation owners in the interior or missionaries in the jungle. All these special interest groups stood shoulder to shoulder, back to back, and face-to-face. And then there were the supporters: Russia, America, and the United Nations stood shouting loudly from the grandstands, surrounded by young states such as Ghana, India, and Egypt. The players didn’t know whom to listen to first, but the Congolese players—as underdogs—clearly received the most encouragement.

And then there all those balls on the table: at least three, in fact. Did people really want independence? And if so, when did they want it? And what was this independent Congo supposed to look like? The latter question had to do not only with the country’s internal organization (unitary or federal?) but also its external relations with Belgium (complete autonomy or still some form of federative ties?). The answers to these three questions led to widely divergent standpoints. On one side of the Ping-Pong table, for example, there might be the call for unconditional and immediate independence, whereby all ties with Belgium were to be severed and Congo would remain unified, while on the other side one had the advocates of gradual decolonization, with enduring ties with the mother country and great autonomy for the various provinces. And between them lay a whole gamut of standpoints.

It was as though an entire world championship of Ping-Pong was being played at the same time on one and the same table. The result was squabbling, irritation, tension, belligerence, euphoria, despair, and madness. And fast play, of course. The rules changed all the time. The only way to keep a cool head was to stay focused, to reduce awareness to one’s own field of vision, to stick to one’s own tactics, to pay attention only to one’s own game. All those involved did precisely that. But another expression for focus is tunnel vision, and it was precisely that which led to folly, on the part of each and every player. The tragic decolonization of Congo was a story with many blind spots and only a little lucidity from time to time. But then, hindsight is golden.

T
HE YEAR IS
1955, and we are still at the home of Jamais Kolonga. After King Baudouin’s visit, Jamais Kolonga’s father began receiving frequent visits from an impeccably dressed
évolué
. “Kasavubu came here every day, here, to this yard.” He pointed to the old, crumbling cement floor. “He would come in the morning and in the evening to talk with my father. I served him wine. Kasavubu was a true gentleman.” In photos from that day, the man’s sophisticated allure is indeed plain to see. The neat suit, the fashionable glasses, eyes that seem more to smile than to laugh out loud. Whispered rumor had it that one of his ancestors was Chinese and had worked on the railroad between Matadi and Kinshasa in the 1890s. Hence those eyes, people thought.

Joseph Kasavubu was born forty years earlier in Bas-Congo, in a village a hundred kilometers (sixty-two miles) north of Boma, at the edge of the Mayombe forest. He learned to read and do arithmetic at the Scheutist mission school, and because he was good at it he was allowed to go to the minor seminary, with a view to possible priesthood. He studied Latin and French there and at eighteen was admitted to the seminary at Kabwe in Kasai. It was the first time he had been outside of Bas-Congo. After studying philosophy for three years, he came to the conclusion that his calling lay elsewhere. He left the seminary, became a teacher, then a clerk, and finally a civil servant, but that hint of sacerdotal unction never left him. He would never become the sort of inspired orator Patrice Lumumba was. His voice was brittle and high, his tone rather more uniform and boring. It was not easy for him to seize an audience’s full attention. He was unmistakably intelligent, but that intelligence was more the result of hard work and plodding reason than of any inborn brilliance. By means of frequent conversations with others of like mind he molded his preferences into clear standpoints. Once those had been established, however, he possessed the skill to express them with great conviction.

Like so many young people, he moved to Léopoldville during the war. At the age of twenty-five he started work as administrative assistant for the colonial administration’s finance department. With that position, he became a part of the new, black urban elite. After work he would talk with people like Kolonga’s father about the status of the Bakongo language and culture in Léopoldville. That they were the original inhabitants of the area around the capital was something on which they fully agreed and they were upset by the fact that it was not their language but Lingala, the language of the Bangala who lived in the jungle upriver, that was becoming the city’s lingua franca. The Bakongo had been the first ones here, hadn’t they? And didn’t they live here in greater numbers? So why should Lingala be the language used in the schools? Wasn’t there something like a “right of occupancy”? That slogan was a golden find: a term taken from nineteenth-century colonial rhetoric, downloaded directly from the Berlin Conference, but Kasavubu applied it to the urban situation of the 1940s and 1950s.

They also mulled over social and racial issues. How could it be that the whites earned so much more than the
évolués
, even more than those who held a registration card? Here too Kasavubu kneaded his indignation into a bold slogan: “à travail égal, salaire égal”: the same work, the same wages. Tough words for a man who spoke so timidly.

Kasavubu joined the capital-city chapter of Adapes, the Scheutist alumni association. After the war he became the association’s general secretary, a function he would hold until 1956 and to which he owed a great many contacts with the city’s young elite. At the time, the alumni club had somewhere between fifteen and eighteen thousand members.
²
In 1955 Kasavubu was also appointed chairman of the Abako, the tribal association that had for several years already been promoting the Bakongo language and culture in Kinshasa. His period of tenure saw a radical turnabout. Kasavubu would transform the Abako into an explicitly political club. With that, the cornerstone was laid for the politicization of the
évolués
and, in fact, for the start of decolonization.

There was also another event that made 1955 a pivotal year, although no
évolué
in the Belgian Congo would have suspected it at the time. It took place, after all, in Belgium and the Netherlands. In December of that year, the magazine of the Flemish Catholic Workers’ Federation,
De Gids
, ran an article entitled “A Thirty-Year Plan for the Political Emancipation of Belgian Africa.” The author was Jef Van Bilsen, a correspondent for the Belga press agency who had worked for a long time in Congo and taught at the colonial polytechnic. The article argued that the colony should finally set about the business of cultivating an intellectual upper crust. A generation of engineers, officers, physicians, politicians, and officials would have to be brought into readiness so that by the year 1985 Congo could more or less stand on its own two feet.
³

Unlike what is often claimed, Van Bilsen’s plan did not meet with full opposition from the word go. Sympathetic consideration was given to it in both Belgium and Congo, even outside more progressive circles. His notion of slow emancipation, after all, harmonized well with the policy of gradualism that the colonial trinity had been advocating for decades. His thirty-year plan would do for politics what the ten-year plan of 1949 had done for the infrastructure and economy: modernize the country, slowly but surely. He did not break away from the existing paradigm, but thought it through to its final consequences. That he set 1985 as a deadline suddenly made the whole thing quite concrete, but even then he was not thinking in terms of complete independence: after that date Belgium and Congo would still be bound together by the crown and would form a sort of federation of states, a commonwealth
à deux
, as it were.

The article appeared in a French translation in early 1956, and that set the ball rolling. Copies of the publication began circulating in the native districts of Léopoldville, the neighborhoods from which thousands of people went out each morning, often barefooted, to work in the department stores, soap factories, or breweries of the Europeans, the neighborhoods to which
évolués
came home each evening after their shift as typist or clerk for a white
patron
(boss), the neighborhoods where a few people talked late into the night about the state of the world, over a glass of Portuguese wine. Why did the boss always call you Victor or Antoine, and never Monsieur Victor or Monsieur Antoine? Why did every white person say
tu
to you and never
vous
, even when you wore cufflinks and a white collar? In those select circles, Van Bilsen’s essays became a hit. A white person who thought aloud about the political emancipation of the blacks: was that really possible? A plan that spoke of higher education and new opportunities: was this some kind of dream? It was as though a ray of sunlight had broken through the massive cloud cover of their lives. Did this mean that this state of affairs was not going to last forever?

It was, in fact, nothing but a pamphlet, but it put Kasavubu in a very bad mood when he read it.
Conscience Africaine
was the title, the July–August 1956 issue. This low-circulation magazine of Catholic origin, which appeared sporadically and had existed for only a few years, was run by Joseph Ileo, a man from Équateur. The six editors included quite a few alumni of Tata Raphaël’s school; one of them held a certificate of civil merit, another even had a registration card. The issue in question was taken up largely by a long and anonymous article with the bold title “Manifesto.” The writers had clearly read Van Bilsen’s plan, Kasavubu saw that right away. “The next thirty years will be decisive for our future,” he read. “The Belgians must realize, above all, that their dominion over Congo will not last forever.”
⁴
Entirely in line with Van Bilsen, the text spoke of political emancipation and gradual change; it made a plea for a joint Belgian-Congolese initiative and spoke of a fraternal atmosphere that would put an end to all forms of racial discrimination. After all, hadn’t young King Baudouin himself set the good example during his visit? The text continued: “We ask the Europeans to abandon their attitude of disapproval and racial segregation, to avoid the ongoing aggrievement to which we are subjected. We also ask them to abandon their condescending attitude, which is an offense to our self-respect. We do not like to be treated as children all the time. Please understand that we are different from you and that, even as we assimilate the values of your civilization, we also wish to remain ourselves.”
⁵
The
évolué
no longer wanted to simply hanker after the white lifestyle, as he had been doing for years, but now wished to rely on his own capabilities as well. And then, in block letters: “We want to be civilized Congolese, not ‘Europeans with a black skin.’”
⁶

Kasavubu felt sick. Not because he disagreed with these statements, far from it. It was having to read somewhere else what he had been thinking for years, that was what galled him. What’s more, almost the entire editorial board of
Conscience Africaine
came from Équateur, while he, Kasavubu, had just become chairman of country’s largest Bakongo association. Were these Lingala-speakers, these Bangala, now going to take the lead in the capital when it came to political ambition as well? Although it is not widely known, ethnic rivalry in the big cities played as great a role in decolonization as did the aversion to foreign rule, no matter how artificial many of these “tribes” really were. These “Bangala” who so annoyed Kasavubu were, as a homogeneous tribe, an invention of the Bureau International d’Ethnographie (they were, in fact, a crazy quilt of cultures in the equatorial jungle; there had never been any inclusive tribal bond). But, thanks to the mission schools, this ethnographic figment from the 1910s was very real in the Kinshasa of the 1950s.
⁷
The Bakongo had no desire to yield pride of place to the Bangala.

Within the next few weeks, Kasavubu summoned the members of the Abako to examine the
Conscience Africaine
manifesto and comment on it. Their “countermanifesto” appeared in August 1956. It was intended to surpass the first text and preferably to pulverize it. The tone was much more radical and the content unequivocally revolutionary. With regard, for example, to the thirty-year plan advanced by Van Bilsen and
Conscience Africaine
? “We, for our part, we do not wish to participate in carrying out this plan, but only in doing away with it; its execution would lead to only more delays for Congo. In essence, it is nothing but that same old lullaby. Our patience is more than exhausted. The time is ripe, and therefore they must grant us that emancipation this very day rather than postpone it for another thirty years. History knows no belated emancipations, for when the hour has come the people will no longer wait.”
⁸