Congo (41 page)

That part about “the people” was, of course, exaggerated. Kasavubu did not have the Congolese people behind him, and even large sections of “his” Bas-Congo had never heard of him. He spoke, at best, on behalf of the Kikongo-speaking
évolués
of the capital. In colonial circles, however, this text exploded like a bomb. It was the first time that a group of Congolese had so openly called for more rapid emancipation. A federation of states obviously did not appeal to them at all. And the colony’s unity did not seem particularly sacred to them either: they seemed only to be standing up for Bas-Congo. Many colonials went into a tizzy. They spoke of “madness,” of “a race toward suicide” and a “racism worse than that which they claim to be combating.”
⁹
Jef Van Bilsen became the whipping boy. It was he who had opened Pandora’s box, they felt.

For the colonials this call for independence came like a shot out of the blue, which says a great deal about the closed world they inhabited. Following World War II, after all, a first wave of decolonization had already swept Asia. Within the space of only three years, between 1946 and 1949, the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, and Indonesia had become independent. That same spark jumped the gap to North Africa, where Egypt threw off the British yoke, and Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria began agitating for greater political autonomy. Figures such as Nehru, Sukarno, and Nasser maintained close contact. In 1955 that relationship had culminated in the seminal Bandung Conference on Java, an Afro-Asian summit where new countries and countries longing for independence unanimously relegated colonialism to the scrapheap of history. “Colonialism in all its forms is an evil which should speedily be brought to an end,” the closing statement read.
¹⁰
No Congolese delegation was present at Bandung, but there was one from neighboring Sudan, which became independent a few months later. In addition, after the conference, radio stations on Egyptian and Indian soil began broadcasting the message of anti-imperialism. On the shortwave frequencies, people in Congo could listen to La Voix de l’Afrique from Egypt and All India Radio, which even featured broadcasts in Swahili.
¹¹
The message was spread by means of a technical innovation: the transistor radio. The introduction of this tiny, affordable piece of equipment had major consequences. From now on, people no longer needed to stand on market squares and street corners to listen to the official bulletins from Radio Congo Belge, but could remain in their living rooms, secretly enjoying banned foreign broadcasts that kept repeating that Africa was for the Africans.

T
O DEAL WITH THE GROWING UNREST
, Brussels decided at last to introduce a nascent form of participation. For ten years politicians had been squabbling over possible forms of native involvement in the cities, but in 1957 a law to that effect was finally passed. The native boroughs of a few large cities were to have their own mayors and city councils. On the lowest administrative rung, therefore, actual power was being granted to the Congolese for the first time. From experience the administrators had already seen that informal neighborhood councils could be effective in solving local problems, particularly when their members were chosen by the community.
¹²
From now on those members would be chosen in formal elections, although the borough mayors continued to be answerable to a Belgian “first mayor.” The first elections in the history of the Belgian Congo were held in late 1957, but were limited to Léopoldville, Elisabethville, and Jadotville. Only adult males were allowed to vote.

Congo, at that point, was one of the most urbanized, proletarianized, and well-educated colonies in Africa. No less than 22 percent of the population lived in the cities, 40 percent of the active male population worked for an employer, and 60 percent of the children attended primary school.
¹³
This situation was both new and precarious. Wages had risen spectacularly during the early 1950s, but from 1956 on, that growth had stagnated; there had even been a major reversion. The fall of raw material prices on the international market (due to, among other things, the end of the Korean War) put a brake on the economy. Unemployment began to appear in the cities.
¹⁴
Soon there were some twenty thousand jobless people in Kinshasa.
¹⁵
Those who had lost their jobs moved in with family members who still had an income. The houses and yards of the
cité
became overcrowded.
¹⁶
Little bars began popping up all over. Alcoholism and prostitution increased proportionately, for when life is hard, morals become easy. It was in this atmosphere of unrest that the first elections were held.

That only adult men were allowed to vote did not mean that the women and young people were politically apathetic. It is precisely in these circles that one saw around that time the rise of alternative displays of social involvement: the
moziki
and the
bills
. The former were women’s associations in which successful women gathered to save money and talk about the latest fashions. That might sound banal. At their parties the members of these associations all dressed in the same new, luxurious materials. But these customs also constituted a form of social commentary. The
moziki
had names like La Beauté, La Rose, and La Jeunesse Toilette, in French, for that was the language of social prestige. It was their way to respond to the gap between the sexes. They adopted the idiom of the male
évolués
and affirmed their own social progress. The members were social workers, teachers, or merchants. Victorine Ndjoli, the woman with the driver’s license, and a few of her friends set up La Mode: “We were influenced by the European fashions we picked up from the mail-order catalogues. Those French names proved that we had been to school, that we were civilized. Women were only given the right to learn French quite late, so speaking it was a way to place ourselves on the same level as the men.”
¹⁷
The radio announcer Pauline Lisanga also belonged to a
moziki
.

Many of these clubs aligned themselves with one of the city’s popular orchestras. The word
moziki
, by the way, comes from
music
. Victorine Ndjoli’s La Mode was an unqualified fan of OK Jazz, the Orchestre Kinois led by François Luambo Makiadi, nicknamed Franco. Makiadi is still considered the greatest guitarist and composer of Congolese rumba and, in a less Anglocentric history of black music, would take his rightful place beside the likes of B. B. King, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard. Franco de Mi Amor was what they called him,
le sorcier de la guitare
(the wizard of the guitar), Franco-le-Diable. Victorine and her lady friends went to his shows (later he even married one of them) where they drank
mazout
, beer mixed with lemonade. It had to be Polar beer, though, because that was made by Bracongo, the brewery where around that same time a young man by the name of Patrice Lumumba became an employee. “I was for Lumumba, we supported his MNC,” Victorine said. In a city where the Abako ruled the roost, that choice was hardly self-evident. “When he died, we all went into mourning.”
¹⁸
Women were not allowed to vote, but fashion, music, nightlife, drinking, and dancing took on political portent. They voted with their glasses. Primus, the beer brewed by the competition, was the one Kasavubu’s supporters drank.
¹⁹

And then there were the young people. After half a century of birth deficit, population figures began rising significantly from the 1950s. Between 1950 and 1960, 2.5 million babies were born in Congo. On the day of independence the country had some 14 million inhabitants. Congo was getting younger all the time: in the mid-1950s, 40 percent of the population was under the age of fifteen.
²⁰
Young people became a category of major importance, not only demographically, but also in society and politics. The
bills
were the colony’s first youthful subculture.
²¹
What the
nozems
were to Amsterdam, the
zazous
to Paris, and the rockers to London, the
bills
were to Léopoldville. They took their inspiration from the Westerns screened in the
cité
. As the name suggests, their hero was Buffalo Bill. They spoke an argot of their own,
hindubill
, and had their own dress code: scarves, jeans, and turned-up collars that were a reference to the Far West and mocked the impeccable
évolués
. This latter group, in turn, voiced great concern about how young people were going to the dogs. Unwholesome movies were to blame:

Restraints must be imposed on the movie theaters. Detective and cowboy movies are extremely popular. All of those scenarios demonstrate to the audiences, who are largely young people and often even children, how to go about stealing, killing, and, in a word, doing wrong.

When one sees the posters and billboards, one sometimes feels as though one has entered the realm of boorishness and sensuality.

How are we to teach our sons and daughters modesty, goodness, charity, self-respect, and respect for others? The great evil is housed in the movie theaters.

What else does one see in those alcoves but the most erotic films consisting of the most lustful scenes, to which extremely sensual music is then attached?

One evening I attended a showing. There were, altogether, ten adults in the theater. The rest? . . . Children between the ages of six and fifteen. The theater was full of these “lads.” A hellish noise . . . The boys bounced with impatience. The screen lit up . . . A cowboy movie . . . Applause . . . Shouts of joy . . . A love story . . . Kissing going on everywhere and shouts of “ha” from every corner . . . Then came the fistfights and the gunfire that elicited indescribable rapture . . . . Two ugly movies . . . After the show began the reenactment of what we had been watching on the screen for the last two hours. Young girls leaving the theater were accosted and kissed on the cheeks . . . . The boys followed each other with sticks and imitated the sound of a pistol, in emulation of the cowboys . . . . See here the moral lesson provided by that evening’s showing . . .

Abominable!

Let us cherish no illusions. The movie theater will become a school for gangsters in the Belgian Congo, unless the screening of certain films is banned in the
cité
or the
centres extra-coutumiers
.
²²

The
bills
were seen as hooligans who took to thievery, debauchery, and the use of marijuana. Juvenile delinquency in the cities did increase during this period, but almost never involved anything more than the theft of a basket of papayas or in the worst cases a bicycle, as opposed to serious crime.
²³
Still, this was something new. Parental authority was crumbling, the prestige of the
évolué
was being mocked, the influence of the traditional chief had vanished long ago. The
bills
created a world of their own. They split up into gangs, each with its own territory in the city, and those territories were rechristened with names like Texas or Santa Fe. Explicit political interest was quite foreign to the
bills
, but they generated a volatile atmosphere of rebellion and resistance.

On Sunday, June 16, 1957, sixty thousand spectators crowded into Raphaël de la Kéthulle’s Stade Roi Baudouin to watch a historic soccer match: F.C. Léopoldville, forerunner of the first national team, against Union Saint-Gilloise of Brussels, one of the most successful teams in the history of Belgian soccer.
²⁴
This was something new. For the first time, a Congolese team would play against a Belgian team in the colony. It was to be a fierce match with a rowdy ending. The referee was a Belgian army officer and his calls caused resentment. When he blew off two Congolese goals for offside violations, the crowd reacted furiously. The final score was 4–2 in the Belgians’ favor. The supporters shouted that the match had been rigged. Upon leaving the stadium,
bills
, workers, the unemployed, hoodlums, angry
mamans
, and schoolchildren vented their rage on the surroundings. There was screaming, blows were dealt out. Youth gangs and onlookers rushed in to join the fracas. Stones hailed down on the cars of white colonials trying to leave the stadium. They had never experienced anything like it. Soccer was supposed to keep the masses docile, wasn’t it? The police should have intervened. At the end of the day, the toll was forty persons wounded and fifty cars damaged.

This mounting tension resounded loudly in the elections held on December 8, 1957. It was an enormous popular success: 80 to 85 percent of all eligible voters turned out. The Abako did an outstanding job in Léopoldville and succeeded in winning the votes of many who were not even Bakongo. It took 139 of the 170 seats on the municipal council. Of the eight native mayors, six belonged to Abako. In Elisabethville, the migrants from Kasai, the largest population group in the city, won a large portion of the votes. The Union Congolaise, a Catholic, pro-Belgian association of
évolués
, also achieved sound results. Nine white candidates were elected as well.
²⁵

For Brussels, the successful and orderly elections rang in the start of the controlled democratization of the colony. Local elections were now to be held in other places as well, followed by provincial and later national ones. But it was too late for such gradual change, Kasavubu felt. In his acceptance speech as mayor of the borough of Dendale in Léopoldville, he did precisely what Lumumba would do in 1960 at his inauguration as prime minister: he gave a fiery speech.