Congo (22 page)

Forminière was set up with American capital. Because the diamond deposits were so widely scattered, the company was originally allotted a prospecting stake of no less than 100 million hectares (about 39,000 square miles), later reduced to 2 million hectares (about 7,700 square miles) with fifty mines in the area around Shikapa and Bakwanga. In 1913 Forminière extracted 15,000 carats in Katanga; by 1922 that had grown to 220,000 carats.
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BCK, finally, the third company set up in 1906, was a private railroad company founded with French-Belgian capital and charged with the construction of a rail connection between Katanga and Bas-Congo. It was along this line that ore was to reach the ocean without leaving the territory of the Belgian
Congo. The only other alternative would have been to cross through Portuguese, German, or British colonies, thereby generating troublesome forms of dependence. The new railroad was finished in 1928. But BCK was involved in more than simply building railroads. The company also owned enormous mining rights, which would later serve it very well indeed. Its concession turned out to contain one of the world’s largest deposits of industrial diamonds. The profits were spectacular and almost half of them flowed into the Congolese treasury.
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And Nkasi went on shoveling. The earliest mining activities, after all, called for manual labor, a great deal of manual labor. And who was going to supply that? The Belgians themselves? That seemed to be out of the question: “South of the Equator, a Belgian can carry out almost no other work than that of supervision. Continuous physical effort, every form of manual labor, which is difficult enough in itself, is more or less off limits to him.”
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For a time, in sparsely populated Katanga, consideration was given to importing Chinese laborers; in view of the god-awful mortality rates experienced during the building of the railroad, however, this idea was soon abandoned. Anyone flying over Katanga today by helicopter, for example from Kalemie to Lubumbashi, as I had the honor of doing in June 2007, can learn a great deal about the region’s social history. The UN aircraft in which I was supposed to travel turned out, due to a shortage of passengers, to have made way for a worn-out chopper with a Russian crew and Russian insignia. Rather than a short, two-hour flight, it became a long and noisy six-hour journey over an empty landscape. We flew at an altitude of no more than three hundred meters (about a thousand feet). One could pick out the individual trees, buffalo, and termite hills, but rarely a village. Wearing my red ear protectors as I peered out the open window, I came to better understand the transformation that had taken place here a century earlier. If today, in an era of explosive population growth, the savanna still remains
so empty, I thought, how much more desolate must it have been a hundred years ago, after a pandemic of sleeping sickness?

Katanga was packed with ore, but there was no one to dig it up. In the isolated villages a fruitless search was carried out for people willing to work. From 1907 on, therefore, the companies began recruiting abroad: each year, six or seven hundred Rhodesians came to work the Katangan copper mines.
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By 1920 their numbers had risen to many thousands; they accounted for one-half of all the African laborers. The workers were employed for stretches of no longer than six months, they lived in compounds, as at the South African mines, and were not allowed to bring their families along.

There are almost no firsthand accounts from those early mineworkers, with a few exceptions. “I came to Katanga on May 4, 1900. I was hired by a Mr. Kantshingo,” an old man recalled. He had to undergo a medical exam and was given a worker’s pass with his thumbprint on it.

There were no houses of stone or brick. The blacks slept in huts, the whites in tents and in termite mounds [
sic
]. Many of the whites were Italians. The crew bosses came from Nyasaland [Malawi]. The language we used was Kikabanga. A pick was called a
mutalimbi
. A shovel was a
chibassu
, a wheelbarrow a
pusi-pusi
, a hammer a
hamalu
. At four in the morning we left for work. We started at six and stopped at five, six, seven o’clock at night. The workers were beaten very often . . . . We used Rhodesian money. The beer we drank was called
kataka
and
kibuku
, it was made from corn or sorghum.
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In 1910 Katanga was linked to the rail network that the British had built in their southern colonies. From then on there was a direct connection between Katanga and Cape Town. Around the little village of Lubumbashi, close to the mine that
the prospectors called Star of the Congo, a city quickly arose: Elisabethville. In 1910 there were three hundred Europeans and a thousand Africans living there: one year later, that were a thousand Europeans and five thousand Africans.
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From the very start, the city was more South African than Congolese. The straight roads lined with trees reminded one of Pretoria; the cozy white house fronts were more like Cape Town. The Rhodesian workers and British industrials saw to it that English became the dominant language and the pound sterling the prevailing currency.

There is an extraordinary document that helps us to understand that earliest phase of the Katangan mining industry from an African perspective. In the 1960s André Yav, an old man who had worked all his life as a boy in Elisabethville, wrote down his recollections:

When bwana Union Minière began, the first people who came to work there were from the nearby villages. Those were Balamba, Baseba, Balemba, Baanga, Bayeke and Bene Mitumba people. There were not very many of them, and they didn’t really want to leave their villages for too long. They would work for two or three months and then go home. After a time, the places where there was work to be had became big. Then they started calling in people from Luapula and Northern Rhodesia [present-day Zimbabwe and Zambia], and others came as well: Balunda, Babemba, Barotse and also boys from Nyasaland. They were strong enough to do the work, but couldn’t leave their villages for a long time either. After six or ten months, they would go home again.
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Things did not stop there, however. Recruiters moved farther and farther into Katanga in search of young, able-bodied men. Some recruiters worked for official organizations, but there were also very many private contractors, white adventurers who
did their best to lure as many young people as possible to the mines. Some of them even went as far as Kasai or Maniema, journeys of eight hundred kilometers (about five hundred miles). Their recruitment methods were often dubious: they would bribe village chieftains with European luxury goods such as blankets and bicycles and a bonus for each worker supplied them. Concerning the working conditions in the mines, they remained prudently silent. They bought up workers in order to sell them on again. Force was often used as well. In fact, their working methods differed little from the recruitment tactics of the Force Publique around 1890, or the Afro-Arab slave traders in 1850. In his memoirs, our retired boy was perfectly clear about that:

In that way,
bwana
Changa-Changa [the African nickname for Union Minière] and the other whites were able to set up their mining companies . . . . The misery we suffered was unimaginable; we slept on the ground, were bitten by snakes, by mosquitoes, by all kinds of insects. That’s the way it was to work for the white people, and all that just to find ore in Katanga, and things were even worse with the whites of the Comité Special [du Katanga, active until 1910]. They made us walk around, go prospecting, look around in the bushes and on the hillsides for all kinds of stones. And what’s more, we, the boys, had to go with the white people along all the rivers of Katanga, of Congo, everywhere.
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The housing provided for the first generation of mineworkers was often abominable. The miners were placed in work camps, far from where the whites lived in the city center. This spatial segregation was established by law from 1913.
⁴⁴
Their neighborhoods looked more like military encampments than urban districts: rectangular and almost without shade. Traditional huts were arranged in serried ranks. Four workers were
assigned to each hut, with four square meters (about forty-two square feet) of living space each. Latrines were provided, at least in theory. In reality, the exhausted miners were forced to live under harsh and unsanitary conditions. At the Kambove mine, the camp inhabitants sometimes literally had to wade through the dreck. Drinking water was scarce. With its steam engines and drilling installations, the mine itself used up most of the water. During the dry season, workers drank from stagnant ponds or muddy streams.
⁴⁵
And the diseases arrived. Dysentery, enteritis, and typhoid fever took their toll, and local influenza epidemics broke out at Elisabethville, at the Star, and in Kambove. At those three places in 1916, 322 workers out of a total of 5,000 died. Hard labor in the dusty mines also caused many workers to contract pneumonia and tuberculosis. One quarter to one third of them fell ill, but health care remained minimal.
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In 1920 there were some seventy physicians and one dentist for all of Congo: they were there largely to serve the white population.
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The miners worked long hours and were paid a pittance. Many of them became apathetic and depressed and longed for home. They organized themselves only in ad hoc fashion and often along ethnic lines, to care for their sick, bury their dead, to drink, and to sing. Some of them deserted, others did not dare. Until 1922 corporal punishment was allowed.

It was, all things considered, a grim situation. Southern Katanga had never been bothered much by the Free State’s rubber policies, but now the region was dragged along by a relentless wave of industrial capitalism. This caused André Yav, the retired boy, to draw an extremely remarkable but also very telling conclusion: he decided that King Albert I was far worse than Leopold II, who had at least “honored the laws of Africa and Congo”! That called for a bit of explanation: “In the days of King Leopold II, the ‘boys’ ate with the white people at the same table. The white people saw them as employees. They were not like the whites who came after Leo
pold II. When he died, he was succeeded by King Albert I. Those whites made hard decisions, and those decisions were really very bad. They were the ones who brought a bad kind of slavery for us, the Congolese.”
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No less trying were the conditions at the Kilo-Moto gold mines in Orientale province. Only one out of every eight workers was there voluntarily, the rest had been press-ganged in local villages: human trafficking, in other words, and forced labor. Recruiters would pay a local chieftain ten francs for each laborer and take the young men away in chains. They were bound together at the neck by a wooden yoke or a noosed rope. In 1908 there were eight hundred workers, by 1920 more than nine thousand.
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In 1923, in diamond-rich Kasai, some twenty thousand Africans were working in the service of two hundred whites.
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Between 1908 and 1921, in other words, Congo experienced its first wave of industrialization, thereby prompting the proletarianization of its inhabitants. Men who had once been fishermen, blacksmiths, or hunters became wage laborers for a company. Even in this earliest phase, their numbers were large. In Katanga, where 60 percent of the laborers worked for Union Minière, the body of mineworkers grew from 8,000 in 1914 to 42,000 by 1921, and the number of railroad workers from 10,000 to 40,700. Together, Kasai and Orientale province were good for 30,000 workers, while another 30,000 migrant workers lived in Kinshasa and Léopoldville. The reason for this massive recruitment of African workers was simple enough: sweat costs less than gasoline.
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This proletarianization was not limited to industry alone. Agriculture too had need of manual laborers, especially now that white farmers had started coffee, cacao, and tobacco plantations. The most extensive agrarian employment of all, however, was in the palm oil sector. In Liverpool in 1884, a man named William Lever had started making soap on an industrial scale. The bars rolled from the production line, and he
christened his product Sunlight. This company’s rise to become the Unilever multinational was due in part to the contribution of Congo. At first, the soap was made from palm oil that Lever purchased in West Africa. But when the British colonial administration there stopped providing favorable conditions, the Belgian state granted Lever an extremely sizeable concession in Congo in 1911. At his own discretion, he was allowed to stake out five circles with a sixty-kilometer (about a thirty-five-mile) radius in those areas where wild palms flourished, for a total holding of some 7.5 million hectares (about 29,000 square miles), two and a half times the size of Belgium. This was the start of the Huileries du Congo Belge (HCB), an enterprise that was particularly active in the south of Bandundu and grew to become a massive concern. Close to Kikwit, the town of Leverville arose. For the harvesting of palm nuts the company made use of thousands of Congolese, who climbed the trees in the traditional manner to cut down the clusters. Lever had a reputation as a great philanthropist, but very little that his company did bore witness to that in Congo. His employees earned a miserable twenty-five centimes a day and lived under primitive conditions. Press-ganging and the bribing of village chieftains took place. Dozens of villages had to pack up and move for the industry’s purposes. People today in Kikwit think back on that period with bitterness: this was worse than what the region had experienced under the rubber regime.
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It was something King Albert could hardly have suspected in 1912, when William Lever presented him with an ivory box containing the first bar of Sunlight soap manufactured with Congolese palm oil.