Congo (33 page)

We left with ten, maybe fifteen columns. Each column consisted of a hundred and fifty trucks, with one Belgian officer and a Marconi operator. I was one of them. As
opérateur
, I was responsible for the wireless communication with the other columns. We went from Nigeria to Sudan, across the Nubian Desert. We could only navigate by compass. I’ll never forget that crossing. We ran into sandstorms that blinded you sometimes for an hour or more. When the sand heated up, you saw things that weren’t there. It took us more than a month. Sometimes we covered only twenty kilometers [about 12.5 miles] a day. There were ravines. Accidents happened there . . . . We lived on biscuits and cans of corned beef, and were given only half a liter of water a day. A lot of us fell ill . . . . Two hundred of the two thousand soldiers died along the way . . . . We lived like animals, we couldn’t wash ourselves . . . . The whole journey from Lagos to Cairo cost us three months. We drove thousands and thousands of kilometers.
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His voice faltered. He stopped. Never before had I heard about this heroic crossing of the Sahara. I asked whether he had ever had his story written down. “No,” he said, “this is the first time a white person has ever asked about it.”

There was, of course, another way to get to Egypt. Martin Kabuya, a ninety-two-year-old whose grandfather had been in Tabora when it was taken in 1916, took that other route. He too was garrisoned in Nigeria, where he too was a wireless operator. His appearance was still imposing, but his voice had grown brittle as an eggshell. He whispered his story to me. “I was very, very good in Morse code.
Ti-ti-tiii-ti
. I never made a mistake,
even when I worked by ear. If you’re able to do that, the rest is easy. On March 24, 1943, I received orders to board a Dutch merchant ship, the
Duchesse de Ritmond
. We sailed south on the Atlantic to South Africa. There we had to round the Cape of Good Hope, and then on to the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea to close to the Suez Canal. There were at least a hundred ships. Around South Africa, a few of them were attacked by Japanese planes. Twenty-seven men were killed on one of those ships. The soldiers slept all bunched together in the hold. Conditions were bad.”
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Both Kitadi and Kabuya took part in the fighting in Egypt. Kitadi spent, by his own account, “a whole year” in the desert outside Alexandria, where enemy positions and planes were fired on. The threat came from Libya and Sicily. “During the day it was scorching hot, at night we had to wear gloves to keep our hands warm. On Sundays we were allowed to go into town, to Alexandria, but that had been bombed by the Germans. It was full of flies.” Kabuya was stationed at Camp Geneva, a huge depot close to the Suez Canal; his job was to intercept and decode Morse messages from the enemy. “I was in the
Section d’écoute
, the monitoring section; we eavesdropped on messages about their troop movements.”

The war brought them in contact with other peoples: British officers, Nigerian soldiers, Arabs, and German and Italian prisoners of war. The hermetic world of the barracks in the Belgian Congo lay far behind them. “There were a lot of Italian prisoners of war in Alexandria,” Kitadi said. “We kept them out in the desert, behind barbed wire, but they dug tunnels. Our munitions dump was a little further away. The Arabs tried to steal our munitions. They’re real thieves,” he said in amusement. Kabuya saw prisoners of war as well. “One time a German prisoner came after me, a big SS man, he must have been two meters [6.5 feet] tall. He had got hold of a revolver. I stabbed him in the stomach with my bayonet. Our bayonets were poisoned. They were very good weapons. That SS man was the only person I ever killed.”

When the war was over both men went by truck to Palestine, but things were calmer there. The most strenuous task was the occasional stint of guard duty along the border at Haifa. The biggest danger Kitadi encountered there came from a case of food poisoning that put him in the hospital at Gaza: something to do with meat that been roasted after it was already spoiled.

The Force Publique’s participation in the Allied campaigns is virtually unknown. Its contributions, in numerical terms, were less decisive than those during World War I. The many tens of thousands of bearers from the olden days had been largely replaced by trucks. That is why today, even in Congo, the memory of those events is quickly withering away. In Kinshasa, a city of eight million, only a handful of veterans is still alive. One of them is Libert Otenga, a man who can still sing “We’re Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line” at the top of his lungs. I was keen to talk to him, because he was one of the very few who had served in the Belgian field hospital. In the course of the conflict, that mobile medical unit of Belgian doctors and Congolese medics made an incredible exodus past the most remote fields of battle. Their wanderings ended somewhere in the jungles of Burma (present-day Myanmar); the Belgian Congo, therefore, assisted the British not only militarily and with matériel, but also medically. The Belgian field hospital became known as the tenth BCCS, the tenth Belgian Congo Casualty Clearing Station. It had two operating tents and a radio tent. In the other tents there were beds for thirty patients and stretchers for two hundred more. During the war, the unit treated seven thousand wounded men and thirty thousand who had fallen ill. Even at the peak of its activities it consisted of only twenty-three Belgians, including seven doctors, and three hundred Congolese.
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Libert Otenga was one of them. When I located him at last, he was still able to recount his odyssey effortlessly. His voice rang like an alarm bell, but he chose his words carefully.

I was a medical assistant. I joined the army in 1942. First we went to Somalia. I worked there with a Belgian surgeon. Thorax, abdomen, bones. We operated on everything. Then we left with British-Belgian troops for Madagascar. There were German prisoners of war there. The German is a special case, believe me! One of them badly needed a blood transfusion, and Dr. Valcke, one of the Belgian physicians, was willing to donate his own. But the German refused! Blood from an Allied sympathizer, he was having none of it. And from a black man, that was
entirely
out of the question. He wanted to preserve his honor, but we wanted to save his life.
Bon
, while he was asleep we gave him that blood anyway.

He still had to laugh heartily at the thought. I had never known that prisoners of war, even against their will, enjoyed the protection of the Third Geneva Convention regarding humane treatment. But Otenga went on marching straight through his recollections. “From Madagascar we went by ship to Ceylon. To Colombo. The hospital and the army were reorganized there. After that a ship brought us to India.” That must have been to the Ganges Delta (present-day Bangladesh). “From there we took another boat, an inland boat, up the Brahmaputra River. When we disembarked, we had to go a long way on foot to the Burmese border.” At the time, that area was the scene of fierce combat between Japanese and anti-Fascist forces, including the British. Japan had conquered Burma in 1942. “The border post was called Tamu. We moved into Burma and got to the Chindwin Valley. We followed that all the way to Kalewa. We set up the hospital there.” The names of all the locations were still chiseled in Otenga’s memory. He even spelled them out for me, in a military staccato. “Ka-le-wa, have you got that? We took care of people there. Soldiers and civilians. Many of them with bullet wounds. I remember a British soldier with shrapnel in his intestines. Things like that.” The fact that Congolese paramedics
cared for Burmese civilians and British soldiers in the Asian jungle is a completely unknown chapter in colonial history, and one that will soon vanish altogether. “Burma was where we stayed the longest. We carried out complex operations there. We even had an ambulance plane at our disposal. Finally, we were saved by the atomic bomb! Then Japan had no choice but to surrender Burma.”
⁸
Then, to underscore that victory, he sang again the little song about the Siegfried Line.

I
T COULD NEVER HAVE OCCURRED
to Colonel Paul Tibbets at the moment he pushed the button. It was August 6, 1945. His plane was called the
Enola Gay
. Within a few seconds the city below him would no longer be a city, but a name: Hiroshima. It would not have occurred to him that what he, as an American, was releasing over Japan in fact originated in Congo. The first American atomic bomb was made with Katangan uranium. When news of that terrible devastation finally reached the Burmese interior, Libert Otenga had no idea that he had been “saved” by an ore that came from under his own native soil. In Congo, too, the mineworkers at Shinkolobwe could never have imagined that the leaden, yellowish ore that was processed into “yellow cake” after they dug it up would lead to such destruction on the other side of the world. No one knew a thing. Operating in deepest secrecy, Edgar Sengier, then managing director of Union Minière, saw to it that Congo’s uranium reserves did not fall into the wrong hands. Shinkolobwe had the world’s largest confirmed deposit of uranium. When the Nazi threat intensified just before the war, he had had 1,250 metric tons (1,375 U.S. tons) of uranium shipped to New York, then flooded his mines. Only a tiny stock still present in Belgium ever fell into German hands. The potential military application of uranium was still unknown (it was used at the time mostly as a pigment in the ceramics industry), but in the late 1930s nuclear physicists announced that it could be used to unleash an unbridled chain reaction. Einstein considered informing Belgium’s Queen Elisa
beth of the situation—he knew her and they shared a love for music—but decided instead to turn to the Belgian ambassador in New York and finally to President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself. When the Manhattan Project started in 1942, the American scientists tinkering with the plans for an atomic bomb went in search of high-grade uranium. The Canadian ore they had used till then was quite feeble. To their amazement, it turned out that the Archer Daniels Midland Warehouses on the New York waterfront already contained a huge stockpile of the finest quality. The discovery led to spirited negotiations with the Belgian government in exile, which received $2.5 million in hard cash with which to finance Belgium’s reconstruction after the war. In addition, Belgium was granted access to nuclear technology. A research center was set up in the Flemish town of Mol in 1952 and a small reactor in Kinshasa, the first of its kind in Africa.
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The Americans also provided support for the construction of two large air bases in Congo; one on the coast in Kitona and the other at Kamina in Katanga. And once again: during World War II, almost no one in Congo knew about this. The strategic importance of uranium, however, was a prime reason for America’s special interest in Congo, an interest that started during the war years, became decisive in the years surrounding independence and lasted until the end of the Cold War in 1990.

Yet it was not only about uranium. For the Allies, Congo was also one of the most important raw materials depots in their fight against Germany, Italy, and Japan. After destroying Pearl Harbor, the Japanese went on in early 1942 to conquer large parts of Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Burma. Allied imports from those regions were cut off completely. Congo helped provide a solution. Ores and other raw materials once again came into great demand. Copper was needed for bullet shells and bomb casings. Wolfram was incorporated in antitank weapons. Tin and zinc served in the making of bronze and brass. Even products of
vegetable origin such as rubber, copal, cotton, and quinine had strategic value. Palm oil was used in Sunlight soap, but was also applied in the steel industry.

Soldiers, therefore, were not the only Congolese to contribute to the Allied push. The colony’s mineworkers, factory hands, and plantation workers also did their part. As it had during World War I, the Congolese economy was now rolling at top speed. There were some half a million payrolled workers in 1939, but their ranks swelled to eight hundred thousand, perhaps even a million, by 1945.
¹⁰
After South Africa, Congo became the second most industrialized country of sub-Saharan Africa. More textile plants, soap works, sugar refineries, cement factories, breweries, and tobacco manufacturing plants had been built during the interwar years. But an industrial sector in top gear did not bring immediate prosperity. Because of the war, less and less cargo was reaching the colony. There were no textiles, no machines, no medicines. The doctors had left, the little hospitals had no supplies, fewer boats plied the rivers. The more supplies shrank, of course, the higher prices rose. And because wages were fixed, the purchasing power of the average employee fell disastrously.
¹¹
In remote Elisabethville, which was highly dependent on imports, the price of a length of textile from Léopoldville increased by more than 400 percent. Imported textiles from England or Brazil rose by as much as 700 percent.
¹²
In the mining town of Jadotville, the price of a blanket quadrupled.
¹³
Clearly a problem, when one realizes how chilly a Katangan night can be.

This dramatic inflation could only lead to social protest. At both the start and the end of the war, strikes and uprisings broke out. In November 1941 mineworkers in Manono, in northern Katanga, tried to take down the Belgian flag and raise a black one in its place. The men wore crowns made from palm leaves. Most of them were adherents of the Kitawala religion. They had already slaughtered all their goats and dogs, convinced as they were that a new age was about to dawn.
¹⁴

One month later, large-scale protests were seen in the Katangan capital of Elisabethville. White employees of Union Minière who had organized to form a union protested against the unprecedentedly low purchasing power and their dissatisfaction jumped the gap to the black workers’ camps. There, too, miners demanded substantial wage increases. Social protest in this case did not assume the guise of a religious revival (as with Simon Kimbangu in 1921) or ethnic revolt (as with the Pende in 1931), but was expressed in the year 1941 in the form of a clear and very understandable wage claim. Yet the colonial and industrial powers-that-be reacted in traditional fashion. Trade unions for natives were still strictly forbidden. On the key day of the strike, the workers gathered on the town’s soccer pitch. It would be hard to imagine a situation more laden with symbolism: the soccer pitch, the place meant to teach the masses the virtues of discipline, now became the site of popular protest and bloody repression. Amour Maron, provincial governor of Katanga, along with the personnel manager of Union Minière, tried to hush up the strikers, but they were having none of it. Their leader was Léonard Mpoyi, an educated clerk. One of the strikers present recounted: “Maron said: ‘Go back to work! We’ve already raised your wages.’ We said no. The people began to shout and rave. Maron asked Léonard Mpoyi again: ‘So you people refuse to leave?’ Léonard Mpoyi said: ‘I refuse. We want you to give us proof, a written document that shows that the company has raised our pay.’” That document never came. But panic broke out. The soldiers of the Force Publique came into action. “Maron ordered the soldiers to shoot at the people. The soldiers obeyed, and fired without mercy.”
¹⁵
At least sixty people were killed and one hundred wounded. The first fatality was Mpoyi himself.
¹⁶