Congo (34 page)

The violence with which that strike was crushed made a deep impression in Elisabethville. André Yav, the former boy from whom we heard earlier, wrote about it in his singular history: “It was a year deep in the war of 1940–45. Many, many
people died. They died for a higher monthly wage. That day there was great sorrow in Elisabethville, because of that
bwana
governor.”
¹⁷

The big Elisabethville strike was a milestone in the social history of Congo because it was the first, open expression of urban protest. Elisabethville was the country’s second city and the economic motor of the whole of Congo. Union Minière was the flagship of colonial industry, widely praised for its generous social provisions. But the paternalistic, finger-in-the-dike policy apparently did have its limits. The people would not put up with everything.

In Léopoldville’s working neighborhoods during the war, several legends made the rounds that were, in all their inventiveness, extremely telling when it came to attitudes toward the white authorities. First there was the legend of Mundele-Mwinda, the white man with the lantern, an imaginary European who walked the streets of Kinshasa at night, holding aloft a lantern and looking for blacks. Anyone struck by his beam of light was immediately paralyzed. Then Mundele-Mwinda would take his victim to Mundele-Ngulu, another horrific creature. This white swineherd (
ngulu
means
pig
in Lingala) fattened up the victim until he turned into a pig. “And that pig was used to make sausages and hams, to feed the white people during the war.”
¹⁸
That parents told their children such stories to keep them off the streets at night illustrates the antipathy directed toward whites by that time. It was a perfect inversion of the figure of Black Peter seen in Catholic Belgium to this day.

But adults too put stock in such legends. Under the influence of folktales about evil whites, they sought refuge in messianic religions; those stories bore witness to a deep distrust of the colonizer. In the barracks at Luluabourg in February 1944, the soldiers mutinied. The cause was bizarre: a vaccine. When military medics announced plans to inoculate the soldiers, a rumor quickly spread that this was a white man’s trick, intended to annihilate them. A great many soldiers turned against their
superiors, left the barracks, and spread out over a huge area. Mutineers and civilians began plundering. Tax offices, storerooms, and a number of houses belonging to white people were attacked. The repression of the mutiny was inexorably harsh. That an unfounded rumor could give rise to such large-scale protests shows how deeply the mistrust ran.
¹⁹

At other places too, social unrest returned in full force at the end of the war. In spring 1944 in the area around Masisi in Kivu province, there was a socioreligious uprising by Kitawala followers. Many of the rebels worked in the local gold mines. Three whites and hundreds of blacks were killed, and the leader of the revolt was hanged. In November 1945 five to six thousand workers and boys in Léopoldville went on strike. Railway personnel spread the news to the port city of Matadi. The dockworkers joined in. They pulled rivets out of the rails and cut the telephone lines. Fifteen hundred strikers marched through the city, armed with iron staves, hammers, and clubs with nails in them. An unknown number of them, including women and children, were killed by soldiers. A military lockdown and a curfew were imposed. During the days that followed, the prison at Matadi became so packed that some rebels died of suffocation.
²⁰
In Congo, the final days of the war did not feel like a liberation. When Brussels was freed, the Congolese danced in the streets of Léopoldville. They hoped that everything was going to be different. But the euphoria did not last for long.

I
N THE CITIES
the workers were asking for higher wages, but the war also made itself felt deep in the calm interior. In addition to the military mobilization, which plucked young men from their villages, there was also a far-reaching civilian mobilization. Each village had to contribute to the
effort de guerre
(war effort). The number of mandatory days in the service of the state rose from 60 to 120. This often placed great pressure on small-scale farming. In the equatorial forest in particular, the
effort de guerre
resulted in hardship. People were required to
build roads through huge swamps and bridges across broad rivers. The villagers were required to gather palm nuts and copal fiber, and even to tap rubber once again. In 1939 Congo produced only 1,142 metric tons (just over 1,256 U.S. tons) of rubber, a fraction of the average harvest during the rubber boom, but by 1944 that had risen to no less than 11,337 metric tons (nearly 12,475 U.S. tons).
²¹
A tenfold increase within five years, right in the middle of the war.

An extremely vivid account of the war’s impact on the countryside is provided by the wonderful diaries kept by Vladi Souchard, the pen name of Vladimir Drachoussoff, a young Belgian agricultural engineer of Russian extraction. His parents had fled to Belgium during the October Revolution of 1917; he himself was only a few months old at the time. At the age of twenty-two he left for the colony, in late May 1940, only a few weeks after the war broke out. Employed at first on a sugarcane plantation in Bas-Congo, he later joined the colonial civil service. As a young agronomist he traveled from village to village with the aim of boosting the war effort. His working territory lay in Équateur, close to Lake Leopold. Suddenly he, an immigrant’s son from Brussels, was responsible for the farming activities in an area of tens of thousands of square kilometers, an area without roads or industry, some parts of which were characterized only by “a vague mixture of water, mud, and trees.”
²²
He traveled on foot, by bicycle, or canoe and visited villages where no colonials had been for years. His maps were outdated, villages had moved, and the government shelters were mostly in a state of sore neglect. During the war, there was no new crew of colonial officials waiting on the sidelines; he could expect no relief from his duties. Drachoussoff had to order communities to start cultivating rice and peanuts and to start harvesting rubber again. This latter directive caused the population to shudder. For it was in this region, after all, that “red rubber” had left the deepest scars. Youngsters had heard the stories from their parents or grandparents.
Some of their accounts required no verbal confirmation. Drachoussoff saw it with his own eyes: “In the Lopori and close to Lake Leopold, I personally saw two old blacks who had lost their right hands and who had not forgotten those days.”
²³
Many villagers claimed that there were no rubber vines in their area, that they had never seen them, or that the vines had been exhausted. So began
la dure bataille du caoutchouc
²⁴
(the pitched battle for rubber), a struggle Drachoussoff nevertheless dared to call into question: “What right do we have to drag the Congolese into our war? None whatsoever. Yet necessity knows no law . . . and Hitler’s victory here would install a racist tyranny that would make the abuses of colonialism look good.”
²⁵

Those were ambivalent times, a fact of which Drachoussoff was well aware. He walked the line between necessity and impotence, between international politics and the jungle, between anti-Axis commitment and colonial reality. As an agronomist in a time of administrative scarcity, he juggled many tasks. And when evening came, he wrote down his experiences.

Wednesday, November 10, 1943. Mekiri
.

At four
A.M.
I leave for Kundu on a borrowed bicycle. Two soldiers accompany me on foot. My companions travel on to Mekiri with our baggage
.

I arrive in Kundu just before dawn, and bolt down a chunk of bread as I wait for it to grow light. A little before six I knock on the door of the capita [a Congolese go-between] and ask him to call all the men together to show me yesterday’s harvest. The villagers are so surprised that they all show up, both those who have latex and all the rest. I hand out a few encouraging words and three fines, and around the necks of the four worst cases I lay the rope [that expression is symbolic: what one does in fact is to tie a twenty-centimeter (about eight-inch) length of kekele—a very sturdy cord made from tree bark that causes no pain but serves to symbolize the arrest—around the person’s neck]. Then I leave triumphantly with my “convicts” to catch up with the caravan
.

There was no prison in the wide surroundings. Incarceration meant that you had to travel along with the colonial official for a few days. A hike as disciplinary measure, the freedom of nature as detention.

On the road to Ngongo I find the soldiers and hand the prisoners over to them. Justice has been done, Kundu shall make its contribution to the war effort
.

A ways past Ngongo I catch up with the rear guard of our caravan. This leg of the journey covers twenty kilometers [about 12.5 miles], straight across huge sandy plains where only a few Borassus palms will grow, punctuated by wispy forest along the banks of the river. We monitor the rubber production in the villages we pass: it is none too impressive, and I write out a number of tickets
.

In the village of Mekiri, the men to whom my arrival was announced last night are waiting for us with latex, so that I can demonstrate how they are to make it coagulate. As I give my little presentation, I send Faigne and Pionso out to check and measure the fields. That evening, as a downpour thrashes the place where we are to spend the night, turning the roof into a sieve and drenching beds, clothing, and food, I deliver verdicts and rapidly hand out a number of convictions and acquittals
.

The proceedings require a sea of paperwork. I have been appointed a magistrate with limited jurisdiction (to wit, I am allowed to rule only on economic offenses) and ambulant prison guard (to wit, I am allowed to let those I convict accompany me as I go). The maximum penalty is seven days for not carrying out works of an educational nature, for the chopping down of protected trees, and for hunting violations, and thirty days for failing to contribute to the war effort. I am, of course, also an officer of the legal constabulary, with limited jurisdiction on the basis of my position as district agronomist
.

Procedure demands that I, as officer of the legal constabulary, first report an offence and then address that report myself as magistrate. While I am changing costumes, I pass the verdict, after an interrogation that is often surrealistic in the extreme
.

A man appears because he has failed to plant ten ares of peanuts. He either has a verifiable and valid excuse and I send him home (some substitute clerks even demand that we then draw up a verdict of acquittal), or he comes up with something. That results in the following dialogue, which is scrupulously included in the minutes of the court
.

Why didn’t you plant any peanuts?

Because I was ill.

For how long?

Two days.

You had three months to prepare your field. It can’t be those two days that prevented you from doing what you had to do.

That is true, mundele. But there was something else . . . .

What?

My father’s second wife had a baby.

Good Lord, it’s impossible to be familiar with all the customs of the thirty or forty peoples who live around the lake, but birth celebrations certainly don’t last for weeks. So then:

Bon
, that will be five days in jail for you.

Yes,
mundele
.

Some of them argufy. Others come right to the point
.

Mpua na nini asalaki bilanga te?
(Why didn’t you cultivate your fields?)

Mpua na koï-koï
(Out of laziness) . . . .

I would dearly love to acquit him then, but if I do they will all give me the same answer tomorrow.
²⁶

Drachoussoff was part of the colonial administration but, unlike most of his contemporaries, he also felt empathy for the local point of view. These people are satisfied with the forest and the rivers, he noted; money interested them only marginally. “Because there is little monitoring in this area, most of the farmers prefer to trade eight days of mild imprisonment for 357 days of peaceful living. Can I really blame them?”
²⁷

As it had in the nineteenth century, the demand for rubber drove people farther into the jungle, despite the predators and tsetse flies. Sleeping sickness, vanquished in its earlier epidemic form, began claiming more victims. Perhaps as much as 20 percent of the population of the equatorial forest became infected. Many of them also suffered from intestinal parasites because, far from home, their only drinking water came from swamps.
²⁸

Drachoussoff’s diary is fascinating, because it allows us to hear the voice of a colonial whose worldview is being shaken. While most whites simply waited for the war to be over and then resumed their old lives, he realized that “Europe’s enfeeblement can only serve to elicit centrifugal forces.”
²⁹
Things would never be the same. Despair began creeping in. This child of Russian émigrés was much more sensitive than the average Belgian to sudden historical turnabouts. The most brilliant passage in his diary was nothing short of prophetic: