Congo (46 page)

One of those delegates was Mario Cardoso. Today he is the deputy vice president of the Congolese senate. He invited me out to lunch in Kinshasa at the restaurant of the stately Memling Hotel.

I was the third student from Congo allowed to study in Belgium. Every year, Raphaël de la Kéthulle would send one of the Scheutists’ students to the university at Louvain. The Jesuits felt that they should educate people in their own country, but the Scheutists wanted to show that they had pupils who could stand comparison with Belgian students. The first one to go was Thomas Kanza, in 1951. He studied psychology and education. In fact, he had been hoping to study law, but the governor general had forbidden that, out of fear for subversion. The next year it was Paul Mushiete. He studied psychology and education too, and sociology alongside that. My turn came in 1954. What I really wanted was to attend the military academy, but that wasn’t allowed, so I also went for psychology and education. In 1959 I came back to Kinshasa and became an assistant at the University of Lovanium. I was planning to become a professor, but Lumumba asked me to go to the economic round table. I was the head of the MNC delegation, the Lumumba caucus.

The party had split in the meantime: there was Lumumba’s MNC-L, which was unitarian, and the MNC-Kalonji, which advanced the interests of the Baluba in Kasai. “There was an awful lot of suspicion at that conference. The Belgian delegation included gentlemen who had been our professors. We had to negotiate with them. That was no mean feat. The talks were about the future status of the colonial companies, but everything seemed to have been decided beforehand.”
⁷⁰

The economic round table was, above all, an attempt on Brussels’ part to save the furniture. Belgium wanted to safeguard its business interests in Congo and felt that Belgian companies should be free to decide where their registered office would be after 1960.
⁷¹
Cardoso was still bitter about that: “The companies were allowed to decide whether to continue under Congolese or Belgian law. That measure was forced down our throats as a foregone conclusion.” Most companies chose for Belgium, fearing as they did fiscal instability in Congo or, even worse, nationalization. From the time of Leopold II on, Congo had been a test plot for the free-market economy. Companies there enjoyed a generous fiscal regime with almost no government interference. Huge conglomerates, with the Generale Maatschappij in pole position, had experienced a period of unbridled capitalism. Even in those cases where the colonial state was the major shareholder, for example the influential Comité Spécial du Katanga, the government left the actual running of affairs to the businessmen. With independence on the horizon, many business leaders now feared that their days of autonomy and excellent relations with the government were numbered. They remained active in Congo, but chose for a registered office in Belgium, effectively placing their company under Belgian rather than Congolese governance. That transfer cost the Congolese treasury a vast amount of tax revenue.

During this second round of talks, the status of the “colonial portfolio” came up as well. The term referred to the huge package of shares the Belgian Congo held in many colonial companies (mines, plantations, railroads, factories). What was to be done with that? As soon as the Belgian Congo became Congo, those shares would obviously become the property of the new state. The Belgian politicians and business leaders didn’t think that was a good idea. They convinced the Congolese delegates that it would be better if those government participations were taken away from the state and transferred to a new Belgian-Congolese development company. It was a sly way to keep a hand on the purse strings.
⁷²
Here too, Congo paid for its delegation’s lack of economic experience. People who had been allowed to study only psychology were being asked to made crucial macroeconomic decisions. “Second-rank figures,” then-prime-minister Gaston Eyskens opined.
⁷³
One of them was the journalist Joseph Mobutu. He had been sent to negotiate by his friend Lumumba, and the experience was to haunt him for the rest of his life. He said of it later:

And there I sat, a silly, unmannered journalist, at the same table with the great white sharks of Belgian finance! I’d had no financial training whatsoever, and the other members of my delegation, who represented the other Congolese movements, hadn’t either. It is not one of my fondest memories. From April 26 to May 16 we negotiated inch by inch, but I became like one of those cowboys in a western who lets himself be bamboozled time and again by professional con men. We talked until late at night, and the next day we discovered that the Belgian parliament had meanwhile made decisions that rendered the negotiations obsolete. We had to fight for everything . . . . Of course we let ourselves be rolled. Our partners in the discussion used a whole series of legal and technical ruses to successfully safeguard the hold which the multinationals and the Belgian capitalists had on the Congolese pocketbook.
⁷⁴

The worst was yet to come, but only a few weeks later. On June 27, 1960, three days before independence, the Belgian parliament—with the endorsement of the Congolese government, no less—disbanded the Comité Spécial du Katanga.
⁷⁵
Congo could not have made a worse blunder! With that, the new state lost control over mining giant Union Minière, the motor of the national economy. How could that have happened? The CSK was essentially a public enterprise that awarded concessions in Katanga to private companies in return for shares. It held a majority share in Union Minière and therefore the power of control. Historically, that right to a government say in the company’s dealing had rarely been used: the colonial state had always relied on the competence of the business world. Now that Congo was on the point of becoming independent, however, there was a chance that the new state would actually involve itself in the activities of Union Minière and all its subsidiaries. By disbanding the CSK, that possibility was effectively blocked. In all their disaffection with the Moloch of Western capitalism, the Congolese delegates to the economic round table had no problem with that, and Lumumba’s new government would soon adopt that same line of reasoning . . . . Congo remained a part owner, but as minority shareholder had far less power and received far less of the profits than the big Belgian trusts, such as the Generale. In that way it not only missed out on many millions of dollars, but also on the opportunity to let the industry work in the service of the country itself.

Dancing with ignorance, the country moved toward the precipice of independence. The political keys were already in its pocket, but the economic ones were now safely tucked away in Belgium. Nevertheless, one day after this unbelievably cunning move, the two countries signed a “pact of friendship” that spoke of aid and assistance.

F
INALLY, IN LATE
M
AY
, the long-awaited national elections were held. The turnout was huge, the results predictable. After Patrice Lumumba’s MNC, the biggest winners were the regional parties, with or without separatist tendencies. The Abako won in Bas-Congo, Conakat in southern Katanga, and Balubakat in the north, Kalonji’s MNC in Kasai, Cerea in Kivu, and the PSA in Kwilu. The latter two were not true tribal parties, but provided the ethnically highly splintered regions of Kivu and Kwilu with a sort of super-tribal élan. The electoral map of Congo in 1960, therefore, was largely identical to the ethnographic maps drawn up by the scientists half a century before. This tribal reflex should not be seen as atavistic. Were pan-European elections to be held in Europe today, after all, there is a great chance that most of the French would vote for a Frenchman and most Bulgarians for a Bulgarian. In a vast country like Congo, where the greatest part of the population had no more than a primary school education, it should come as no surprise that many voted for candidates from their own region. The three strongest figures to come out of the elections were Kasavubu, Lumumba, and Tshombe. Kasavubu held sway over the western part of the country, Lumumba over the northwest and center, and Tshombe over the far south. That corresponded with the major cities: Léopoldville, Stanleyville, and Elisabethville. The smaller parties divided among themselves the countryside that lay between.

This fragmentation made it no easier to form a representative coalition government. No one party had an absolute majority (Lumumba’s resounding victory only secured about one-third of the parliamentary seats from five of the six provinces; he made absolutely no headway in Katanga), and even a rudimentary coalition with only a few partners was ruled out. The negotiations were going to take a long time. What’s more, the Belgian government was quite disappointed to see that Lumumba, whom they considered a seditious demagogue, had been able to win over so many voters. This concern went so far that Brussels even appointed a new minister resident, W. J. Ganshof van der Meersch, and sent him to Congo to supervise the formation of a new government. In his wake, new Belgian troops were also sent to the colony. Lumumba had little patience with these demarches and made no effort to disguise it. The two men irritated each other no end. Kasavubu was the first to be appointed to try and form a new government, but when that failed the job was given to Lumumba. He was faced with the almost impossible task of bringing together all the widely diverse individuals into a single political team. Up until one week before independence, the new minister resident still had hope that Lumumba would not become prime minister.

But on June 23 the first Congolese cabinet became a fact. It numbered twenty-three ministers, nine deputy ministers, and four ministers of state, posts that were divided among no less than twelve political parties. The way things go with difficult compromises, this feat produced more shouts of pain than of joy. Bolikango, the gray eminence from Équateur who had led the common front in Brussels, saw the office of president slip through his fingers at the last moment. Lumumba, after all, needed the support of the Abako, and received it by means of a compromise: if Kasavubu would repress his separatist urge, he could become the head of state. Lumumba, the big winner, therefore, did not become president himself, but only prime minister, even though his party had won 33 of the 137 parliamentary seats and Kasavubu’s only 12.

Tshombe realized at last that he had missed the boat and that his party would have to make do with one ministerial post and one deputy minister. His Katanga accounted for the lion’s share of the nation’s income, but was receiving little in return: that stung. Sooner or later, it would have to have repercussions. The parliament, too, was hesitant: the new cabinet was only barely ratified by the elected representatives.
⁷⁶
In the early days of the Lumumba cabinet, therefore, there was nothing like the collective effort of a government team providing unified support for a political project.

The team that was installed was not only heteroclite and petulant, but also extremely youthful. Seventy-five percent of them were under the age of thirty-five. The youngest was only twenty-six years old. That was Thomas Kanza, the first Congolese to obtain a university diploma. He became the new ambassador to the United Nations, certainly no sinecure in the first months after independence. The oldest cabinet minister was Pascal Nkayi, but he was only fifty-nine. He was made finance minister, after a lifetime as clerk to the post office administration. A new elite also held primacy in the parliament: only 3 of the 137 seats went to traditional chiefs.
⁷⁷

The first government of Congo inherited from Belgium a country with a well-developed infrastructure: more than fourteen thousand kilometers (nearly 8,700 miles) of rails and more than 140 kilometers (about eighty-seven miles) of highways and streets had been built; there were more than forty airports or airfields and more than a hundred hydroelectric and power plants and there was a modern industrial sector (Congo was world leader in industrial diamonds and the world’s fourth largest copper producer). In addition, a start had been made with general health care (three hundred hospitals for natives, plus medical centers and birth clinics) and the country enjoyed an extremely high degree of literacy (1.7 million primary school pupils in 1959)—achievements that were truly striking in comparison with other African colonies.
⁷⁸
What’s more, the army had had major successes in both world wars. But there is more to life than infrastructures. Thomas Kanza, the fresh-faced cabinet minister who had studied psychology, knew that for many Africans those successes were only relative: “Unlike what most Europeans were willing to admit, they had suffered more under the lack of sincere sympathy, respect, and love from the colonizers than from any lack of schools, roads, and factories.”
⁷⁹
Besides, what were you supposed to do with a fully appointed country if no one knew how to run it? On the day of its independence, the country had sixteen university graduates. And although there were hundreds of well-trained nurses and policy advisers, the Force Publique did not have a single black officer. There was not one native physician, not one engineer, not one lawyer, agronomist, or economist.

“B
ELGIUM HAD NO EXPERIENCE WITH COLONIZING
,” Mario Cardoso said during our elegant lunch at the Memling, “but it had even less experience with decolonization. Why did it all have to go so quickly? If they had waited five years, the first batch of Congolese officers would have finished their training. Then there would have been no mutinies in the army.” Between 1955 and 1960 the colonial regime had searched feverishly for reforms that could stem the tide of major social unrest, but it was too little and too late. And so the process of decolonization became a runaway locomotive and no one could find the brake. By bowing too late to the understandable demands of a frustrated elite, Brussels released a play of forces that far exceeded its own ability to control. But the same applies to that same young elite, which not only pinpointed and canalized the social dissatisfaction of the lower classes, but also whipped it up and magnified it until it took on proportions that it, too, was unable to handle. The chronology of events brought to light a paradox that could be noted at best, but not resolved: the decolonization had begun much too late, independence came much too early. Disguised as a revel, the breakneck emancipation of Congo was a tragedy that could only end in disaster.