Congo (45 page)

Head-over-heels decolonization was the result of symmetrical escalation with the colonial government and a symbolic and continuous raising of the stakes among the various political parties. The killing of a few dozen of Lumumba’s supporters during riots in Stanleyville did nothing to improve the situation. The proud Lumumbist Jean Mayani said of that: “After the congress, the colonial powers interpreted the MNC’s demands as a form of racial hatred and xenophobia that was being turned against the Belgians.” It took a bit before I realized that, in the colonial vocabulary, xenophobia was a trait ascribed to the Congolese. “The Force Publique dealt repressively with Lumumba’s partisans. Twenty people were killed in Mangobo, a borough in Kisangani. Lumumba was arrested and thrown into prison. It was just like the January 4 riots in Kinshasa.”
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Municipal elections were held in late 1959, but boycotted by the Abako, the MNC, and the PSA. The parties were no longer interested in transitional measures and slow processes. The important thing now was immediate independence, and nothing else. Belgium hoped that gradual democratization would win the people’s favor, but things turned out differently. The tensions had risen too far. The first elections had been organized in 1957, in the hope that that would placate the men of
Conscience Africaine
and the Abako. But it had the opposite effect. After the January 1959 riots, the Belgians promised independence, but not even that could smooth the feathers that had been ruffled. The colonizer thought it was doing the right thing, but struck out each time. That resulted in 1959 in the loss of a great deal of valuable time and goodwill; assets that could have been used to prepare well for independence. Rather than try to slap together an improvised, well-intentioned policy, perhaps the time had come to finally ask the Congolese themselves what they wanted.

O
N
J
ANUARY
20, 1960, a group of some 150 men in winter coats gathered at the Palais des Congrès in Brussels—about sixty Belgians and some ninety Congolese. The idea was to spend one month discussing, frankly and on an equal basis, a number of touchy issues. Hence the name: it was to be a “round table conference” (even though the tables were actually arranged in a rectangle). The Belgian Socialist Party, part of the parliamentary opposition at the time, was pleased with the initiative. The Belgians were represented by six cabinet ministers, five members of parliament, and five senators, accompanied by a few dozen advisers and observers. The politicians had little on-the-ground knowledge of the colony; “dry-season pilgrims” was how the Belgians in Congo itself referred to them mockingly. But many of them were rather smitten with the United Nations’ new-fangled ideology of decolonization. The Congolese delegates came from the major political parties (Kasavubu, Tshombe, Kamitatu among them) and included a dozen tribal elders to represent the traditional authorities. Just before the conference began, the Congolese delegates gathered to form a common front that would bridge the interparty rivalries, ethnic tensions, and ideological fault lines. They did not want this conference to turn into a messy game of Ping-Pong; they wanted to act as a single player.
L’union fait la force
—united we stand, divided we fall: Belgium had at least taught them that much. This sudden coalition came as a great surprise to the Belgian politicians, divided as they were between Catholic, Liberal, and Socialist sociopolitical blocs, between cabinet and parliament. Many of them were ill-prepared. There was no agenda, no government standpoint. After all, this meeting was not meant to decide anything, was it?

During the first five days of the round-table conference, however, the common Congolese front achieved three crucial victories. First, they were able to convince the Belgians that Patrice Lumumba, who had been imprisoned after the Stanleyville riots, should not be absent. Without him, they stated, the conference was not representative and might merely fan the flames in Congo. Deciding to play it safe, the Belgians had Lumumba released from prison and flown to Brussels. The second major victory: the Belgian delegates had to promise that the resolutions of the conference would afterward be molded into draft bills that would then be sent to both parliament and the senate. The Congolese knew all too well that they had no legislative power, but this gave them the guarantee that the decisions made would not end up at the dead-letter office. It would be hard to overstate the importance of this particular victory: what had begun as an informal colloquium in this way became a summit meeting of far-reaching portent. The third victory was even more conspicuous: the date! The Belgians had hoped to knock around a few ideas about the political structures of a Congo that would become independent at some point in the future, but for the Congolese delegates there was one question that went before all others: when?

On the fifth day of the round-table conference, even before Lumumba arrived, a discussion took place between Jean Bolikango, leader of the common front, and August De Schryver, acting minister for Congo, that most closely resembled the process of haggling and undercutting at a Kinshasa street market. January 1, 1961, the date only dreamed of back in 1958, had meanwhile become superseded. Things could not go quickly enough. In accordance with the old Flemish motto “you never know until you ask,” Bolikango made the first bold move and proposed June 1, 1960. The Belgians were astounded: but that was barely four months away! What could they say to that? Their counterproposal was July 31. A two-month respite. Given, it wasn’t much, but it was all right. Shall we make it June 30 then? Split the difference? Going, going, gone! On June 30, 1960, Congo would become independent. The die was cast. In the Palais des Congrès, an applause went up from the Congolese
and
Belgian delegates. No one in the Congolese delegation had thought it would be so easy; they were all flabbergasted.
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What was going on here? Had the colonizer, in an unguarded moment, given away independence? No. The round-table conference had indeed gained more momentum than first intended (as was the case with almost every initiative in Belgian colonial politics after 1955) and the Belgian delegation was indeed badly prepared, but this was no rash decision. In the context of the moment, Belgium had only two options: either to reject the common front’s demand, which would almost surely have led to massive rioting, or to agree to the request and hope that things would not get out of hand.
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There was no time for calm negotiations. The choice, in other words, was obvious enough. There were enough Belgian soldiers stationed at the military bases at Kitona and Kamina, but Belgium was not at all in favor of a conflict model. A bloody struggle for independence had been raging in Algeria for the last six years. There was absolutely no majority to be found in the Belgian parliament for a military show of force. The United Nations Charter and the anticolonial standpoints of the United States and the Soviet Union also gave Belgium little room to maneuver on the international scene. Fight off independence? That was possible, but only at the cost of a risky undertaking in the colony and moral isolation from the international community. In 1960 no less than seventeen African countries were to gain independence; Belgium could not lag behind. The only European countries with no intention of releasing their large African holdings were the southern European dictatorships: Salazar’s Portugal, which refused to surrender Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and the Cape Verde Islands, and Franco’s Spain, which still clung to Equatorial Guinea. Apartheid South Africa had no plans to let go of Namibia either. Belgium could agree to the date of June 30, 1960, because it knew that, even after that, it would continue to be involved in policy making, the army, and the economy. Top officials would act as ministerial advisers, white officers would remain in service, the big companies would remain Belgian, and missionaries would carry on teaching.

At the Plaza Hotel in the heart of Brussels, the atmosphere was euphoric. All kinds of things still had to be talked about, of course (that Congo would become a republic, that the ties with the Belgian royal family would be severed, that it would become a unitary state, that the provinces would receive powers of their own: none of this had been established yet), but the loot had been dragged in, the cat was in the bag! Joseph Kabasele’s African Jazz orchestra, which had had such success with its song about Jamais Kolonga, had accompanied the delegates to Brussels. Even negotiators in three-piece suits have to be able to dance after the plenary sessions.

Charly Henault still remembered it clearly. He was African Jazz’s drummer for years, but a Belgian nonetheless. “I was white, but what did I care? I was a drummer in a land full of drummers,” he told me when I found him one drizzly day at his home in eastern Belgium. He was deathly ill and stayed in bed; the memories were becoming washed out. “The round-table ball was held at the Plaza, yeah . . . . The joy, the euphoria . . . Kabasele called the politicians by their first names. They all loved him . . . . A man with class, in his powder-blue tuxedo with black piping. Very chic . . . He loved women and he loved making jokes . . . . One time I even hid his pajamas!”
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Besides all the fooling around, at the Plaza the band made a start composing the song that would soon become the biggest hit in Congolese music: “Indépendance Cha-Cha.” The lyrics, in Lingala and Kikongo, celebrated the newly won autonomy, praised the cooperation between the various parties and sang of the great names in the struggle for independence: “Independence, cha-cha, we took it / Oh! Autonomy, cha-cha, we got it! / Oh! Round table, cha-cha, we won it!” After 1960 Congo would adopt a number of national anthems, under Kasavubu, under Mobutu, under Kabila: pompous compositions with pathetic lyrics, but throughout the past half-century there has been only one true Congolese anthem, one single tune that right up until today makes all of Central Africa shake its hips: that playful, light-footed and moving “Indépendance Cha-Cha.”

J
UNE
30
IT WAS
. The round-table conference ended on February 20, 1960, with only four months left in which to knock together a country. The to-do list was impressive. A transitional government had to be formed, a constitution written, a parliament and senate established, ministries expanded, a diplomatic corps appointed, provincial and national elections organized, a cabinet put together, a head of state chosen . . . and that was only the country’s political institutions. A national currency also had to be created, and a national bank, in addition to postage stamps, driver’s licenses, license plates, and a land registry office.

A great many Belgians in the colony were leery of this mad rush. They were afraid that the colony, which had been worked on so carefully for seventy-five years, would go down the tubes in a few months’ time. Many of them began sending their savings, their belongings, their families home. Others migrated to Rhodesia or South Africa. During the first two weeks of June, four times as many passengers left from the airport at Ndjili than in the same period the year before. Sabena had to organize seventy extra flights, the boats to Antwerp were brimming over.
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The run-of-the-mill Congolese, on the other hand, was enjoying it immensely. He believed that a golden age was on its way, that Congo would become prosperous from one day to the next. That, after all, was the promise made him in the dozens of pamphlets circulating around the country. Almost all the parties were making promises that could never be kept, promises that were sometimes grotesque, sometimes downright dangerous.
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“When independence arrives,” an Abako broadsheet read, “the whites will have to leave the country.” That was definitely not one of the conclusions of the round-table conference. “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 to the Bakongo.” Little wonder then, with such inflammatory texts, that farmers in Bas-Congo expected nothing short of boundless liberty: “All laws will be abolished, we will no longer have to obey the traditional chieftains, nor the elders, nor the officials, nor the missionaries, nor the bosses . . . . .” In that longing for a sudden, radical turnabout one heard echoes from the days of Simon Kimbangu. Independence itself became a sort of messianic moment that would bring with it “life, health, joy, good fortune and honor.” Kasavubu and Lumumba, both of whom had spent time in prison, grew to became prophets and martyrs. In Kasavubu people saw the resurrection of the king of the old Kongo Empire, while dynamic Lumumba was compared to the Sputnik satellite! Simple people looked forward to nothing less than a cosmic turnabout. Employment and taxes would disappear. Some of them even assumed that, from then on, “the black will have white boys” and that “everyone will be allowed to pick out a white woman for themselves, because they will be left behind and redistributed, just like the cars and other things.”
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A few hucksters took advantage of that naïveté and began selling white people’s homes for the trifling sum of forty dollars . . . . Gullible souls, not realizing they had been swindled, knocked on the doors of white villas to ask whether they could come in and take a look at their new property. Some of them even asked to inspect the woman of the house, because they had just paid twenty dollars for her as well.
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On a macroeconomic scale, a number of things had to be arranged too. Colonial industry, after all, was intertwined in numerous ways with the colonial state, which would soon cease to exist. To deal with that, a second round-table conference was held in Brussels. This time, the political parties in Congo attached far less importance to the meeting. Independence was the most important thing, they figured, and they had secured that. Besides, it was already late April and everyone was busy campaigning for the upcoming elections in May. None of the heavyweights had time to leave Congo for any period. Young party members went to Brussels in their stead, where they were assisted by a few Congolese who had studied in Belgium.