Congo (31 page)

“My uncle was the founder of the Association Sportive Congolaise, Congo’s first sporting club,” Père Henri said once we were seated. His white hair was still blown back from his forehead after his scooter ride. A Kikwit coiffure, as it were. “He was the greatest promoter of soccer in Kinshasa.” But that was not the whole story. “His club also promoted gymnastics, track and field, swimming, and even water polo.” Raphaël de la Kéthulle must have been every bit as indefatigable as his nephew. Besides all manner of sporting initiatives, he also founded a number of schools. He was one of the original initiators of colonial Scouting and school drama programs, and founded a brass band and an alumni association. But above all he was the driving force behind the development of a decent sporting infrastructure in Léopoldville. Père Henri knew the story by heart. “He built three soccer stadiums, a huge sports park, tennis courts, and an Olympic swimming pool, which even had its own five-meter board. In that same pool, he also organized canoeing matches!” The absolute apogee of his urge to build was the Stade Roi Baudouin, later renamed the State du 20 Mai, a soccer stadium that seated 80,000 supporters and that,
at its opening in 1952, was the biggest in all of Africa. It was here, in 1959, that the riots broke out that would ultimately lead to independence. It was here that Joseph-Désiré Mobutu addressed the people after his 1965 coup. It was here that Muhammad Ali fought George Foreman in their famous 1974 bout. Today, every Kinois still knows about Tata Raphaël, Daddy Raphaël, even if that is only because the huge stadium is named after him these days and because his image, which bears a striking resemblance to the logo of Kentucky Fried Chicken, sprawls across the front of the Collège Saint Raphaël. “Yes, he was quite energetic,” Père Henri concluded, “though he did have something of a
bottine légère
.” A light boot? “That’s right, he was known to deal out a swift kick now and then, when necessary.”

The club life facilitated by the Catholic missions offered the urban worker not only healthy recreation, but purposefully altered the social topography as well. Out of fear for ethnically tinted revolts like those among the Pende, tribal boundaries were broken down—the very same boundaries delineated so sharply before by mission-school education! Henri de la Kéthulle told me: “In the sports, my uncle mixed up the various peoples. His football competitions always consisted of mixed teams. He organized inter-Congolese matches, even the first international soccer match. A Congolese team played against a Belgian one. Beerschot it was, I believe.”
⁶⁶

B
LOOD, HOWEVER, WOULD NOT BE DENIED
. Despite the well-intentioned sports initiatives and patronizing family policies, a certain hunger remained among parts of the Congolese urban population. The colonial administration may have shown a friendly face, but that lasted only as long as one toed the line. The masses were steered beneath the smiling countenance of the colonial trinity, but anyone stepping out of line was punished without pardon.

And so native organizations continued to exist.
⁶⁷
The Kita
wala religion spread among the mineworkers and infiltrated large parts of the countryside. From Katanga it reached Kivu, Orientale province, and Équateur. Operating clandestinely, it provided a mixture of mysticism and revolt. When adherents were arrested in Jadotville in 1936, they said of the Bible: “This book clearly states that all people are equal. God did not create the whites to rule over the blacks . . . . It is unjust that the black man, who does all the work, must continue to live in poverty and misery, while the wages of the whites are so much higher.”
⁶⁸
Many followers were banished, but exile served—just as it had with the Kimbaguists—only as a stimulus to the movement.

Ethnic organizations in Katanga, like those among the Lulua or the Baluba, featured a conviviality and hominess unrivaled by any Scout troop. They provided assistance to newcomers and helped young people to pay their dowries. There even arose certain forms of solidarity between people with the same first name. An old man from Lubumbashi explained: “If my name is Albert and your name is Albert, then you become my brother . . . . We take care of each other. We help each other to get food, we play sports together, we support each other in every way.”
⁶⁹
Starting in 1929 the financial crisis resulted in intensive forms of solidarity among the Congolese. André Yav, the former boy from Lubumbashi, said of that: “Everyone was very hungry back then. Unemployment rose incredibly. But this is what we did: if a man had work, then he was the father and mother of all his friends. They came to eat at his house and they came there to get clothes.”
⁷⁰
Such forms of spontaneous self-organization were ineradicable.

In the 1920s there were groups that called themselves Les Belges. With no lack of humor, the members decked themselves out with titles borrowed from the colonial administration (“district commissioner,” “governor general,” “king”) and in their dances imitated white officials and missionaries. In addition to satire, they also engaged in finding housing for newcomers,
distributing food, and organizing funerals.
⁷¹

Following the financial crisis there also rose the first associations of Africans who had risen through the ranks. Organizations with names like Cercle de l’Amitié des Noirs Civilisés and the Association Franco-Belge brought together Congolese who had attended school, who enjoyed a decent income, and who spoke French together. They represented the start of a Congolese middle class, with all of the hopes and snobbism that went along with that. Their members often looked down on the life of the street, which they themselves had left behind only recently, and longed for a more European lifestyle, for cufflinks and respect. But if frustrated, that longing could backfire in the form of irritation and protest—which is precisely what happened in the 1950s. During the interbellum, however, their activities were not yet overtly political, although some wished to organize themselves independently of the church.

S
TARTING IN THE 1930S
, at the border post with Rhodesia, a fascinating phenomenon could be observed several times a week.
⁷²
Whenever a train arrived from the British dominions, it would stop with a loud hiss to allow the white engineer to step down. His colleague from the Belgian Congo would then climb aboard to continue the journey to Elisabethville. Those witnessing this for the first time must have rubbed their eyes in disbelief: was that new engineer really an African? Yes, he was. In the Belgian Congo, unlike in South Africa and Rhodesia, people prided themselves on the lack of a “color bar.” Africans in the mines and factories were allowed to operate expensive and dangerous machines, albeit under the watchful eye of white foremen. Dedicated Union Minière employees could, to a certain extent, work their way up in the company. Hotels, restaurants, and cafés were, in theory, open to everyone. Only in the movie theaters was there a clear racial division. There was no formal ban on sexual relations between whites and blacks.

But the absence of a legal color bar did not mean that there
was no invisible color bar.
⁷³
And that latter phenomenon was perhaps the most stubborn of all. Africans could not build their careers in a way that admitted them to the top levels of a company. In administrative service, the position of clerk or typist was the highest achievable level. The cities consisted of strictly delineated white centers and black, outlying neighborhoods, supposedly to prevent the spread of malaria. But that was a specious argument. Graveyards, too, were racially segregated, and there one ran little risk of contracting malaria. There were also no Scouting troops of mixed race. And Congolese soccer teams were not allowed to compete against European ones, out of fear for riots after a defeat or humiliation after a victory. One of the most acute observers of the colonial period wrote of this: “Remarkably enough, the fact that there was no official color bar only aggravated the racial reflexes of the whites. Denied by law, racism confirmed itself with full force in the facts.”
⁷⁴
And that was true enough. Today, anyone reading the colonial papers published between the wars will notice how much the thinking was determined by an us/them logic, and how much fear went hidden behind their forceful rhetoric. After a white man was murdered by a Congolese,
L’Avenir Colonial Belge
, one of the colony’s most popular papers, wrote:

Is our personal safety, the safety of the Whites, still ensured in Léopoldville?

One can reply in all sincerity: No! The acts of insubordination by the blacks are multiplying; their insolence is great and strikes fear into the hearts of even the bravest among us. Thefts are increasing in number and scope; the arrogance of the blacks towards the Whites is at times staggering; the fear we instill in them is null; the respect for the
mundele
is a thing of the past.

That is how things stand in the Year of Our Lord 1930.

But, we hear you say, is Stanley Pool a region once again in need of pacifying?

Well, why ever not?

What that repacification entailed, the paper felt, was clear enough: any African threatening the life of a white person, for whatever reason, should face the death penalty.
⁷⁵
Valid self-defense, mitigating circumstances, involuntary manslaughter, irresistible compulsion; none of that mattered. The courts, fortunately, were more subtle in their thinking, but that a newspaper flogging such humbug could become one of the most influential in the colony shows how the majority of whites thought about the racial question.
Les noirs
, that was printed in lower case;
les Blancs
, that took a capital.

In essence, colonial society between the wars was ruled by mutual fear: the white rulers were terrified of losing their respectability in the eyes of the Congolese, while a great many of those same Congolese were afraid of the white man’s authority and did all they could to earn his respect. It was a stranglehold of fear. How long could this be kept up?

A
LBERT
K
UDJABO AND
P
AUL
P
ANDA
F
ARNANA
spent four long years as prisoners of war in Germany, years that included much more than singing songs for ethnographers in Berlin. Years of sickness and forced labor. Years of mockery and humiliation. Kudjabo had been forced to work on a farm outside Stuttgart, where the farmer cheated him out of money. Panda ended up in Hannover, and was taken from there to Romania.

But now they were back in Belgium, the country for which they and a few other Congolese had risked their lives. And what did the veterans’ magazine
Le Journal des Combattants
write about them? “Let us repatriate them and send them back to the shade of their banana trees, where they will certainly feel more at home. There they can relearn their Negro dances and tell of their war experiences to their families, who sit around them on chimpanzee skins.”
⁷⁶

Is that what they had fought and suffered for? They weren’t
about to let it go at that. A reply came: “In the trenches the soldiers never tired of repeating that we were brothers and we were treated as the whites’ equals. Nevertheless, now that the war is over and our services are no longer required, people would rather see us disappear. In that regard we are in complete agreement, but then under one condition: if you insist so vehemently on the repatriation of blacks, it would be only logical for us to demand that all whites now in Africa be repatriated as well.”
⁷⁷

What nerve! No one in Congo dared to adopt such a self-assured tone. The reaction was written in a French more elegant than that of the original article. A new voice was truly being heard. A few weeks before the article in question appeared, on August 30, 1919, the Union Congolaise had been set up in Brussels, “an association for the assistance and the moral and intellectual development of the Congolese race.” It resembled the organization André Matswa had set up in France. The association originally had thirty-three members, almost all of them veterans. The central figure was the former prisoner of war Paul Panda Farnana; his companion-in-arms Albert Kudjabo became its secretary. They set about helping the poor and sick, assisted in paying funeral costs, and arranged for free night-school training. But theirs was also an explicitly political line. As early as 1920 the Union Congolaise demanded that forced labor regimes be relaxed, that workers’ wages be raised, and that schooling be expanded. Above all, they called for the Congolese to have more say in the colonial administration. Once again: this was 1920! In those days the authorities consulted at most with individual village chieftains they had appointed themselves. Much better, Paul Panda suggested, would be for the Congolese themselves to elect a council to advise the colonial government in Boma.

Panda’s Union Congolaise grew steadily. Branches were set up in Liège, Charleroi, and Marchienne-au-Pont. The new members were often Congolese sailors who had jumped ship in
Antwerp harbor. These young, single men, who had spent weeks in a deafening engine room as
lubricator
, fireman, or trimmer, rebelled against the fact that their white colleagues on arrival were paid twice as much for the same work. In Congo there were no white laborers, only supervisors, but aboard the big ocean steamers the huge contrast became visible for the first time. And while irritation on dry land led to religious ecstasy, disgruntlement on board led to more prosaic resistance: strikes. Tools were downed at the ports of both Antwerp and Matadi, especially after the African crew members were forbidden to supplement their measly wages with a private trade in bicycles and sewing machines. What’s more, once on land they were not allowed to hang about in bars. The Belgian government greatly feared them ending up in the red-light district or, even worse, in red cafes. There were enough Communists in Antwerp as it was!