The African Dream

by Ernesto Che Guevara

  The lake is full of fish, but there has been little fishing in recent times because of aircraft during the day and raids by the dictatorship’s boats at night.

  For the purpose of analyzing the revolutionary forces in this conflict, the human geography can be divided into three groups: peasants, leaders and soldiers.

  The peasants belong to different tribes, of which there are a great many in the area. If we look at the enemy army’s report on its general plan of attack we notice that it always specifies the tribe to which people belong; this is important information for political work. Relations between the tribes are usually cordial but never truly fraternal, and there is serious rivalry between some of the tribal groups. This phenomenon can be seen between the Rwandans and the rest of the Congolese tribes, but it is also clearly evident between tribes in the Nor-Katanga ethnic area (who inhabited the southern part of our guerrilla territory) and tribes of the ethnic area of Kivu province (who inhabited the northern part of our territory); this was most conspicuously represented by Kabila on one side and Soumialot on the other.

  The peasants present us with one of the most difficult and engaging problems of a people’s war. In all wars of liberation like this, a fundamental element is the hunger for land arising from the great impoverishment of a peasantry exploited by the latifundists, feudal lords and, in some cases, capitalist-type companies. In the Congo, however, this was not the case, at least not in our region, and probably not in most of the country. The Congo has only 14 million inhabitants spread over more than two million square kilometers—a very low population density—with land that is highly fertile. On the eastern front, there is no significant land hunger or even individual enclosures; simple convention ensures that the crop belongs to those who cultivate it. Moreover, in practice, property is not defended against intruders; only where there are gardens is there some protection against goats and other animals that might cause damage. The concept of land ownership hardly exists in any of the areas we visited, and the huge expanse of the Congo Basin permits anyone who wishes to acquire land to simply go and work there. As far as I understand it, in the area around Bukavu to the north, feudalism is much more developed and there are real feudal lords and serfs; but in the mountainous region where we were the peasants are completely independent.

  How can the level of development of these tribes be described? It would be necessary to conduct a much deeper study than we have had the opportunity to make, with much more data and with a proper geographical breakdown, for it is clear that the development of each sub-region very much depends on its particular historical and social conditions. There are features of primitive communism among the nomadic groups, and some traces of slavery in the way women are treated, although in relation to men no slavery was evident. Women are merchandise, an object to be bought and sold, and there is no law or convention restricting the number of women that may be owned; economic influence is the only limiting factor. Once a woman is bought, she becomes the absolute property of her lord and husband, who in general does not work at all, or only very little, in the house or fields. At most he participates in activities like hunting, but always accompanied by women, who play an active role. It is women’s responsibility to till the land, to transport crops, to prepare food, and to look after the children; she is truly a domestic animal. Feudalism, as I’ve said, can be seen in northern parts of the region, but not here, where there is no property in land. Capitalism is not dominant but operates in superficial forms through small traders who establish themselves on the periphery, and following the North Americans in what we might call the “demonstration effect” of certain items used by the peasantry. Aluminum pots are fast replacing earthenware ones, for example, and industrially made spears are taking over from those made at home or at the local forge; modern clothing is worn by some peasants, and radios can be found in the homes of the more prosperous. Industrial goods are acquired through trading the products of agriculture and hunting.

  In the past, people worked as paid laborers, or simply through middlemen, in the extraction of gold from the rivers that flow down from the mountains to the Congo Basin. The trenches dug for this purpose can still be seen, but the works have been abandoned. Some crops, such as cotton, are processed and packed on a capitalist basis with the help of modern machinery. Textile factories are not present in the region, although there are a few in Albertville; there are no industrial workers, except those at the sugar mill, whose status is unclear, and I saw no signs of wage labor. The peasants gave their labor to the army and for the rest of the time supported themselves through hunting, fishing or agriculture; any surplus was sold for money. The Congolese currency is accepted as a measure of value, but it does not penetrate very deeply into the relations of production.

  Imperialism shows itself only sporadically in the region, its main interest in the Congo being the strategic mineral resources of Katanga, where there is an industrial proletariat, the diamond resources of Katanga and Kasai, and the tin deposits located near our region (although not actually in our region). Agriculture consists of the cultivation of cotton and peanuts, and to some extent palm trees for the extraction of oil, but in these cases, too, the harvesting and trade are carried out on the basis of primitive relations.

  What could the Liberation Army offer this peasantry? This is the question that always bothered us. We could not speak here of an agrarian reform, of dividing up the land, because everyone could see that it was already divided; nor could we speak of credits for the purchase of farm tools because the peasants ate what they grew with their primitive instruments and the physical features of the region did not lend themselves to credit-fuelled expansion. Ways have to be found of fostering the need to acquire industrial goods, which the peasants were obviously willing to accept and pay for, and therefore a need for more widespread trade. In the conditions of the war, however, we could not pay any real attention to this.

  We should stress here the exploitation to which the peasants are subjected. How is this manifest? What is visible is the mistreatment of the population; in the enemy-occupied areas, there is an increasing number of rapes of women and murders of men, women and children are multiplied. Moreover, the people are forced to supply food and perform services. The key feature here is the negation of the individual human being, which may go as far as physical elimination because the [dictatorship’s] army, as a modern institution, had organized their logistics, anticipating a shortage of supplies or the hostility of the population.

  On the other hand, what did we have to offer? We did not offer much protection, as our story has shown. Nor did we offer any education, which might have been a great vehicle for communication. Medical services were provided only by the few Cubans present, with inadequate medical supplies, a fairly primitive system of administration, and no sanitary conditions. I think that some deep thought and research should be devoted to the problem of revolutionary tactics where the relations of production do not give rise to land hunger among the peasantry. The peasantry is the main social layer in this region; there is no industrial proletariat and a petty bourgeois class of middlemen is not very developed.

  What kind of leaders has the revolution brought forth? We may divide them into the categories of national and local leaders. The national leaders I got to know were first and foremost Kabila and Massengo. Kabila is certainly the only one of them who, in addition to a clear head and a developed capacity for reasoning, has the personality of a leader: he asserts himself by his very presence; he is capable of inspiring loyalty, or at least submission; and he is skillful in direct dealings with the population (although this contact is very rare). In short, he is a leader capable of mobilizing the masses. Massengo is an individual with very little charisma, no knowledge of the art of war and no talent for organization; he was totally overwhelmed by events. His distinctive feature was an extraordinary loyalty to Kabila, and a desire to continue the fight beyond what had been planned, even against the views of many of those around him. It would be u
nfair to expect any more of him; he did what he was capable of doing.

  Among all the section heads on the General Staff and the so-called brigade leaders, not one can be described as having the qualities of a national leader. The only one who might develop in the future is Compañero Muyumba, but he is still in the Congo and we don’t know what his situation is. He is a serious young man, apparently intelligent and resolute insofar as we were able to observe him, but that is all we can say about him.

  Of the national leaders in the Congo, Mulele remains the big mystery, almost a phantom. He was never seen at meetings, nor did he ever leave his zone after the struggle began. There are many indications that he is a man of a superior caliber, but his envoys—or those who said they were his envoys—displayed all the negative qualities of their counterparts in the various commissions and sectors of the liberation movement who roam the world swindling the revolution.

  Of the men who have gained some prestige in recent times, we have already related what others have to say about General Olenga. Without judging whether they are true or not, we can say that the stories about him suggest his unwillingness to make any sacrifice. For months that are becoming years, he has been living off the myth of the revolution as a general in exile. Others do this as political leaders, but he is a general who conducts his operations by telepathy from Cairo or other such capital cities.

  Soumialot is another whom I consider useful as a middle-level revolutionary leader. With the right guidance and supervision, he might have rendered some service as president of the Supreme Council of the Revolution; the main things he does are traveling, living it up and giving sensational press conferences—that’s all. He lacks any organizational ability. His conflicts with Kabila, in which both employed a multitude of ruses, contributed as much as anything to the temporary setback of the insurrection.

  Gbenyé is not worth mentioning as he is simply an agent of the counterrevolution.

  It might be the case that some young people have emerged, combining a capacity for leadership with a revolutionary spirit, but I have not met any or they have not demonstrated those qualities to date.

  The local leaders fall into two categories: those in charge of military units and peasant leaders. The military leaders were appointed through the most arbitrary methods, with no theoretical, intellectual, military or organizational training of any kind. Their only merit is that they exercise some influence over the tribes in their regions, but a line could be drawn through their names without any loss to the revolution.

  The local peasant leaders are the kapitas and chairmen, appointed by the old Lumumba administration or its successors, who would like to be the germ of a civil power. But faced with tribal realities, the easy option was chosen of making traditional chiefs the chairmen and kapitas. These men are nothing other than the old chiefs in another guise, some better or more progressive than others, some more conscious of the meaning of the revolution, but none of them have reached even a middling level of political development. Having authority over a group of peasants, they are responsible for the provision of food to soldiers passing through the area and bearers to carry things from one place to another, for the organization of supplies to units installed nearby, for help with the construction of housing, etc. They were useful intermediaries in the solving of such problems, but did nothing faintly related to political work.

  The troop had their political commissar, a title borrowed from the socialist versions of a liberation army or people’s army. Anyone familiar with the work of commissars in various liberation wars, or who knows of the heroism and self-sacrifice of such compañeros from stories about them, would not be able to recognize them in the Congo, where the political commissar was selected from men with a certain level of education—almost always with a knowledge of French—who came from an urban petty-bourgeois family. They performed like sporadic loudspeakers; the men would assemble at a certain time to hear the commissar “sound off” on particular problems, and then they were left to their own initiative to follow his verbal recommendations. Neither the commissars nor the officers, with a few honorable exceptions, participated directly in combat; they looked out for their own skins, had better food and clothing than the rest of the troop, and enjoyed frequent vacations when they could go and get drunk on the notorious pombe in nearby villages. In the Congo, the political commissar is a veritable dandy of the revolution and, furthermore, could be dispensed with without any harm whatsoever, although it would be far preferable to develop genuine revolutionaries for this task which is so vitally important in a people’s army.1

  The soldiers are of peasant origin and completely raw; the main attraction for them is to have a rifle and a uniform, sometimes even shoes and a certain authority in the area. Corrupted by inactivity and the habit of lording it over the peasants, saturated with fetishistic notions about death and the enemy, with no structured political education, they consequently lack revolutionary consciousness or any forward-looking perspective beyond the traditional horizon of their tribal territory. Lazy and undisciplined, they have no spirit of combat or self-sacrifice; they do not trust their leaders (who can be considered exemplary only in terms of obtaining women, pombe or food, and making an easy life for themselves); they lack any consistent battle experience that would enable them to develop, if only as killers; in reality, they lack training of any kind as drilling was the only exercise we ever saw them do during our stay there. All these traits make the soldier of the Congolese revolution the worst example of a fighter I have encountered to date.

  Even with full backing of the leaders, it still would have been a gigantic task to make revolutionary soldiers out of these individuals. But given the hopelessness of the high command and the obstruction by the local chiefs, this became the most thankless of all our tasks and one in which we completely failed.

  Among the political commissars and special weapons instructors there was often someone who had returned from a six-month course of study in one of the socialist countries. Most of these graduates came from Bulgaria, the Soviet Union and China. You could not work wonders with such men; the prior selection was very poor, and it was like winning the lottery if you found genuine revolutionaries or at least men tested in struggle. They returned with a great sense of their own importance, a highly developed conception of the duty to protect cadre (ie, themselves), and a well-formed idea, clearly expressed in their actions and demands, that the revolution owed them a lot for their period of study abroad and should somehow reward them now that they were making the sacrifice of being with their compañeros. They almost never participated in any fighting; they were usually instructors—a task for which they were not qualified, with a few exceptions—or formed parallel political organizations that called themselves Marxist-Leninist but actually served to deepen divisions. In my view, most of these evils were due to flaws in the prior selection. Good education can result in extraordinary development for someone with an awakening consciousness. But for this kind of pliable and domesticated revolutionary, all that was developed during his months in a socialist country was an ambition to attain a leadership position on the basis of his colossal knowledge, and also, at the front, a nostalgia for the good times spent abroad.

  We should ask what is left after our defeat. From a military point of view, the situation is not so bad. The small villages controlled by our army did fall, but in the surrounding area there are troops—with less ammunition and some lost weapons but generally intact. The enemy soldiers occupy only the territory through which they pass and this is a very important fact. Nevertheless, from a political point of view, all that remains are scattered groups that are still disintegrating, but from which one or several nuclei should be extracted as the basis for a future guerrilla army. As of today, forces are present in the Fizi-Baraka area but do not occupy any locality nor do they have permanent control over any territory; others remain more or less well organized at Uvira, controlling a good stretch of the highway from Baraka to Bukavu up to now; and at
Mukundi, Muyumba has what could be the germ of an organization with a political understanding of the struggle. There are also some troops at Kabimba who used to be quite well armed, and there must still be some nuclei in the Kabambare and Kasengo hills, although we have not had contact with them for some time.

  It is important to note that all these groups have very little to do with one another; in practice they don’t obey any orders from above, and their vision does not extend beyond the zone where they have their own particular enclave. For all these reasons, they are not the embryo of a new army, but the remnants of the old. There may be somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 weapons in the area, senselessly distributed among individual peasants, and it will not be easy to recover them. Some heavy weapons were saved, but right now I cannot say precisely how many. If a single leader with the right qualities were to emerge at just one spot, the eastern front would soon hold the same territory it had achieved at the time of the defeat. A rival to Soumialot and Kabila has recently appeared in the person of Mbagira, the minister for foreign relations in the Supreme Council of the Revolution, who has been based in Uvira, but we cannot make any concrete assessment of him. Only events will tell whether he really is a leader with the capabilities demanded by the struggle in the Congo.

  What are the characteristics of the enemy? First, it should be explained that the old Congolese army that remained as a legacy from the Belgian colonial period—badly instructed and without a leadership cadre or fighting spirit—was swept away by the revolutionary wave; it was so badly demoralized that towns could be taken without a fight. (It seems to be true that the simbas would telephone in advance their intention to capture a particular city and the government troops would promptly withdraw.) Subsequently, the army was put in the hands of North American and Belgian instructors, who transformed it into a force with the characteristics of a regular army capable of fighting without assistance—although in the final stage of the war it received help from white mercenaries. It is well trained and disciplined, with proper cadres. The white mercenaries fight efficiently—as long as they do not have to take a pounding—and the Africans fight alongside them. They don’t have much in the way of weapons; their most effective weapon turned out to have been their PT boats, which made it difficult [for us] to cross the lake; but their aircraft, which I have mentioned before, are antiquated and not very effective; their infantry weapons were only modernized at the very end.