Congo (29 page)

Never before had an official of the Belgian Congo been slaughtered so brutally in the execution of his duties. The colonial administration’s reaction was grim. It set out to grind the uprising beneath its heel. A punitive expedition, unlike anything seen since the worst years of the Free State, headed for the Kwango. Three officers, five noncoms, 260 soldiers, and seven hundred bearers occupied the region for months. Heavy fighting ensued. Rebels were captured and brutally tortured; even women were taken prisoner and raped. An investigative committee of the Belgian government later confirmed the gruesome tally. At least four hundred Pende had been murdered, perhaps many times that number. The Pende uprising had been broken, but the people’s frustration was none the less for it.

When she arrived back in Brussels, Balot’s widow, with an almost preternatural mildness and grandiosity, said: “The agents of the private companies treat the blacks badly and exploit them. People need to know that. What happens there must stop, otherwise there will be uprisings everywhere. Private companies have granted themselves rights that should be reserved only for the government. What’s more, many district offi
cials have not behaved as they should. My husband has paid for those others.”
²⁸

I
T MAY COME AS SOMETHING OF A SURPRISE
that the first forms of popular protest took place in the countryside, among the farmers of Bas-Congo and the palm-nut harvesters of the Kwango. A thoughtful observer traveling around the country in 1920 would probably have predicted that the fires of unrest would first ignite in the cities, with their rudimentary workers’ camps and their hard and unhealthy labor. But that was not the case. Why not?

There are, roughly speaking, two answers to that: the quality of life in the cities was improving, so that many Africans had begun feeling at home there,
and
the European population did everything to keep the masses calm. For as long as it lasted . . .

During the interwar period, the proto-urban agglomerations grew into real cities. Their populations showed a spectacular increase. Between 1920 and 1940, the population of Kinshasa doubled to fifty thousand inhabitants.
²⁹
The population of Elisabethville grew from sixteen thousand in 1923 to thirty-three thousand by 1929, a doubling in the space of only six years.
³⁰
More and more Congolese were moving to the cities. The forced recruitment of laborers was coming to an end, but many migrated of their own free will. In Kasai, Maniema, the Kivu, and, yes, even in Rwanda and Burundi, thousands of villagers let themselves be talked into going to the Union Minière mines in Katanga. In 1919 that company employed some eighty-five hundred local workers; by 1928 their numbers had grown to seventeen thousand.
³¹
From Bas-Congo and Équateur, people went to Léopoldville; Stanleyville owed its growth largely to the arrival of workers from Orientale province.

Most of those who packed their bags and went to work for a boss were young people. What made working in a mine, on a plantation, or in a factory so attractive to them? Often they were anxious to get out of the village with its poverty, its corrupt
chieftain and powerful elders who married all the young women. Away from a miserable farming existence and the raising of state-ordained crops. Away from mandatory road building and primitive village life. Away from that world of deprivation, with no future in store for them.
³²

What’s more, the cities and mines were no longer the horrors they had been until recently. The mortality rate at Union Minière in Katanga fell dramatically. In 1918 20.2 percent of the workers had died of the Spanish flu; one year later the mortality rate had fallen to 5.1 percent and by 1930 to only 1.6 percent.
³³
Mineworkers also contracted fewer illnesses.
³⁴
They were inoculated against smallpox, typhoid fever, and meningitis. Hospitals and medical centers were built. Housing, clothing, and nutrition improved considerably. The same went for the diamond pits in Kasai. A worker in the gold mines of Kilo-Moto in those days received a daily ration of 179 grams (about 6.25 ounces) of fresh meat or fresh fish, 357 grams (about 12.5 ounces) of rice, 286 grams (about 10 ounces) of beans, and one and a half kilo 3.3 pounds) of bananas, in addition to salt and palm oil.
³⁵
In his village, he could only dream of such a rich and varied diet.

In addition to health standards, the pleasure quotient also improved. Life in the workers’ camps of Katanga took a major turn for the better from 1923, when Union Minière began allowing workers to bring along their wives and children. In 1925 18 percent of the mineworkers were married; by 1932 that proportion was 60 percent.
³⁶
The feeling of being uprooted, which had characterized an earlier generation, was dwindling rapidly. Many chose to prolong their contracts voluntarily. Beginning in 1927, mineworkers were allowed to sign three-year contracts, as opposed to the six-month maximum only a few years before. Many workers took advantage of that: by 1928, 45 percent already had a longer-term contract; in 1931 it was 98 percent.
³⁷
Working in the mines was no longer an ordeal. When the economic malaise of 1929–33 forced the company to lay off three-quarters of its personnel, the protests were aimed not so
much against the sudden unemployment, but against the prospect of having to return to the villages. The laid-off workers had to leave their company houses, but rather than return home they chose to settle in the immediate vicinity of Elisabethville, where they cleared fields and turned to farming until the economy recovered.
³⁸

The Katangan mining industry was no longer peopled by overworked young men who lodged for a few months in gruesome workers’ camps, but by young families who felt quite happy in their new surroundings. Wages rose; in the camps children were born who knew the village of their parents and ancestors only by word of mouth. Elsewhere in Elisabethville, the
cité indigène
swelled to become a lively, multiethnic universe with a dynamism and atmosphere all its own. Unlike the neat, increasingly comfortable workers’ camps housing the employees of the big mining companies, the
cité
was inhabited by a ragtag population: carpenters, masons, woodworkers, smiths, and craftsmen, as well as nurses, clerks, and warehouse foremen. The operators of small- to-medium-sized businesses lived next door to government personnel.
³⁹
The population density there was five times that in the white city center.
⁴⁰
There arose, in other words, an extensive and permanent urban population of African origin. The colonial administration, at first, was less than enthusiastic. Wouldn’t such a protracted gathering of proletarians lead to a subversive or, even worse, Bolshevist climate? Fear of the red menace was deeply rooted within the colonial government. Or, to put it more succinctly: “The fear of the black went in the guise of fear of the red.”
⁴¹

In 1931, however, the colonizer realized that communities had now been formed that were no longer traditional villages and would not become such. Their existence was recognized with a monstrous bit of officialese, a fit of jargon at which the colonial administration was, in fact, quite expert: the
centre extra-coutumier
, the extra-legal center, as it were. Those centers were given a structure similar to that of the classic
chefferie
, and
a chief was appointed to act as intermediary between the masses and the powers that be.

The new lifestyle that arose in the cities was different from village culture, but it was also more than simply a copy of European urban culture, if only because the new African agglomerations in no way resembled their European counterparts. The colonial city was an entirely new experience, even for Belgians! There was more space and freedom, the distances were greater, the lanes broader, the lots roomier. From the very start, these cities were planned with the automobile in mind. It had something American about it, many whites felt. Léopoldville with its various urban nuclei but no clear city center looked more like Los Angeles than like the medieval towns of Belgium or the nineteenth-century middle-class neighborhoods of Brussels or Antwerp. The colonial city did not trot along in pursuit of the European model, but took the lead over it. When a Belgian journalist saw white women in Congo taking a plane to Léopoldville to have their babies, he crowed that in the colony “a new society, a new Belgium with new ideas is being born.”
⁴²
In the Congo of the 1920s, it seemed as though the 1950s had already begun.

For the Congolese as well, the colonial city constituted a new universe with a material culture of its own. An imaginary young family from Kasai who moved to Elisabethville, where the father went to work in the mines, moved into a brick house. The wife began preparing meals in enameled pots and pans rather than in terra-cotta, even though she retained her preference for cooking out of doors rather than in the dark kitchen at the back of the house. The family began using tables, chairs, and cutlery. New ideas arose concerning care of the body and personal hygiene: people wore European clothes, sometimes even shoes; they washed themselves with soap and used latrines. The parents slept beneath blankets that came from England; if their children fell ill they were given medicines from Belgium. If the woman became pregnant, she went to have the child in a maternity ward run by black nurses or white nuns. When the family on rare oc
casions visited their former village, they took their relatives such novelties as needles, thread, scissors, safety pins, matches, mirrors, and money. But during those visits it also became clear how much distance had grown up between them. As a salaried employee, the young father had acquired a new sense of autonomy. He was less impressed by what the village chieftain and elders told him. They listened to him now! He told them about the iron discipline in the mine, about the siren that called the workers in each morning, about working six days a week. His audience laughed at that, of course. Six days a week? He would have been better off staying in the village, then his wife would have worked the fields! They were only envious, he knew. Everyone viewed his clothes admiringly; he had noticed that already. On the way back to town he felt more energetic and motivated than ever. If he could only make his way up in the hierarchy of Union Minière, he may have thought, as a mechanic or machine operator for example, then after saving for a long time he could buy his family a bicycle, a sewing machine, or even, imagine that, a gramophone! On Sunday morning they could ride to church together, on the bicycle. He would sit on the saddle, his wife on the baggage carrier, the children on the crossbar and the handlebars. That was what was called prosperity, and it felt good.
⁴³

The moment in the week when the new lifestyle was truly celebrated was on Sunday afternoon. In Elisabethville, the miners went to watch the white man’s teams play soccer.
⁴⁴
In Boma, the dockworkers went out strolling, wearing starched collars and straw hats and carrying canes. Their wives wore flowery cotton textiles and hats that had long been out of fashion in Europe.
⁴⁵
In peaceful Tshikapa, close to the diamond mines of Kasai, the tenor voice of Enrico Caruso could be heard coming from some of the huts.
⁴⁶
Someone else played jazz records and Cuban tunes on his gramophone. At four o’clock in Léopoldville, the Apollo Palace quickly filled with dancers.
⁴⁷
Western trousers were all the thing: the men gathered there in long trousers,
short trousers, cycling shorts, jodhpurs, or soccer shorts, as long as they wore trousers. And the women wore dresses, long skirts and fancily draped
pagnes
(skirts), all of them dancing in heels, sometimes twelve centimeters (just over four and half inches) high. The occasional male wore a tuxedo with patent-leather shoes, but most of them went barefooted. The dancing proceeded carefully and in great earnest, fearful as they were for all those spiked heels. An orchestra played merengue or rumba music, complex, syncopated African rhythms beat out on bottles and drums. But one could also catch snippets of fandango, cha-cha, polka, and Scottish music, in addition to echoes of martial music and hymns.
⁴⁸
The most important influence of all, however, was Cuban: 78 rpm records brought back music that felt somehow vaguely familiar to the Congolese. It was the music the slaves had carried with them across the ocean centuries before and that now, enriched with various Latin influences, had come home again. Singers in Léopoldville liked to sing in Spanish, or in something that passed for it. The clear vowels sounded like the phonetic patterns of Lingala: all you had to do was toss in a
corazón
or a
mi amor
now and then. The guitar became the most popular instrument, in addition to the banjo, the mandolin, and the accordion. Camille Feruzi, the greatest accordion virtuoso of Congolese music, composed peerless melancholy melodies. And aboard the boats bringing people from the interior to Léopoldville, young Wendo Kolosoyi tirelessly strummed his guitar: he would grow to become the founder of the Congolese rumba, the most influential musical style in the sub-Saharan Africa of the twentieth century. Léopoldville in those years was a kind of New Orleans where African, South American, and European popular music fused to form a new genre: the Congolese rumba, irresistible dance music that would wash over the rest of the continent, but that could be heard at that time only in the bars of the new capital. It was music that made people laugh and forget, that made them dance and flirt, that made them happy and horny. It was
Saturday Night Fever, but on a Sunday afternoon. Why would you want to protest against such a dazzling, uproarious life?