Congo (32 page)
Authors: David Van Reybrouck
At first the Union Congolaise encountered a certain degree of sympathy. Paul Panda Farnana was an extremely eloquent intellectual who had mastered the rare art of presenting radical ideas as reasonable measures. In December 1920 he was allowed to address the first National Colonial Congress in Brussels, where his speech concerning the need for political participation by natives also met with a great deal of support from the Belgians present. Grant us power, that was his bottom line. And he received applause! As a gifted orator, he had not forgotten to pepper his speech with references to historic popes.
One year later, however, Panda Farnana took part in the second Pan-African Congress, an African American initiative led by the radical American civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois. That gave Panda Farnana a bad reputation: the colonial press accused him of nationalism, Bolshevism, and Garveyism. Incorrectly. The Pan-Africanism of that day was out to liberate and emancipate the black race, all over the world. The congress, which lasted a week and was held in London, Brussels, and Paris, gave the lie to the accusations of Bolshevism. All the
delegates wanted was to promote the equality of blacks and whites, in times of both war and peace. The delegates made a field trip to the colonial museum at Tervuren, where the African Americans were incensed by the collection, already huge by that time, of what they saw as the fruits of plunder. Panda Farnana had never thought about it that way before. The sessions in Brussels and Paris were chaired by Blaise Diagne, a Senegalese who had held a seat in the French parliament since 1914, the first African ever. That must have made a huge impression on Panda Farnana. While the French colonies were already allowed to send elected representatives to Paris, in the Belgian Congo one could attain no higher status than that of railroad engineer, choirboy, Boy Scout, or goalie. When it came to political participation, the status of
chef médaillé
meant nothing: that was no popular involvement, that was simply an excuse. A few years later he expressed his unvarnished, final opinion: “So far, the colonization of Congo has amounted only to ‘civilization-vandalism,’ in favor of the European element.”
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In May 1929 Panda Farnana returned to the colony, where he settled in his native village of Nzemba, close to the ocean. There he helped to set up a school and a chapel. With his rare combination of life experience, acuity, and tact, he could have been a key figure in the negotiations for a more just colonial regime. But less than a year after his return he died, unmarried and childless. The Belgian Congo had lost its most brilliant voice of dissent. He was only forty-two years old.
The War and the Deceptive Calm That Followed
T
HEY STOOD SWAYING IN A CIRCLE, SHIFTING THEIR WEIGHT
from one foot to the other; something between cautious dancing and marching in place. The little group of veterans at the Maison des Anciens Combattants in Kinshasa were clearly enjoying themselves. Their brand-new uniforms were a gift from the Belgian army to Congo’s present-day armed forces. The veterans wore them with pride, clapped their hands and sang in deep voices: “Saluti, saluti, pesa saluti, tokopesa saluti na bakonzi nyonso.” A marching song. “Salute, salute, atten-shun, we salute all our leaders.” Those leaders, as they explained to me afterward, had been Belgians. All their officers were Belgians back then. “Biso baCongolais, biso baCongolais,” was how it went after that, “We Congolese, we Congolese, we have shown our strength. Today we have conquered Saio.” A simple but catchy soldiers’ song. Once you’d heard the melody, it stuck with you. A Congolese soldier had come up with the tune in 1941, shortly after the taking of the fortified garrison town of Saio in Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia). It was sung in the backs of the trucks in which the Congolese soldiers drove back to Kisangani through the arid, open landscape of Sudan. Almost seventy
years later the veterans still knew it by heart. It breathed a new sort of brotherhood. That’s right, in those days the whites were still their superiors, but during the war something had changed. The Congolese soldier was extremely proud to present his white officers with the conquest of Saio.
That sense of pride, however, would not last for long. Much more even than World War I, World War II brought about rapprochement, followed by disillusionment. I talked about this to eighty-seven-year-old André Kitadi, one of the men who had sung along that day. He was deputy chairman of the veterans’ association of 1940–45, a remarkable, quiet-voiced man of keen judgment. His office was empty, save for a metal desk, a Congolese flag, and a huge puddle of water. The previous night’s rain had collected on the concrete floor. “We fought for Belgium, that much was clear. The Belgians used us to defend their interests. We took part because we had discipline. We had
la conscience de la guerre
[a sense of duty about the war].”
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After the German army rolled over Belgium during those eighteen days in the spring of 1940, the legal status of the Belgian Congo remained unclear for a few months. That was due to the general collapse in the fatherland itself. While the Belgian government fled first to France and later to England, where it aligned itself with the Allies, King Leopold III, great-nephew of Leopold II, bowed to the German victory. He was taken prisoner and remained in Nazi Germany until the end of the war. Which raised the question: who was the colonial administration to heed now? The king of a country that no longer existed as a sovereign state but still had a colony, or his minister of colonies in exile, who was effectively the administrator general of the Belgian Congo? In the colony itself, opinions differed. Conservative elements like Félix de Hemptinne, the influential bishop of Katanga, were royalists and resigned themselves to the German victory and a new fascist world order. Many industrialists also harbored ultra-right-wing sympathies. They hoped to continue
supplying Germany with raw materials, which in fact they did during the war, by way of Portugal. Anti-Semitism reared its head here and there. In the El Dorado of Elisabethville, a small Jewish community had formed. The local rabbi, the only one in Congo, saw to his horror how the shop windows of Jewish merchants were daubed with swastikas and slogans like
sale juif
(dirty Jew).
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But in the end, Governor General Pierre Ryckmans put his foot down: the Belgian Congo would unanimously take the side of the Allies and continue to fight against fascism. Officially his administration was answerable to the exiled minister of colonies, but in actual practice he enjoyed great autonomy. His personal courage was of more overriding importance than any directive from London.
The French colonies, too, hesitated about which side to take: most of them decided to support Philippe Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy regime, while a few opted for Charles de Gaulle’s Free France. In this way, the conflict between the Allies and the Axis powers was transferred to the African continent. Although Germany had lost its final overseas territory in 1918, large parts of Africa still moved within the National Socialist sphere of influence. What’s more, Germany’s new ally, Italy, still possessed African colonies. It had ruled ever since the late nineteenth century over Eritrea and Italian Somaliland in the Horn of Africa, areas along the Red Sea coast whose strategic important had grown with the opening of the Suez Canal. In 1911 Italy had succeeded in taking Libya and in 1935 Mussolini invaded Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia, the only state of any size in Africa that had never been colonized. Thanks in part to soldiers from the Belgian Congo, that instance of foreign rule would this time be short-lived as well.
When the Belgian government-in-exile sided with the Allies, Winston Churchill called for material and military support from the Belgian Congo. In Northern Africa, after all, Libya posed a threat to Egypt (which had gained independence in 1922, but was in many ways still dependent on England), while the Horn
of Africa was a menace to British-held Kenya and Sudan. From those British colonies Churchill first sent his own troops to Abyssinia, but starting in February 1941 their ranks were reinforced by the eleventh battalion of the Force Publique. Some three thousand Congolese soldiers and two thousand bearers took part. There was one Belgian officer to every fifty Africans. By truck and boat they moved across the Sudan, where daytime temperatures often reached 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) in the shade. From there they invaded the mountainous western portion of Abyssinia. The trucks received a new coat of paint; in order to better camouflage them, brown sand was mixed with the army green. But it was largely on foot that the soldiers traveled through the desolate region. During the day the troops almost collapsed in the heat; at night, at higher elevations, their teeth chattered from the cold. When the rainy season began a few weeks later, some of them had to bivouac in the mud. Towns such as Asosa and Gambela did not pose much of a problem. After brief but intense fighting, the Italian troops fled. Their officers did not even bother to take their sabers or tennis rackets with them. A much greater challenge was Saio, a major Italian garrison city close to the Sudanese border. After heavy shelling on June 8, 1941, the demoralized Italians demanded a truce, despite their clear superiority in numbers and arms.
The Belgian commanders agreed, on terms of a total surrender. No fewer than nine Italian generals were taken prisoner, including Pietro Gazzera, commander of the Italian troops in East Africa, and Count Arnocovaldo Bonaccorsi, inspector general of the Fascist militias that had terrorized Mallorca during the Spanish Civil War. In addition, 370 Italian officers (45 of them high-ranking) were taken prisoner, along with 2,574 noncoms, and 1,533 native soldiers. Another 2,000 native irregulars were sent home.
MAP 6: BELGIAN CONGO DURING WORLD WAR II
The taking of Saio, however, was primarily of material and strategic importance. The Force Publique captured eighteen
cannons with five thousand rounds, four mortars, two hundred machine guns, 330 pistols, 7,600 rifles, fifteen thousand grenades, and two million rounds of small-arms ammunition. In addition, Belgians and Congolese confiscated twenty metric tons (twenty-two U.S. tons) of radio equipment, including three complete transmitter stations, twenty motorcycles, twenty automobiles, two armored vehicles, 250 trucks, and—hardly unimportant in the highlands—five hundred mules. An army had gone out of business here, that much was clear. It was the most significant Belgian victory over Fascism and in fact the greatest Belgian military triumph ever, but the heaviest toll was paid by the Congolese. The Belgian casualties were 4 killed and 6 badly wounded, while 42 Africans were killed, 5 went missing, and 193 succumbed to illnesses or injuries. Among the bearers there were 274 fatalities; most of those died of exhaustion or dysentery.
The Force Publique’s Abyssinian campaign was instrumental in Haile Selassie’s return to the throne. Ethiopia had been a colony for only five years, from 1936 to 1941; now the centuries-old empire had been restored. The restoration gave new inspiration to the Jamaican Rastafarians, who had begun to venerate Emperor Haile Selassie as a deity in the 1930s. His divine status, however, was one that had been affirmed in ways more military than metaphysical. Congolese soldiers had freed Ethiopian towns like Asosa, Gambela, and above all Saio. Indirectly, therefore, Belgian colonialism contributed to the spiritual dimension of reggae. What Tabora had been to World War I, Saio was to World War II: a resounding victory that bolstered the troops’ morale. It was no mean feat; here, for the first time in history, an African country had been decolonized by African soldiers. “The only people we saw were white,” Louis Ngumbi, a veteran from eastern Congo told me, “we shot only at white people.”
3
That was a bit of an exaggeration, but that the Force Publique took several thousand white soldiers as prisoners of war, including nine generals, made a huge impression. Saio
was etched in the memory of an entire generation of military men. André Kitadi, deputy chairman of the veterans’ association, knew the numbers by heart: “In Abyssinia we captured nine Italian generals, plus 370 Italian officers, twenty-five hundred Italian soldiers, and fifteen thousand natives.”
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Kitadi volunteered in 1940. The war had already started, but that didn’t bother him. In the army you could get a good education: he became a telegraph operator. During the Abyssinian campaign he remained on stand-by in Orientale province, along the border with Sudan, ready to be deployed. But that never proved necessary. When the troops returned, singing, and were welcomed by cheering crowds, he was transferred to Boma. But not for long. Now that the Horn of Africa had fallen, the Allies shifted their focus to Western and, above all, Northern Africa. In fall 1942, after the Vichy French were rousted from Morocco and Algeria, Kitadi boarded a carrier that brought him and his comrades to Lagos in Nigeria. It was from that British colony that the battle for Dahomey (present-day Benin), a French colony still aligned with the Vichy regime, was to begin. “It took us four days to get to Nigeria. We arrived in Lagos and were taken to barracks three hundred kilometers (185 miles) away. We were trained there. For six whole months.” The men of the Force Publique came in contact there with the British colonial troops. Although still under Belgian command, Kitadi was fitted out with a British uniform. In early March 1943 he received new marching orders. Following the Allied successes in Northern Africa, Dahomey had sided with De Gaulle. The last German-Italian stronghold in Africa was now Libya. From there General Erwin Rommel had struck at Egypt, to force a passage to the Suez Canal. The Allies wanted to stop him at all costs and began a troop build-up in Egypt. Kitadi now had to get from Nigeria to Egypt. That was, to say the least, no easy task as long as the Mediterranean was still controlled by Italy. Overland, then? Straight across Africa? In those days neighboring Chad, a
French colony, was run by a black governor general, Félix Eboué. He supported De Gaulle and opened his territory for a crossing by Allied troops. The only problem was that this entailed a long journey through the desert . . . .