Fomenting Discord

June 30th 1960 was a day of hope and also regret for the Congo. It had just gained independence from Belgium. Its young Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba’s scathing response to King Baudoin I’s rose-tinted view of Belgium’s colonial record[1] emphasised two things. Lumumba and his nation would not tolerate Baudoin’s revision of the humiliating and brutal colonial past, and if he had not been previously, Lumumba was a marked man from that day forth.

Fearing the loss of their plantations and business interests Belgian colonists fought to maintain their privileges. They did so by taking advantage of divisions in the government between President Joseph Kasa-Vubu and Lumumba, who favoured different systems. They also stoked the flames by instigating the secessionist movement in the mineral rich Katanga province.

Katanga’s secessionist government was led by Moïse Tshombe, but it was sustained by mainly Belgian mercenaries. The strategy soon bore fruit, as the Congolese army soon mutinied.

Plots

Plotting Lumumba’s downfall gathered pace. The governments of Belgium, Britain and the USA wanted a permanent solution to the Lumumba problem. Fearful of losing influence and privilege, especially in Katanga province, the former colonial power began destabilising the newly independent Congo.

The Chief of Staff, Joseph Désiré Mobutu, – a man Lumumba had unwisely promoted – proved a willing vessel. The new government was soon in a chaotic state – one that could be exploited. On September 5th 1960 Lumumba was dismissed by President Kasa-Vubu, but the Prime Minister refused to accept it and dismissed the President – the Prime Minister had greater power than the President.

Just over a week later Mobutu made his move, launching his first coup. Lumumba was put under house arrest. Initially, Lumumba was more Pan-Africanist than socialist and had wanted normal relations with the USA, but his anti-colonial speech in response to Baudoin I’s paternalistic appreciation of Belgian colonialism and rule came at a high cost. It alarmed the west and also Kasa-Vubu and Mobutu.

Lumumba asked for help from the USA, especially to resolve the separatist problem, but it was refused. That left him little option but to ask the United Nations and also the USSR to help. At the height of the Cold War Lumumba had been driven into the arms of the USSR and that heightened western fears about him.

The governments of the USA, Britain and Belgium wanted a permanent solution to the ‘Lumumba problem’. And now they had their pretext.

Cynical Ruse

After four months he was allowed to escape, but that was a ruse. The UN did nothing to save him. Almost certainly on the orders of the Belgian Minister for African Affairs, Mobutu and Kasa-Vubu had Lumumba delivered into the hands of Katanga’s secessionists. Lumumba was made to literally eat his own words. Tshombe then did what Mobutu could not – he had Lumumba murdered by Belgian mercenaries led by Julien Gat on January 17th 1961.

Another Belgian mercenary, Charles Huyghé boasted of his role in the murder of an unarmed prisoner, and claimed that Lumumba begged for his life. Instead of facing justice, Huyghé was awarded Belgium’s top award for bravery, the Order of Leopold. Huyghé was also made a Knight of the Realm.

[1]  The following extract of Lumumba’s impromptu speech is quoted by Chukwunyere Kamalu in The Little African History Book – Black Africa from the Origins of Humanity to the Assassination of Lumumba and the Turn of the 20th Century. The third edition, sadly out of print was published by Orisa Press in 2007: “For this independence of the Congo, even as it is celebrated today with Belgium, a friendly country with whom we deal as equal to equal, no Congolese worthy of the name will ever be able to forget that it was by fighting that it has been won, a day-to-day fight, an ardent and idealistic fight, a fight in which we were spared neither privation nor suffering, and for which we gave our strength and our blood. We are proud of this struggle, of tears, of fire, and of blood, to the depths of our being, for it was a noble and just struggle, and indispensable to put an end to the humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force”.

Decolonisation 

Despite the examples of recent African history, such as the Mau Maus. Colonialism had to go. Britain belatedly realised it and its post Mau Mau process was relatively peaceful. France, however, was reluctant to let its African colonies go. It was not alone.

Belgium and Portugal proved reluctant too. Belgium’s resulted in chaos, as it simply withdrew without a decolonisation process. Instead the Congo had a destabilisation process. No sooner had the country achieved independence than divisions rose to the surface. The President, Joseph Kasa-Vubu was conservative and favoured a federal republic. The Prime Minister, one of the outstanding leaders of Africa’s liberation struggles, Patrice Lumumba, was a nationalist, who favoured a centralised republic.

From Bad to Worse

Relations between the former colony and colonial power began badly on June 30th 1960 at independence. The Belgian King Baudoin I told the Congolese how benevolent and beneficial Belgian rule had been for them. This outraged the Congo’s young Prime Minister. Lumumba swiftly disabused the Belgians of such notions.

“We have witnessed atrocious sufferings of those condemned for their political opinions or religious beliefs, exiled in their own country, their fate truly worse than death itself”, Lumumba told Baudoin and the Belgian delegation. “Who will ever forget the massacres where so many of our brothers perished, the cells into which those who refused to submit to a regime of oppression and exploitation were thrown?”

And then there was the genocide – one of the worst in history – that Baudoin’s ancestor Leopold II had inflicted on the Congo. Colonialism had been anything but beneficial for the Congo, and it had sown the seeds for yet more misery. The die had been cast.

Destabilisation

And then there were the secessionists. Katanga was a mineral rich province, still ripe for exploitation, both economic and political. Led by Moïse Tshombe, Katanga, attempted to secede. Its ‘army’ largely consisting of Belgian mercenaries served a ‘movement’ fomented and utilised by Belgian colonialists and industrialists who feared the future and were keen to protect their interests and privileges.

This, combined, with the internal disputes within the government, created a toxic situation and it marked Lumumba for assassination. Then US President Dwight Eisenhower and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, among others, wanted a permanent solution to the ‘Lumumba problem’.

Exploited

The growing divisions between Lumumba and Kasa-Vubu provided the pretext needed. The government was ineffective. It had failed to resolve the secessionist problem and the disagreement in the government had rendered it ripe for an unscrupulous take-over. The conditions required to disguise a coup as being in the national interest had been carefully fomented.

On September 5th 1960 Kasa-Vubu announced that he had dismissed Lumumba. The Prime Minister refused to accept it and countered by informing the President that he had dismissed him. The situation degenerated further. On September 14th, with the tacit approval of the western governments, Joseph Désiré Mobutu turned on his mentor.

Lumumba was arrested and he was kept under house arrest until he was allowed to escape – the pretext to deny responsibility for his murder.

National Hero

Lumumba was betrayed into capture and murder by Mobutu, a man Lumumba had misread and promoted. Lumumba was murdered on the orders of secessionist leader Moïse Tshombe. Few tears were shed by the western powers for Lumumba then, yet from the chaos that followed, a brutal kleptocratic dictator seized power and inflicted over three decades of poverty and misery on his people.

Faced with an insurrection, led by long-term foe Laurent-Désiré Kabila, Mobutu eventually fled to Morocco. One of the most brutal and corrupt tyrants in African history died in exile in September 1997, a few months after he fled. Mobutu’s legacy of brutality and corruption cost the Democratic Republic of Congo dear. Kabila was killed by members of his Presidential Guard in 2001. He was succeeded by his son Joseph.

Never Recovered

The former Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda once said that Africa never recovered from the February 1966 coup that overthrew Dr Kwame Nkrumah. There’s stiff competition in very dirty processes in many countries for events that Africa has not recovered from.

A decade of change – the 1960s – began with hopes that were soon dashed. Five years before the coup that toppled Nkrumah, the Father of Pan-Africanism, Lumumba was murdered.

In 1965 Mobutu seized power after a coup. This was his second coup. Five years earlier Mobutu, with the support of Belgium, Britain and the USA, led a coup that placed Lumumba under arrest. He was allowed to escape. In reality, he was delivered into the hands of Tshombe’s secessionist mercenaries to be killed.

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