Congo (55 page)

Then it would have to be by force, the United Nations decided. In August, September, and December 1961, the blue helmets launched heavy offensives to regain Katanga, to disband the local army and drive out the foreign mercenaries. They did not succeed. The mercenaries withdrew to Rhodesia and continued the fight from there. The UN campaign caused much suffering among the civilian population. Ambulances were fired upon, hospitals bombed, innocent civilians killed. More than thirty Europeans lost their lives. In addition, the UN offensive resulted in a dismal premiere: the first refugee camp in Congolese history. More than thirty thousand Baluba took to the road, out of fear for reprisals from Tshombe. They were not in favor of the secession and felt threatened. At the edge of Elisabethville they settled down in little huts of cardboard, leaves, and cloth.

Anne Mutosh, too, had bad memories of the UN offensive. “At the roadblocks, the Moroccan blue helmets raped a lot of women, even pregnant women. I was chairperson of the Union des Femmes Katangaises at the time, and I sent letters to Dag Hammarskjöld and President Kennedy. I actually met Hammarskjöld once.”

The UN secretary general himself was determined to put an end to the neocolonial state of Katanga. He engaged in intensive mediation between Léopoldville and Elisabethville. On September 18, 1961, he flew to Ndola airport in North Rhodesia for a meeting with Tshombe. But shortly before landing, the plane went down under circumstances that have never been cleared up. No one survived the crash. “Pray that your loneliness may prompt you to find something to live for, great enough to die for,” he had once written.
⁶²

The conflict seemed endless. Congo was like a broken vase that could not be glued back together. Still, around this same time (December 1961–January 1962), Mobutu’s government forces succeeded in putting an end to the secession of Kasai and overthrowing Gizenga’s government in the east of the country. With that, two of the four governments had been eliminated. Katanga would hold out for another year. The new secretary general of the United Nations, U Thant, spent all of 1962 trying to reach a solution through negotiations, but in late December of that year the United States decided that enough was enough. President John F. Kennedy provided considerable American support for a final UN offensive, known as Operation Grand Slam. Within two weeks, Katanga had been taken.

I
T WAS
J
ANUARY
3, 1963; my father was standing at the window on the second floor of his house in Jadotville. BCK had given him one of the apartments for single men. Not a villa with a garden, but a spacious flat with a downstairs garage and a modernistic stairway. It was just outside the city, beside the main road to Elisabethville. He knew that the UN blue helmets had already taken the capital. “Liberated” said some, “occupied” said others. The international force was now moving north toward Jadotville, the second largest town in Katanga province, following the same road along which Patrice Lumumba had made his final journey by car two years earlier. At the Lukutwe and Lufira rivers they had encountered resistance, but moved effortlessly into Jadotville around noon on January 3.

My father was looking out the window. He saw a white Volkswagen Bug coming up the road from the direction of town. Now that the troops had passed, apparently, the road to Elisabethville was open. Life was resuming its normal course. Suddenly, a volley of shots rang out. Across from his house, the Volkswagen careened to a stop. There were three people in it, a man behind the wheel and two female passengers. Three Belgians and a dog. My father had seen them before. The driver climbed out. Albert Verbrugghe worked in a cement factory. He raised his hands to show that he was unarmed. Blood was running from a cut under his eye. He screamed, wailed, staggered. The two women—his wife Madeleine and her friend Aline—did not get out. Across the fronts of their floral dresses, huge red spots were spreading. Only when their bodies had been pulled out of the car and laid in the grass beside the road, did Verbrugghe realize what had happened. The Indian blue helmets had apparently taken them for white mercenaries.
⁶³
The dog, too, was dead.

“That dog lay there for a whole week,” my father told me, sometime in the early eighties. I was sitting with him in the dentist’s waiting room. On the coffee table was a well-thumbed copy of
Paris Match
. The front page bore a black and white photograph of the scene with the Volkswagen. I was ten or eleven at the time and could see the mortal fear in the man’s eyes. My father looked at it for a few minutes, then said: “That photographer must have been more or less standing beside me. That happened right in front of my door.” Later I learned that the images had been shot by an American cameraman and sent around the world.
Time
magazine published them in January 1962; today they can be found on the Internet.
⁶⁴
My father had been an eyewitness to the most famous photograph of the Katangan secession.

On a Sunday in July 2007 I found myself standing where my father had stood then. I looked out his window at the spot where it happened. The road was dusty; there was a big sign advertizing CelTel. Someone was pushing a bicycle along, heavily laden with charcoal. My father’s apartment still existed. It was inhabited these days by a friendly young magistrate, his lovely wife, and two darling children. On Sundays the man was a preacher in the Armée de l’Eternel, one of Congo’s many Pentecostal denominations. The windowless garage where my father had parked his Ford Consul for five years was now an impromptu house of worship. I attended a service there. Some thirty believers were packed in close together on shaky wooden benches. Light came through the half-opened garage door. In the semidarkness I saw the glowing colors of the people at prayer. I thought about black and white photos. The years 1963 and 2007 faded into one. My father had died one year earlier, in 2006. The people sang beautifully.

W
HILE THE DOG LAY THERE ROTTING
, Katanga was retaken. Ten days later, on January 14, 1963, Tshombe announced that the secession was over. His Katangan gendarmes and white mercenaries fled across the border to Angola. Tshombe himself fled to Franco’s Spain. Among the Belgians, the mood was extremely anti-American: Kennedy was blamed for that final UN offensive. “It’s over and out,” my father’s colleague, Walter Lumbeeck thought at the time: “Everything became Congolese again. That came as a great disillusionment. A lot of people left.”
⁶⁵
The ANC moved in, young soldiers who spoke no Swahili, only Lingala, and who acted with the arrogance typical of victors. The administration was placed in the hands of people from Léopoldville. “During the secession, our boy’s pension plan was still in effect,” said Frans and Marja Vleeschouwers, “but under the new administration that all disappeared. People went back to cooking on
makala
, charcoal fires. You couldn’t get anything in the shops except for milk and meat.”
⁶⁶

For his cigarettes and shaving soap, my father had to turn to the Ethiopian blue helmets. The United Nations remained in Katanga for another eighteen months, to keep the peace. In the mid-1980s, when I first started shaving with a razor, my father produced a big, old-fashioned tube of Palmolive. He himself had switched to an electric razor long ago. As an electrical engineer, he couldn’t see the charm of brush and foam. “Don’t use it all up right away,” he said nonetheless, “I bought it more than twenty years ago from the UNOC soldiers.” I still have that tube. The soap is half a century old, but it hasn’t lost its foam.

The Katangan secession was over, but the white enclave lived on. They held “Bavarian Alps” festivals in Jadotville, where they walked around in lederhosen and waved steins of beer. In the middle of the savanna . . . Alice Lumbeeck recalled that, on November 22, 1963, there had been a celebration with dancing at the home of her Belgian neighbors. What was going on over there? They had once had a Katangan politician as neighbor. A frantic household. The crates of beer had been stacked to the ceiling. The Katangans had used the garden to barbecue rats. A white mercenary had also lived next door for a while, one of the “
affreux
,” the terrible ones. But now they heard the ruckus coming from their Belgian neighbors, normal citizens. “I asked them what the party was about. ‘Kennedy has been killed! Kennedy has been killed!’ they cheered.”
⁶⁷

T
HEN THERE WERE JUST THE TWO OF THEM
, Kasavubu and Mobutu. At the start of the third and final act of the First Republic, it was Kasuvubu who had triumphed: Lumumba was dead, Tshombe was in exile, and Mobutu hadn’t exactly distinguished himself with the liberation of Katanga. That had been the work of the blue helmets. For the first time since independence, Kasavubu could rule over the entire territory of Congo. The country was reunited and he traveled around in it. The ties with Belgium had been restored and those with America had been strengthened. As a token of appreciation, Washington had sent a free package of enriched uranium to Léopoldville for research in the nuclear reactor at Lovanium.
⁶⁸
Kasavubu owed the stability of those years in equal part to his prime minister, Cyrille Adoula, who remained in office for three years. That was far and away the longest term of office during the First Republic, where a prime minister’s tenure tended to be expressed more in months than in years. Adoula was a hardworking, intelligent, but introverted bureaucrat who, due to his irresolute nature, never constituted a threat to Kasavubu.
⁶⁹

During this third act, Kasavubu was able to considerably fortify his position. Now that peace and quiet seemed to have returned, he became a zealous advocate of a new constitution to replace the provisional
Loi fondamentale
. In the course of 1964, a commission turned its attention to drafting the country’s future rules of play. The result was the Constitution of Luluabourg, a text submitted to a national referendum, and a two-base hit for the president. The new constitution transformed Congo into a decentralized state, something Kasavubu had dreamed of for the last decade. The provinces were given more power, but were also greatly reduced in size. In 1962 the six gigantic provinces of colonial times had already been split up into twenty-one
provincettes
, miniprovinces, which reflected more closely the ethnic reality and the historical territories.
⁷⁰
What’s more, the new constitution granted the head of state a lot more power. From then on he would reign supreme over the prime minister and his government. The parliament, too, was hobbled. If it voted in favor of a law that did not appeal to the president, he could send it back with a request for a recount; anyone, after all, can make a mistake. And to avoid the same mistake being made twice, a two-thirds majority was needed to overturn the presidential alternative. In cases of emergency, the president could even draft legislation himself. Dickering with a recalcitrant prime minister became a thing of the past. “Accordingly, he may at his own initiative terminate the carrying out of the duties of the prime minister or of one or more members of the central government, particularly in those cases where he finds himself in grave opposition to them,” Article 62 read.
⁷¹
Kasavubu was sitting pretty: the country had been broken up into little blocks, Katanga had dissolved into three innocuous miniprovinces, and he held the reins more tightly than ever. Divide and conquer is what they called that. He was safely out of range. Or so he thought.

On November 19, 1963, two Russian diplomats were arrested as they returned from Brazzaville. They were found to be carrying extremely compromising documents. In the capital on the far shore they had met with Christophe Gbenye, former interior affairs minister under Lumumba. Brazzaville had become a haven for those who had been Lumumbists from the very start, close enough to Léopoldville, yet safely out of reach of Kasavubu. The documents spoke of the setting up of a revolutionary movement, the Comité National de Libération, led by Gbenye. Delegations had already visited Moscow and Peking. In the documents, the committee asked for Russia’s support in training young soldiers. It asked for radio units, small tape recorders, miniature cameras and photocopiers, “or other, similar material for espionage.” It sounded like
Mission Impossible
. The group also asked for “20 miniature pistols (with silencer) in the form of lighters or ballpoint pens” and several “carryalls with a double bottom.” Kasavubu’s peace of mind had been premature.
⁷²

The first eruption of defiance took place in Kwilu. The instigator was Pierre Mulele, former minister of education and the fine arts under Lumumba and one of Gizenga’s confederates. Mulele had nothing to do with the conspirators in Brazzaville, but he was on the same track. After the debacle with the first government he had fled abroad and ended up in China. There he grew acquainted with the ideology and practices of Mao’s peasant revolt and gained experience with guerrilla warfare techniques. With this training, he returned clandestinely to his native region. Gizenga was a Pende, the tribe that had fought against the colonial authorities in 1931; Mulele belonged to the neighboring Mbunda tribe. He tried to reignite the fires of rebellion among the local farmers. The enemy this time was not the white colonizer, but the first generation of Congolese politicians who had murdered Lumumba. After all, weren’t they more concerned with power than with the public interest? Wasn’t their lifestyle bloated and their grab for financial gain despicable? Weren’t they simply depraved, bourgeois pigs? Rather than serving the people, he claimed, they abused their power and stuck their fingers in the till. Their pro-Western attitude only aggravated their greed. The farmers listened to Mulele and nodded in assent. It was true, they really hadn’t noticed much of the benefits of independence. In fact, their lives had become harder. Wasn’t it about time for “a second independence,” they wondered. The expression was an authentically popular one; a new
dipenda
, but this time the right kind.