Congo (53 page)

Lumumba appealed to Article 51 of the provisional constitution, which stated that “only the Parliament and the Senate can provide authentic clarification of these laws.”
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It was a wise gamble, for on September 13 the parliament confirmed its faith in Lumumba and refused to recognize Ileo as the new prime minister. President Kasavubu was put to shame so badly that the next day he sent the parliament into recess for a month.

The imbroglio was now complete. Congo was being ruled not by government, but by arguments. National interest was made subordinate to power struggles. And in the midst of this chaos, Colonel Mobutu, the army’s chief of staff, stepped forward to put an end to the squabbling. That very same day, September 14, 1960, he carried out his first coup d’état, with the approval and support of the CIA. He told the press that the army would be taking over the reins until the end of the year. Lumumba and Kasavubu were “neutralized.” But whereas Kasavubu was ultimately allowed to stay on as a sort of figurehead president, Lumumba was placed under house arrest in his capital city residence. The friendship between Mobutu and Lumumba was over for good.

Mobutu placed national policy making in the hands of a team of young university students and graduates, a move intended to counter the lack of expertise in Lumumba’s government team. Mario Cardoso, who had attended the economic round-table meeting and was popular among the Congolese students in Belgium, told me the following: “Colonel Mobutu asked the students and academics to come back from abroad and apply their knowledge in the service of the country. We would not be given the title of minister, but of commissioner general. We were to become apolitical administrators, we would not represent any party, tribe, region, or village. We had a diploma, and that was enough.” Within that council of commissioners general, Cardoso was charged with education. Justin Bomboko, charged with foreign affairs, was the chairman and served as de facto prime minister. This situation was to last only a few months. “We were a transitional government. Mobutu only wanted to restore order, because the fighting between Kasavubu and Lumumba just wouldn’t stop.”
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This government of academics did not please everyone, not by a long shot. Lumumba repeated his claim to be the only democratically elected prime minister of Congo. The Belgian government, on the other hand, was only too glad to see him removed and maintained warm relations with the young commissioners. Many of them had studied in Brussels or Liège. Any return to the political arena by Lumumba was to be blocked at all costs, even physically if need be. Two Belgian military men, operating under the protection of Minister of African Affairs Harold d’Aspremont Lynden, made preparations to kidnap or murder Lumumba.
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In addition, U.S. president Eisenhower personally ordered the CIA to liquidate Lumumba. In true James Bond style, the Congolese prime minister was to be poisoned with a tube of hypertoxic toothpaste.
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There were also many people in Congo who would have been pleased to see him go.

Aware that attempts might be made on his life, Lumumba asked the UN for protection. He received a contingent of Ghanian blue helmets, who camped in his garden to keep any attackers at bay. That proved necessary; on October 10, Mobutu sent two hundred soldiers to Lumumba’s residence to take him into custody. The United Nations stopped them. The resulting standoff lasted for weeks. Lumumba’s house was under a twofold siege: by a ring of blue helmets, to protect him as long as he stayed inside, and by Congolese ready to arrest him as soon as he came out. His telephone was cut as well. Lumumba was silenced. Deputy prime minister Antoine Gizenga therefore took on the role of representative of the Lumumba government. Gizenga came from Kwilu, and even today he is adored by older people, including Longin Ngwadi, the swordsman from Kikwit. As Mobutu’s coup gathered momentum, however, Gizenga realized that there was no place in Léopoldville for him and other Lumumba supporters. In early November, therefore, he left with the remnants of the first government for Stanleyville, the cradle of Lumumba’s movement, to govern and retake the country from there.

T
HE SITUATION WAS GROWING MORE COMPLICATED
all the time. Congo was now four months old and already had four contiguous governments, each with its own army and foreign allies. In Léopoldville Kasavubu and above all Mobutu enjoyed unconditional American support. Thanks to the massive funding supplied by the United States, Mobutu was able to reorganize the national army. Around him there rose up the “Binza group,” named after the residential neighborhood in the capital where they met. It was an informal group with a great deal of power, generously supported by the CIA. In Stanleyville Gizenga was keeping alive the Lumumbist body of ideals. He was backed by a portion of the armed forces and his government received support from the Soviet Union, although that was never as systematic and substantial as the American support for the capital.
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In Elisabethville Tshombe stood at the helm of a self-proclaimed, independent country. Belgium was very generous with its logistical and military support. The Katangan military police included a great many Belgian officers. Union Minière financed the secession on a large scale. In Bakwanga, Kalonji led Kasai, an independent Baluba state where Belgian diamond delvers were active. The necessary means were provided by Forminière.

Tshombe and Kalonji were only regional leaders, but Kasavubu and Gizenga both claimed the legitimacy of a national government. Who would be proved right? Both went in search of international recognition, and their battle was fought out before the UN General Assembly in New York. Congo showed up there, divided into two camps: Kasavubu/Mobutu versus Lumumba/Gizenga. Thomas Kanza, the twenty-six-year-old psychologist, represented the Lumumba government at the United Nations, but President Kasavubu traveled to New York himself to convince the world that he, and only he, embodied the legal authority of the republic. He argued that his dismissal of Lumumba was allowed under the constitution, a claim with which the Americans, Belgians, and many UN officials had little problem. On November 22 the verdict came in: fifty-three countries recognized Kasavubu, twenty-four voted against him, nineteen abstained.
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Cardoso, who worked for Mobutu at the time, remembers it as a triumph: “That’s when we won the seat in the U.N. Kasavubu was the head of our delegation, and Lumumba lost internationally.”
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With that international marginalization, Lumumba’s swansong began.

He was still locked up in his home in the capital. When news of the vote in New York reached him, he realized that his days in Léopoldville were numbered. Would the blue helmets in his garden still protect him, now that the United Nations had voted against him? He was bound and determined to join up with his political friends in Stanleyville. It was nighttime, it was November, the rainy season was in full swing. On November 27 an unusually heavy tropical storm forced his Congolese besiegers to seek shelter. Their attention lagged. Lumumba crawled into the back of a Chevrolet and was driven out of the house in the pelting rain.

The Congolese roads at that point were still in excellent condition. Had his chauffeur driven on steadily for two days, they could have reached Stanleyville. But on the night of his escape, Lumumba hung back in the capital to speak to the people. Along the way as well he stopped in the villages and enjoyed the locals’ warm welcome.
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But it was the rainy season. In the capital, Mobutu found out about Lumumba’s escape and vowed to keep him, at any price, from reaching Gizenga. A successful reunion there could only mean a political rebound, and Mobutu’s Belgian advisers and the CIA wouldn’t like that. The United Nations refused to help search for the fugitive, but a European airline supplied Mobutu with a plane and a pilot accustomed to carrying out low-altitude reconnaissance. It did not take them long to find the convoy, which now consisted of three cars and a truck. On December 1 Mobutu’s troops arrested Lumumba and his retinue as they tried to cross the Sankuru River close to Mweka. Lumumba was flown to Camp Hardy at Thysville, the base where the army mutiny had begun a few months before. From that moment on Lumumba could no longer count on UN protection, but was a prisoner of the Léopoldville regime. When he arrived, without glasses and his hands tied, someone stuffed a piece of paper in his mouth: the text of his famous speech.

What were Kasavubu and Mobutu going to do with him? Hold him in custody forever, like a sort of Simon Kimbangu of the First Republic? Wouldn’t it be better then to have him taken to Katanga. Or Kasai? Hostile provinces, to be sure, but that was exactly why it might be a good idea. He would have no supporters there. Where he was now, the trouble was starting all over again. On January 12 the soldiers at Thysville started another mutiny. The situation grew restless. The Belgian government, in the person of Minister of African Affairs d’Aspremont, endorsed the plan to take Lumumba to Katanga, come what may, as long as it was far from the capital and somewhere no mutineers could come to his rescue. D’Aspremont’s support for the plan also meant a strengthening of the ties with Kasavubu, and Belgium was interested in reestablishing diplomatic relations with Léopoldville. The former colonizer wished to avoid the impression that it sympathized only with Katanga. Reluctantly, Tshombe accepted the arrival of Lumumba and two other political prisoners. At the last minute, d’Aspremont had applied his influence to that end.

At 4:50
P.M
. on January 17, 1962, the DC-4 carrying Lumumba and his two confidants, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito, landed at Elisabethville. During the flight the men were beaten. A force of about one hundred armed troops was waiting for them; the soldiers were led by the Belgian captain Gat. A convoy took them immediately to Villa Brouwez, an isolated, vacant mansion belonging to a Belgian, close to the airport. The security inside and outside the villa was in the hands of the military police, led by two Belgian officers. There they received a visit from at least three Katangan cabinet ministers—Godefroid Munongo, Jean-Baptiste Kibwe, and Gabriel Kitenge, charged with internal affairs, finance, and public works respectively—who beat them as well. Tshombe was not with them. At that moment he was sitting in a movie theater, watching a film with the, in this context, preposterously cynical title
Liberté
(Freedom), from the Moral Re-Armament movement. When the movie was finished, he met with his ministers. There were no Europeans present. The meeting lasted from 6:30 to 8:00
P.M
., but all practical measures for the rest of the evening seem to have been taken beforehand. The decision to send Lumumba to Katanga was taken jointly by the authorities in Léopoldville, their Belgian advisers, and the authorities in Brussels; the decision to murder Lumumba, however, was made by the Katangan authorities themselves. Munongo, the grandson of Msiri, the nineteenth-cenutry Afro-Arab slave trader who had taken the Lunda empire by force, played a particularly decisive role.

After the meeting, a ministerial delegation once again left for Villa Brouwez. There the prisoners were loaded into the back of a car. Along with a few other vehicles and two military jeeps, they drove off. Darkness had fallen by then. The convoy drove to the northwest, over the level road through the savanna toward Jadotville. In the glow of the headlights, to the left and right: bushes, the silhouette of a termite mound. After about forty-five minutes the vehicles left the main road. A few moments later they stopped at a secluded spot. The prisoners had to get out. In the wooded savanna beside the dirt road they saw a shallow well that had been dug only hours before. There were a few uniformed black policemen and guardsmen, but also a few men in suits: President Tshombe, the ministers Munongo and Kibwe, and a few of their colleagues. Four Belgians also took part in the execution: Frans Verscheure, police commissioner and adviser to the Katangan police force; Julien Gat, captain in the Katangan national guard; François Son, his subordinate police sergeant; and Lieutenant Gabriël Michels. One by one, the prisoners were led to the edge of the hole. They had been in Katanga for no more than five hours. They were beaten and mishandled. Only four meters away from them stood the firing squad: four Katangan volunteers with machine guns. Three times, a deafening salvo sounded through the night. Lumumba was the last to be dealt with. At 9:43
P.M.
, the body of Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister tumbled back into the well.
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L
UMUMBA
’
S MURDER WAS KEPT QUIET
for a time. Shortly afterward, to wipe out all traces, Gerard Soete, the Belgian deputy inspector general of the Katangan police, dug up the three bodies. Rumor has it that a hand, possibly Lumumba’s, was still sticking out of the ground.
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Soete sawed the bodies into pieces and dissolved them in a tub of sulfuric acid. He pulled two gold-lined teeth from Lumumba’s upper jaw. He cut three fingers off his hand.
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For years, at his house in Brugge, he kept a little box that he sometimes showed to visitors. It contained the teeth and a bullet.
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Many years later, he threw them into the North Sea.

The world received the news of Lumumba’s murder with total dismay. From Oslo to Tel Aviv, from Vienna to New Delhi, people marched in the streets. Belgian embassies in Belgrade, Warsaw, and Cairo were attacked. While a university in Moscow was named after him, in the West the “Lumumba”—a popular cocktail made with brandy and chocolate milk—became popular. Gizenga’s Lumumbist government was promptly recognized by the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, Yugoslavia, China, Ghana, and Guinea-Conakry. In no time, the murdered prime minister was elevated to a martyr of decolonization, a hero to all the earth’s repressed, a saint of godless communism. He owed that status more to the grisly circumstances of his death than to any political successes. He had been in power for less than two and half months, from June 30 to September 14, 1960. His track record read like a pile-up of blunders and misjudgments. His abrupt Africanization of the armed forces was sympathetic but disastrous; his appeals for military assistance to the United States and the Soviet Union were understandable but frighteningly frivolous, his military offensive in Kasai took the lives of thousands of his countrymen. During his lifetime, Fulbert Youlou and Léopold Sédar Senghor, the first presidents of Congo-Brazzaville and Senegal respectively, already considered his actions quite doubtful.
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On the other hand, here was a man who was barely prepared for his task, who was forced to deal with a rash domestic exodus and a Belgian military invasion, and who watched as the United Nations hesitated about forcefully condemning the Belgian aggression. But with his unfortunate way of responding to true injustices, Lumumba systematically cultivated more enemies than friends. The tragedy of his short-lived political career was that his greatest trump card from before independence—his incredible talent for rousing the masses—became his greatest disadvantage when, once in power, more cool-headed behavior was expected from him. The magnet that had first attracted now repelled.