Lumumba publicly accused Belgian officers of fomenting rebellion, dismissed Janssens and decided to replace the whole of the officer corps with Congolese. The new army commander he appointed was a former sergeant who had last served in the army in the Second World War. As chief of staff, he chose a 29-year-old personal aide, Joseph Mobutu, who had spent seven years in the Force Publique, employed mainly as a clerk, before leaving in 1956 to work as a journalist.
Despite these changes, the mutiny spread. In scores of incidents, whites were beaten, humiliated and raped. Seized by panic, the white population fled in thousands. The Belgian government urged Lumumba to allow Belgian troops stationed in the Congo to restore order, but Lumumba refused. Belgium then unilaterally ordered Belgian forces stationed in the Congo into action and arranged to fly in reinforcements. As Belgian troops took possession of key points including Leopoldville airport, Lumumba became convinced that Belgium was trying to reimpose its rule. He broke off diplomatic relations and declared that, as far as he was concerned, the Congo was now at war with Belgium.
On 11 July, the crisis escalated. With the connivance of Belgium and the support of Belgian mining and commercial firms, the Katanga leader, Moïse Tshombe, grasped the opportunity of the chaos to declare Katanga an independent state. Belgian regular officers previously attached to the Force Publique began training a new Katangese gendarmerie, and a Belgian technical assistance mission was sent to Elisabethville, the Katanga capital, to act, in effect, as a shadow government. Belgium’s plan was to use Katanga as a base from which to establish a pro-Belgium government in Leopoldville.
As the Congo’s administration disintegrated and internal security collapsed, Lumumba appealed to the United Nations for help. Acting with remarkable speed, within days the UN organised a major airlift of foreign troops, mainly from African countries, and set in motion plans for a civilian task force to run public services. But Lumumba demanded more. In an increasingly volatile mood, he insisted that the UN force be used to expel Belgian troops. Then he issued an ultimatum threatening that if the UN did not remove Belgian troops by 19 July, he would ask the Soviet Union to intervene. Lumumba’s frenetic manoeuvres, coming at a time when the Cold War was at one of its peaks, infuriated the United States. To the Congo’s misery and confusion was now added the possibility of a Cold War imbroglio.
By the end of July, UN forces had been deployed in five of the Congo’s six provinces, allowing Belgian troops to be withdrawn. But the problem of Katanga remained unresolved. Lumumba issued new demands insisting that UN troops be used to end the secession of Katanga, by force if necessary. When UN officials made clear to him that their mandate precluded interfering in the Congo’s internal affairs, Lumumba reacted in fury, accusing the UN of collaboration with Belgium and attacking the whole UN operation. Key UN officials came to share the US and Belgian view that Lumumba was too erratic and irrational to be trusted. Congolese politicians in Leopoldville and the Catholic hierarchy were similarly exasperated by Lumumba’s incessant quarrelling, his dictatorial habits and impetuous decisions.
On 15 August, obsessed by the need for military victory in Katanga and facing another secession in south Kasai, the main source of the Congo’s diamond riches, Lumumba took the fateful decision to ask the Soviet Union for immediate military assistance. He planned to send a military force first to regain control in south Kasai and then to march on Elisabethville to oust Tshombe. Lumumba’s military expedition to Kasai, supported by Soviet aircraft, trucks and technicians, resulted in the massacre of hundreds of Baluba tribesmen and the flight of a quarter of a million refugees. Colonel Mobutu, who controlled the Leopoldville troops, fell out with Lumumba over the expedition and joined the ranks of his critics.
Moves to get rid of Lumumba gathered momentum. Urged on by Belgian advisers, US diplomats and his own Congolese supporters, President Kasa-Vubu announced Lumumba’s dismissal as prime minister, accusing him of acting arbitrarily and plunging the Congo into civil war. Lumumba in turn announced he had dismissed Kasa-Vubu as president. Western governments sided with Kasa-Vubu; the Soviet bloc with Lumumba. The outcome was decided on 14 September when Mobutu, with the active encouragement of the US Central Intelligence Agency and the connivance of UN officials, announced he was assuming power himself. He then ordered the expulsion of all Soviet personnel.
While Mobutu assembled an interim government in Leopoldville, retaining Kasa-Vubu as president, Lumumba, after seeking UN protection, continued to live at the prime minister’s residence on the banks of the Congo River, guarded by an inner circle of UN troops. Various assassination schemes were set in motion. The Belgian government was the most determined of all to be rid of Lumumba. In a telegram to Belgian officials in Elisabethville on 6 October, the Minister of African Affairs, Count Harold d’Aspremont Lynden, the chief architect of Katanga’s secession, summed up Belgian intentions: ‘The main aim to pursue in the interests of the Congo, Katanga and Belgium, is clearly Lumumba’s élimination définitive.’
In November, shortly after the UN General Assembly bowed to American pressure and accorded recognition to Kasa-Vubu’s administration, Lumumba decided to escape from Leopoldville and head for Stanleyville, his main political base, to set up a rival regime there. ‘If I die, tant pis,’ he told a friend. ‘The Congo needs martyrs.’ Halfway to Stanleyville, he was caught, severely beaten and taken to an army prison in Thysville, about a hundred miles south-west of Leopoldville. As rebellions erupted in the Stanleyville region, in Kivu province and in north Katanga, a coterie of Belgian officials and Congolese politicians, including Mobutu, decided to dispose of Lumumba once and for all, sending him to Elisabethville, Tshombe’s capital, knowing that it was tantamount to a death sentence. On 17 January 1961 he was executed by a firing squad under the command of a Belgian officer.
The agony of the Congo continued for year after year. It became a battleground for warring factions, marauding soldiers, foreign troops, mercenary forces, revolutionary enthusiasts and legions of diplomats and advisers. Katanga’s secession lasted for two more years until in 1963 the United Nations resolved to finish it off. Rebellions in the eastern Congo in 1964 ended with a death toll of a million Congolese. In Leopoldville, politicians bickered endlessly. When Mobutu, the army commander, stepped forward a second time in 1965 and assumed the presidency for himself, it seemed at the time to offer some sort of respite.
Belgian rule in Rwanda culminated in a similar disaster. Belgium’s policy of favouring the Tutsi minority in all aspects of the administration and in education produced a groundswell of deep resentment among the Hutu majority. In March 1957, a group of nine Hutu intellectuals, all former seminarians, published a BaHutu Manifesto challenging the entire economic and administrative system in Rwanda. The central problem, said the authors, was ‘the political monopoly of one race, the Tutsi race, which, given the present structural framework, becomes a social and economic monopoly’. They demanded measures to achieve ‘the integral and collective promotion of the Hutu’.
Belgian officials reacted lethargically to the protest. In December 1958, a senior administrator finally conceded that ‘the Hutu–Tutsi question posed an undeniable problem’ and proposed that official usage of the terms ‘Hutu’ and ‘Tutsi’ – on identity cards, for example – should be abolished. The Hutu, however, rejected the proposal, wanting to retain their identifiable majority; abolition of identify cards would prevent ‘the statistical law from establishing the reality of facts’. The idea gained ground that majority rule meant Hutu rule. Ethnic obsession took hold among the small stratum of the educated elite. Political parties were formed on an ethnic basis. Hutu parties campaigned for the abolition of the Tutsi monarchy and the establishment of a republic.
The first spasm of violence erupted in November 1959. In what became known as ‘the wind of destruction’, roving bands of Hutu went on the rampage, attacking Tutsi authorities, burning Tutsi homes and looting Tutsi property. Hundreds of Tutsi were killed; thousands fled into exile.
The terminology used by Hutu extremists for the killing was ‘work’.
In the midst of this chaos, Belgium decided to launch the idea of self-government. It also switched sides, throwing its support behind the Hutu cause. ‘Because of the force of circumstances, we have to take sides,’ a senior Belgian official told Brussels in January 1960. ‘We cannot remain neutral and passive.’ The colonial authorities thus began dismissing Tutsi chiefs and appointing Hutus in their place. The new chiefs immediately organised the persecution of Tutsis in districts that they controlled, precipitating a mass exodus of 130,000 Tutsis to neighbouring states.
In local government elections, held in June and July amid continuing violence, an all-Hutu party, ParmeHutu, gained a dominant position in almost every commune. The Belgian authorities then colluded with Hutu leaders to abolish the Tutsi monarchy and establish Rwanda as a republic. Legislative elections in September confirmed Hutu supremacy. A United Nations report warned: ‘An oppressive system has been replaced by another one.’
On 1 July 1962, Rwanda became an independent state under a republican government dedicated to the cause of Hutu hegemony and determined to keep the Tutsi in a subordinate role. Burundi gained its independence on the same day. Though there were similar tensions between Hutu and Tutsi there, the Tutsi monarchy survived. But both Burundi and Rwanda were to endure massive upheavals.
64
IN THE NAME OF APARTHEID
The tide of African nationalism that swept away one colonial regime after another came to an abrupt halt on the frontiers of white-ruled southern Africa. To the white populations of South Africa, South-West Africa, (Southern) Rhodesia and the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, the notion of African rule spelt disaster. Determined to keep power and wealth in white hands, white-minority governments tightened their control, suppressing black groups which sought to challenge white rule, turning southern Africa into a seemingly impregnable fortress.
In South Africa, as a militant mood grew among the urban African population during the 1940s, the ‘black peril’ issue – swaart gevaar – dominated white political debate. Urban areas were changing fast. Massive numbers of Africans migrated to industrial centres on the Witwatersrand, driven there by poverty and hunger in the African ‘reserves’ and by harsh conditions on white farms, hoping to find work in booming wartime industries, but often meeting little else but hardship and squalor. Squatter camps proliferated on the outskirts of Johannesburg in defiance of municipal authority. The cost of food soared. African trade unions led a sudden rash of strikes in support of demands for a minimum wage. In 1946 African mineworkers launched the largest strike in South Africa’s history in protest against pay and conditions.
Not only were there signs of truculence among the black population but whites were reminded anew of the numbers that threatened to swamp them. Census figures in 1946 showed that whites were a declining proportion of the population. Since 1910 the white population had increased by little more than a million to 2.4 million whereas the non-white population had expanded by nearly 4.5 million to 9 million. About 60 per cent of Africans were now living in European-designated areas while only 40 per cent were based in the reserves. In urban areas blacks outnumbered whites.
The prime minister, Jan Smuts, spoke eloquently about the problem but was able to offer no solution. ‘A revolutionary change is taking place among the Native peoples of Africa through the movement from the country to the towns,’ he said. ‘Segregation tried to stop it. It has, however, not stopped it in the least . . . You might as well try to sweep the ocean back with a broom.’ The impression he gave to an increasingly worried white electorate was that his government was beginning to lose control of the black population, and what was worse, lacked the will to restore control.
His National Party opponents meanwhile put forward a plan which they claimed would provide a permanent solution to the problem: apartheid. The word had come into common use in the mid-1930s among a group of Afrikaner intellectuals searching for more decisive methods of dealing with ‘the Native question’. It had remained a vague concept until the 1940s when Nationalist politicians presented it as a blueprint that would destroy the swaart gevaar and ensure white supremacy for all time. In a manifesto issued in 1948, a few months before a general election, the National Party promised to segregate the black population wherever possible. Every facet of their life – residence, amenities, transport, education, politics – would be regulated to keep them in a strictly subordinate role. By such means no race group would then threaten the future of any other. All this, the Nationalists asserted, would be in accordance with Christian principles of right and justice. Texts from the Bible were cited as justification.
With relentless propaganda, the Nationalists played on the electorate’s racial anxieties at every opportunity. They paid particular attention to working-class Afrikaners facing competition from cheap black labour. By 1948 about half of the white Afrikaans-speaking population lived in urban areas. A large proportion were miners, railwaymen, transport, factory and steel workers for whom the Nationalist slogan of apartheid, promising protection of white jobs, had a potent appeal. The Nationalist programme attracted Afrikaner farmers who wanted tighter controls imposed on African movement to overcome acute shortages of African labour. Throughout the campaign, the National Party leader, Daniel Malan, harped on the need for unity among Afrikaners. In total, they now constituted about 60 per cent of the white population. ‘Bring together all who, from inner conviction, belong together’ was his constant rallying cry.
The National Party won the 1948 election by a narrow margin. In his victory speech, Malan declared: ‘Today South Africa belongs to us once more. For the first time since Union, South Africa is our own, and may God grant that it will always remain our own.’
The Nationalists put their stamp on South Africa with ruthless determination. Malan’s government was the first in the history of the Union to consist exclusively of Afrikaners; all but two were members of the Broederbond. Using patronage on a scale hitherto unknown in South Africa, it purged English-speakers from the upper echelons of the civil service, the armed forces, the police and parastatal organisations such as the railways and replaced them with carefully selected Afrikaners. The state sector became virtually an Afrikaner preserve. The legal profession eventually faced the same treatment. The government also favoured Afrikaner banks and businesses with contracts.
To deal with the Native question, Malan’s cabinet began to construct an apparatus of laws, regulations and bureaucracies which successive Nationalist governments developed until they had built the most elaborate racial edifice the world had ever seen. The basic structure of apartheid rested on a Population Registration Act requiring every person to be assigned to one of three racial groups: White, Coloured or African. Separate residential areas were allocated for each racial group, even though it involved uprooting whole communities. New laws enforced segregation in all spheres of public life: buses, trains, post offices, stations, restaurants and theatres. Everywhere signs proclaiming Slegs vir Blankes and Nie Blankes proliferated. There were separate doors and separate counters in public buildings, separate benches in public parks. In their drive to halt inter-racial integration, the Nationalists also prohibited marriage and sexual intercourse between white and black.
New controls were imposed to restrict African entry into urban areas. Under ‘Section Ten’ provisions, no African was allowed to remain in an urban area for longer than seventy-two hours without a permit unless he or she had lived there continuously for fifteen years or served under the same employer for ten years. Those who could not prove their right to remain were likely to be ‘endorsed out’ – expelled to an African rural area. As enforced, the law split families apart, separating husbands from wives, parents from children. Labour regulations were also tightened. Government departments were instructed to replace African employees with whites.
After a protracted legal battle, the Nationalists also succeeded in removing
Coloured voters in the Cape province from the common roll which they had shared with whites since 1853. There was no pretence about the objective. ‘Either the White man dominates or the Black man takes over,’ the prime minister, Hans Strydom, told parliament in 1956. ‘The only way the Europeans can maintain supremacy is by domination . . . And the only way they can maintain domination is by withholding the vote from the Non-Europeans.’
The onslaught of apartheid legislation prompted a new generation of political activists in the African National Congress in 1949 to launch a ‘Programme of Action’ against government measures, including civil disobedience, boycotts and strikes. Among their number was Nelson Mandela, a law student connected to the Thembu royal family. Born in 1918 in the simple surroundings of a peasant village in Thembuland, he had won a coveted place at Fort Hare College, the leading educational institute for Africans in southern Africa, but left to escape an arranged marriage. Making his way to Johannesburg, he had fortuitously found work with a white law firm, enabling him to complete his university degree by correspondence course. A tall, athletic figure, with dark, piercing eyes and an engaging laugh, he had a commanding presence, a patrician manner but a tendency to act impulsively. A close friend, Oliver Tambo, remembered him at the time as ‘passionate, emotional, sensitive, quickly stung to bitterness and retaliation by insult and patronage’.
The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour Page 58
