Congo (50 page)

Radical military reforms were needed to counter so much frustration, but General Janssens had no intention of countenancing them during the tumultuous months before and after independence. The first batch of Congolese officers was in training at the Royal Military School in Brussels, and a school for noncoms had been set up at Luluabourg. Within a few years those men would be on active duty, but until then everything would remain the same. On Tuesday morning, July 5, Janssens went to the Leopold II barracks and gave his troops an unambiguous lesson in military discipline: the Force Publique was there to serve the country, that’s how it had been in the days of the Belgian Congo and that’s how it would be now. To underscore his message, he wrote in big letters on the chalkboard: “
Avant l’indépendance = après l’indépendance
” (before independence is the same as after independence). That was not a good idea. The slogan stuck in the soldiers’ craws. They had watched as Congolese civil servants, from one day to the next, were assigned top administrative positions, they had seen how well the politicians did by themselves during the big turnover. One of the new parliament’s first acts, after all, had been to decide that they had a right to a 500,000 franc honorarium, almost twice the amount earned by their Belgian colleagues.
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The soldiers awoke with a start to the fact that independence was doing them very little good.

The mutiny within the army is often explained by referring to Lumumba’s inflammatory speech. But that remains questionable: the soldiers were as angry with their own fresh-faced politicians as they were with their white superiors. They wanted to vent their rage not only on General Janssens, but also on Lumumba himself! To them he was not so much a hero as a defense minister who had never served, an intellectual in a dress suit and bowtie who was out to cut a dashing figure while their fate remained unchanged, despite all his glorious promises.
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That very same day, July 5, the mutiny jumped the gap to the garrison town of Thysville, barely a two-hour drive from the capital. Things there took a much more violent turn. Hundreds of soldiers rose in revolt. They beat up their officers and forced them, with their wives and children, to take refuge in the mess hall. Meanwhile, the soldiers occupied the munitions dump. Outside the barracks, along the road to the capital, heavy rioting was seen in the Madimba-Inkisi district. This time the soldiers did not turn on their white officers, but on white civilians. A number of European women were subjected to sexual violence. One of them was raped sixteen times within a five-hour period, in the presence of her husband, mother, and children.
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The rumors reached the capital only a few days later.

Meanwhile, Lumumba did all he could to stop the mutiny in his army. He took three successive measures, each with the best of intentions, but also with consequences far beyond what he could oversee. On July 6, in the company of General Janssens, he inspected the troops at the Leopold II barracks. On that occasion he promised to promote each soldier in rank. “The private second class will become a private first class, the private first class will become a corporal, the corporal will be a sergeant, the sergeant will become a sergeant first class, the sergeant first class will be sergeant-major, and the first sergeant-major will become adjutant.”
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It did not have the desired effect. “Lokuta!” the soldiers shouted, “lies!”
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They weren’t about to be appeased that easily. For them, it was all about the officers’ corps.

Two days later, Lumumba took things a step further. He dismissed General Janssens and appointed Victor Lundula to replace him as chief commander of the armed forces, with Mobutu as his chief of staff. The Africanization of the army top brass, that should boost the troop’s morale, shouldn’t it? Then he moved on without hesitation to his third measure: the accelerated and drastic Africanization of the officers’ corps. The soldiers were allowed to nominate their own candidates. In this way, at one fell swoop, sergeants and adjutants became majors or colonels. And to emphasize this break with the past, the Force Publique was now given a new name: the Armée Nationale Congolaise (ANC).

These decisions did help to calm things down a bit, but the final result was disastrous: after only one week, the newborn Republic of Congo no longer had a functional army. The new state’s most solid pillar had toppled. In today’s demilitarized Europe, where the NATO invisibly safeguards its members, it is hard to imagine the importance of a standing army for a nascent state. The state can only become a state when it assumes the monopoly on violence (be that social, tribal, or territorial). In the turbulent Congo of the 1960s, the army was vitally important. But the Force Publique, the colonial army that could look back on crucial victories in the first and second world wars, was reduced in the space of one week to an unruly mob. The supreme command was now in the hands of two reservists: Lundula, the mayor of Jadotville, who had served as a sergeant-medic fifteen years earlier, and Mobutu, a journalist who had worked for a spell as a sergeant-bookkeeper and had recently become Lumumba’s confidant. Once the two men had driven together through the streets of Léopoldville on a scooter, now they were the prime minister and chief of staff of a vast country with a ragtag army. That Mobutu might also be the confidant of the Belgian and American intelligence services was a suspicion Lumumba refused to entertain. It was a refusal that would soon cost him his life.

Lumumba’s attempts to mollify the mutineers remind one of Belgium’s attempts to pacify social unrest in the 1950s: confronted with a rebellious element in society, he also made too-hasty decisions that consisted of important concessions meant to buy social stability. But once again, the result was the exact opposite of what was intended. The resentment was not dammed, but actually continued to spread.

“O
UR WOMEN ARE BEING RAPED
!” The rumor spread like wildfire through Congo’s European community. On July 7 a train full of Belgians who had escaped Thysville arrived in the capital. For many, their stories went beyond even the worst nightmare scenarios. Some of them had been spit upon, humiliated, and jeered at; many of them felt threatened. But it was the rumor of sexual violence that caused the most panic. In colonial society there was no greater gap than that between the African man and the European woman (the reverse, contact between a European man and an African woman, was a matter of course). Jamais Kolonga had become a national celebrity by dancing with a white woman. Longin Ngwadi had told King Baudouin that he wanted to marry a European. Before
30 juin
, naive souls had believed that they could buy a Belgian home
and
a Belgian wife. The white woman was inaccessible, and it was for that very reason that she generated such intense curiosity. In the late 1950s a Belgian colonial was privy to a humorous, yet telling, incident:

The post office at Katana had a native postmaster. One day the postmaster came to me and said: “Sir, they have cheated me.” And I replied: “Tell me what you mean.” “Well, sir (all this was said in Swahili), look here, I have a catalogue from the Au Bon Marché in Brussels and look at this picture here. (The picture showed a lovely girl with a beautiful bra.) I ordered it, and do you know what they sent me? An empty bra.” Our postmaster told me later that he had thought he would get the girl along with it; the price was much more reasonable than that for the dowry of a native woman.
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White females in colonial Congo were almost always married women or nuns. Their sexual availability was negligible. Sexual violence after independence was a brutal way to nevertheless claim the most unattainable element in colonial society and to deeply humiliate the former rulers. Clichés abounded on both sides: if the white woman was a semimythical being for many Congolese men, then many Europeans still had semimythical conceptions of African sexuality. The clichés influenced the events. The rapes were hideous, but their frequency stood in no proportion to the panic they caused among the Europeans. Everyone was goading everyone else with horror stories.

Not a single European had been killed, but the result was a large-scale exodus. An estimated thirty thousand Belgians left the country within a few weeks.
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Between Léopoldville and the Beach, cars were backed up for kilometers to catch the ferry to Brazzaville. Lots of Volkswagen beetles, lots of pickups, lots of Mercedes with with the CB sticker (for
Congo belge)
still on their bumpers . . . Elsewhere the cars were simply left behind. Before independence, Brussels had asked as many Belgians as possible to remain at their posts in the colony—young Congo would be badly in need of their expertise—but two weeks later Belgium was advising its citizens to return home, or at least to bring their wives and children to safety. Sabena organized an airlift that within three weeks took tens of thousands of Europeans out of Congo. It was a hallucinatory withdrawal. Some ten thousand civil servants, thirteen thousand private-sector workers, and eight thousand colonists (plantation owners) left the country.

We know today that this mass psychosis bore no relation to the actual danger. It was like a movie theater emptying out after someone has shouted “Fire! Fire!,” while in reality the flames are limited to an overfull ashtray. “See what I mean, look at that fire!” the moviegoers shout on their way to the exit, apparently not realizing that the fire is being fed precisely by the draft they are creating themselves. The situation was serious, without a doubt, but there was no reason for a general evacuation. But reason had gone out the window. At a certain point, every wave of panic achieves an energy that can no longer be tempered. Just as the barracks at Luluabourg had been vacated in 1944 due to irrational fear of a vaccination campaign, so too did the European inhabitants of Congo leave the country due to a misjudged security risk.

But there were also those who kept a cool head. In the village of Nsioni in Bas-Congo, I spent a few days in 2008 with the old physician Jacques Courtejoie. As a child in Stavelot (in the Belgian province of Liège), he had witnessed the Ardennes Offensive (the Battle of the Bulge) in 1944 as it passed within three hundred meters (about four hundred yards) of his parents’ home. A lesson in level-headedness. He had lived in Congo since 1958, always on his own, always unmarried, as a missionary of science, a one-man repository of humanism, dedication, and optimism. He had educated and trained half a dozen people from that same area; he gave them responsibility and self-assurance. The booklets and posters with medical information they made together were distributed all over Congo: books about tapeworms, eye disease, and domestic rabbit breeding; posters with information about washing one’s hands, tuberculosis, and breastfeeding. Rarely had I seen a man serve the cause of human dignity so straightforwardly and under such difficult circumstances. An unsung Dr. Albert Schweitzer. From the very first day of his stay in Congo, Courtejoie had been averse to colonialism. “In July 1960 I heard the reports on the radio. Panic was breaking out everywhere, everyone was running away. I tried to stay calm and rational. I really saw no reason why I should leave.” He was one of the few who stayed. After three months of independence, Congo had only 120 physicians.
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There was so much irrational fear at the time. For example: two months after independence, I went to dinner at the home of a white regional administrator. He came home late, because he’d been to a political meeting of the Abako. When he got home, his wife said: “I certainly hope you didn’t shake Kasavubu’s hand!” I can still hear the way she said that. Even by that time, people still thought Africans were dirty! And two months later that man became the president of Congo! That’s what the mood was like back then. A black person was never allowed to go along in the car, at most in the back of a pickup, even when the person in question was sick or pregnant. One time I even saw them make the elderly mother of a black priest travel in the back of the truck, even though she was seriously ill. Here in this area, the whites never sat down at the table with black people.”
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Courtejoie still combats prejudice every day. Whenever he goes out with his staff members, everyone piles into the jeep until there’s no more room. During lunch breaks he shares their manioc loaf and eats with them from the same can of sardines.

Many Europeans ran away with the idea that they would come back a few months later, when everything had calmed down. But they did not. Among Belgian ex-colonials, proud as they were of their own achievements, this caused a great deal of bitterness. Many of them sincerely felt that they, as subjects of a little country, had outdone themselves and displayed great dedication and boundless drive. In the 1980s Vladimir Drachoussoff, the agronomist who kept such a fascinating diary during World War II, remembered “the joy of helping to develop a huge country that is today foreign but which we experienced intensely as our own.”
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The colony had offered many opportunities that would have been beyond their reach in Europe, it was their most cherished homeland. Now it had become a foreign country. Thomas Kanza, the first man with a university diploma in Congo and a very young cabinet minister under Lumumba, displayed amazing insight into their state of mind when he wrote: “Almost all of them had achieved more in Africa than they would have in Europe, because the opportunities to take initiatives, to display their skills, their energy, in short to confirm their personality, were greater abroad than they were there.”
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Leaving Congo therefore also meant giving up a dream, a dream of self-fulfillment that, for many of them, went hand in hand with a paternalistic ideology. Drachoussoff, once again, was completely frank about that: “Our paternalism was solid and serene: we were deeply and sincerely convinced that we were not only the bearers of a more modern civilization, but of civilization as such, of the rule and standard for all of the peoples on the earth . . . . Almost all of us were proud of being European and we approached the world around us as builders and designers, with the will to mold and to transform, and the conviction that we had the right to do so.” Of course that calm self-confidence also had a dark side, he realized. The sudden hostility between white and black had not appeared out of thin air: “An understandable but dangerous sense of superiority had influenced the daily practice of colonization . . . . The ‘civilizers’ dearly wanted to protect and to educate, as long as it went from top to bottom and the pupils remained respectful and obedient. None of us escaped completely from that God-given hierarchy that expressed itself among the mediocre in the form of straightforward racism and provided the more magnanimous with a good conscience.”
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