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HOW THE WEST DESTROYED CONGO’S HOPES FOR INDEPENDENCE  
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Andrée Blouin
February 12, 2025
Jacobin
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_ In 1960, Patrice Lumumba became the prime minister of newly
independent Congo. His close ally Andrée Blouin describes how Belgium
and the US conspired to oust Lumumba and impose Mobutu’s
kleptocratic dictatorship on the Congolese people. _

A December 1960 photo shows soldiers guarding Congolese prime
minister Patrice Lumumba (right) Joseph Okito (left), vice president
of the Senate, upon their arrest in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa)., AFP
Photo / Stringer via Getty Images

 

Andrée Blouin (1921–1986) was a central figure in the struggles for
decolonization that swept Africa in the 1950s and ’60s, nicknamed
“the Black Pasionaria.” Born under French colonial rule in what is
now the Central African Republic, she became active in the
independence struggles of several African countries. In this extract
from her memoir, _My Country, Africa_
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now available from Verso Books, she discusses the challenges faced by
Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first prime minister, for whom she worked
before he was overthrown in a US-backed military coup and later
murdered.

The burden that Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of the Republic of the
Congo, assumed was an awesome one. On his young, slim shoulders — he
was then thirty-four years old — rested the heavy weight of a
country of six provinces containing 14 million souls speaking three
principal languages — Lingala, Swahili, and Kikongo — and an
uncounted number of dialects.

 

He inherited a scene set for disaster. Government officials and
businesspeople were resigning. People in the professions were leaving
en masse. The Belgians had not trained replacements. There were few
people in any field who were capable of taking responsibility. The
workforce was made up only of copying clerks, blue-collar workers, and
laborers. The most basic services began to go to pieces. As the
Belgians had hoped.

In Léopoldville, on the eve of independence, out of a population of
350,000, there were at least 100,000 unemployed. This number was to
swell “miraculously” at the proclamation of independence, and the
people demanded “work and a good salary, at once.” How was the new
government to wave a magic wand and, within two days after the
proclamation, find a solution for the catastrophe that the Belgians
had been preparing for eighty years?

Mortal Wounds

Before June 30, the Congo was already mortally wounded. First there
had been the divisive personal and political rivalries, then the
tribal conflicts, and then the demonstrations of the unemployed.
Finally, on July 5, it was the army’s turn to add to the country’s
calamities. The Congolese soldiers refused to obey any longer the
commands of their Belgian officers. They mutinied.

The chief source of their fury was the rule that the highest rank that
a Congolese could hold in the army at that time, after fifteen years
of service, was sergeant, or first sergeant. A few months earlier, at
the Belgians’ Round Table, Patrice Lumumba had raised the “serious
problem” of the Africanization of the army’s upper echelons.

The burden that Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of the Republic of the
Congo, assumed was an awesome one.

A Belgian, General [Émile] Janssens, in particular, was detested by
his Congolese troops. Scornfully, he had announced that he had
“thrown out independence.” “That,” he said, was “for the
civilized.”

With a ferocity that accurately reflected what they’d learned from
the Belgians, the army went into revolt. Congolese blood was spilled
as the men turned against their officers. The Belgians’ reprisals
greatly resembled techniques of the Nazis, by whom they had been
trained. Lumumba tried to halt the riots, making personal appeals to
each side for calm and reason.

The ship of state was listing dangerously as bad news continued to
pile up everywhere. On July 4, I was in Conakry [in Guinea] when I
received the prime minister’s telegram asking me to return to the
Congo. On July 8, I was back in Leo with my friends.

Lighting the Power Keg

At the airport, the Belgian police were still on duty. When I arrived,
the man who examined my passport said to me in an aggressive tone,
“You’ve been expelled from the Congo. You can’t come back.”

Georges Grenfell, a minister of state and member of Lumumba’s MNC
[Congolese National Movement], was beside me. He had been sent to
Ghana to take part in the festivities there for the proclamation of
the republic. We sat together on the plane after he boarded at Accra,
and now he interceded for me.

The ship of state was listing dangerously as bad news continued to
pile up everywhere.

“Are you still trying to make the law here? Where do you think you
are, in Belgium? This is the independent Republic of the Congo.
In-de-pen-dent, you understand? Yes, this woman was expelled, but the
new government of the Congo has brought her back. Does that displease
you? Hand me the phone.”

The Belgian police officer hesitated, marking time. “Whom do you
wish to phone?” “The prime minister, Patrice Lumumba.” “And
your name?” “State minister Grenfell.” The police officer was
perplexed. “Has no one come to meet you?” “Perhaps they did. But
the plane was eight hours late, you know.”

He let us pass. We took the aviation company’s car and arrived at
Leo just at curfew. Lumumba received me with open arms and these
words: “You’re eight days late! Have you heard the news?”

“That the army revolted? Yes, I heard it in Dakar. From Modibo
Keïta. Tell me . . . what happened?”

“It was General Janssens’s statement that lit the powder keg. The
men just couldn’t bear it any longer. They had been working for
starvation wages as it was. The idea that they would continue to be
commanded by the Belgian officers was simply intolerable.”

“And at this time!”

“The men had been taught to shoot. Even their own brothers. And they
had arms and ammunition. So they took their revenge wherever they
could find it. On the Congolese population as well as on the
Europeans. The revolt spread through the city blindly, like a disease.
It has been terrible.”

“And now? How are things now?”

“As of today, they are a little better. I spent the day talking to
the soldiers, with [Congolese president Joseph] Kasavubu. We managed
to calm them. Camp Leopold has been quiet ever since.”

Defying Fate

Patrice seemed exhausted. Still, he had the courage to laugh as he
spoke to me, that laugh that was the trademark of his hope and
idealism. In spite of everything, he laughed, to defy fate.

 

“And you?” he asked me. “What news have you?” “In Guinea I
saw President Sékou Touré, and [Kwame] Nkrumah. I asked them to give
us technical help.”

The news of the revolt was frightening. But the Belgian press made it
even worse than it was, aggravating the situation so as to justify the
Belgians’ sending parachutists to establish order. The first act of
these Belgian troops was to disarm the Congolese soldiers. This
happened on the very evening that Moïse Tshombe announced the
secession of Katanga. It was a reconquest, pure and simple.

In Léopoldville, the Belgian paras, in combat clothes, took control
everywhere. Machine guns were stationed at the crossroads.
Radio-controlled jeeps blocked the major boulevards. N’djili Airport
was surrounded by the paras to assure the evacuation of the Europeans
who, baggage in hand, were fleeing for Belgium.

There was a fantastic traffic on the beach too, where boats were
rented by whites fleeing to Brazzaville, to [Congo-Brazzaville leader
Fulbert] Youlou’s great profit. The panic in this exodus was
terrible to behold. Hundreds of cars were abandoned in the streets,
giving a terribly sad appearance to this city, which was armed like a
fortress.

If the Congolese mistreated the Belgians, it was often to try to keep
them from leaving the Congo. They did not want the whites to go.
Throughout the country, there was the revolting spectacle of violence
and woes of every kind.

The word ‘_macaque_’ (a species of monkey) was used as an epithet
for blacks by the Europeans, even by the children.

Hate breeds hate. The word “_macaque_” (a species of monkey) was
used as an epithet for blacks by the Europeans, even by the children.
And the Congolese thought that the word “_Falamand_,_”_ a
corruption of “_Flamand_” (Flemish), said with terrible scorn, was
the supreme insult.

At N’djili Airport there were incidents between the blacks who
worked there and the Europeans who were fleeing. Several Congolese
were killed. General Janssens declared, “This will teach a lesson to
those who were lucky enough to escape our bullets. If they don’t
shut up, we are ready to begin the sport again.”

Katanga’s Secession

The Assembly of Deputies tried to find a means of regaining control of
the country, but found itself paralyzed. With the secession of
Katanga, the Belgians’ plan for keeping control of their economic
interests in the Congo moved ahead with diabolic success.

The idea of Katanga as a separate republic was really like a vulgar
caricature of a ministate in an operetta. The Belgians were quite
serious about it, however, as they saw in the secession a means of
escaping the nationalization of Katanga’s rich mines. It would also,
the Belgians believed, draw other provinces with tribal aspirations
into secession after it.

Thus Belgium would officially let go of the Congo, whose enormous
needs and continued indebtedness, aggravated by the flight of capital
and the repatriation of the gold and credit reserves, had put it in
the red for a long time. But it would keep the prize, Katanga, and
through its secession [Belgium] hoped also to gain later the other two
useful provinces of Kasai and Kivu.

With the secession of Katanga, the Belgians’ plan for keeping
control of their economic interests in the Congo moved ahead with
diabolic success.

I cannot speak of Katanga without mentioning its extraordinary
reservoir of minerals, as yet hardly touched: gold, cobalt, chrome,
platinum, pewter, industrial diamonds, diamonds for jewelry,
manganese, nickel, rare metal, uranium, asbestos, lead, tungsten, and
germanium. Above all, Katanga produced copper, about 350,000 tons a
year, from a vein three hundred kilometers wide of the purest copper
ever found.

The Congo was only in the fifteenth day of its sovereignty when the
president, Kasavubu, and the prime minister, Lumumba, decided to make
a tour through the country to calm the people and find a solution to
the many problems that had hit the young nation so hard.

Tirelessly Lumumba mounted the platform, speaking to the people. Often
he used demagogic language. It was the lesser of the evils. This was a
race against the clock. He had to avert the ruin into which the
country was plunging.

 

When the presidential plane returned to N’djili Airport near
Léopoldville at the end of the tour, the Belgian ambassador refused
to give Lumumba and the chief of state the honors of arrival, on the
pretext that he wanted to avoid any provocation of disorder among the
Belgian refugees who were waiting at the airport to leave. There was,
in fact, a scandalous scene.

One of the Belgians pulled the prime minister’s beard and slapped
him. “President of monkeys,” the European women screamed at the
top of their voices. “We will come back.” “Bastard . . .
murderer . . . son of a bitch . . .” Others spat in his face.

Lumumba remained dignified. He always was and always would be
dignified. When I heard of this disgraceful event, I asked myself who
the savages in this case were: Were they in the skins of the blacks,
or the whites?

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Lumumba’s victory was ephemeral, and he knew it. Soon after this,
there was to appear in the halls of power the sinister figure chosen
earlier by Belgium and the United States to replace him: Mobutu.

Like the secession of Katanga, carried out by Tshombe, the takeover of
the Congo by Mobutu had been prepared at the Round Table. It was with
the treachery of these two creatures that the Congo’s ruin was
prepared.

Mobutu, an army sergeant and member of the MNC, was a minister without
portfolio in Lumumba’s government. After the army’s revolt,
Lumumba made him a colonel. His earlier activities, I learned later,
had included being a spy for both the Belgian intelligence and the US
Central Intelligence Agency.

Like the secession of Katanga, carried out by Tshombe, the takeover of
the Congo by Mobutu had been prepared at the Round Table.

It was not enough that Lumumba had the Belgian government and all its
unscrupulous maneuvers to deal with. The young state, because of its
riches and its evident weakness, also became the pawn of the two
giants of politics, the East and the West. The echoes of the Cold War
found a new sounding board in the Congo, this bastion of international
trusts. Here, communism and capitalism faced one another like the
rhinoceros and the elephant.

The fabulous Union Minière, it should be pointed out, was controlled
by three groups of stockholders: the Belgian corporation, the special
Board of Katanga, and an Anglo-American company, Oppenheim de Beers,
through the intermediary of the Tanganyika Concession Ltd.

Firmly supported by his two principal backers and sure of the
complicity of the United Nations, Mobutu carried off his coup
d’état of September 14, after buying, with millions of francs,
acquiescence to his rise to power. The theme of his right to the
takeover, the hook with which he insured the cooperation of the West,
was anti-communism. Because of him, many Congolese died, including its
own best son. It is true that copper has the color of blood and mud.

The days that followed Mobutu’s seizing of power were like a modern
apocalypse. The Congo was on the edge of madness. Kasavubu had at
least pretended to conform to the constitutional laws drawn up by
Belgian lawyers. Mobutu made no such pretenses. Democracy was
completely overthrown and replaced by a military dictatorship.

The National Assembly was closed by Mobutu’s orders and rigorously
guarded by soldiers. The last session of the assembly was the one in
which Lumumba had been confirmed. The _casques bleus _prevented
Lumumba from speaking to the people on the radio. [Justin] Bomboko,
minister of foreign affairs, produced a crop of freshly milled young
Congolese technocrats who acted as the “shock troops,” appearing
everywhere to justify Mobutu’s takeover.

Bomboko was, at that moment, a man to be reckoned with. In a press
conference the morning before the coup d’état, he announced the
measures deemed necessary to prevent communist penetration in the
Congo. These measures involved the expulsion of certain undesirable
elements: the Ghanaian and Guinean contingents, the Egyptians, Félix
Moumié, a Cameroon leader, and . . . Madame Blouin.

Lumumba’s Calvary

When the order for my expulsion was announced on the radio, my mother
was stricken by a heart attack. She was hospitalized immediately.

I was supposed to leave the city within twenty-four hours, but
Joséphine’s condition was so serious that I phoned Mobutu to tell
him that I could not leave her in such a critical state. He informed
me that an order for my arrest had been issued by the chief of state,
Kasavubu, and sent to him for execution. But he would allow me another
forty-eight hours.

 

[Antoine] Gizenga was arrested and placed in an underground prison
twenty-five kilometers from Leo. Hearing of this, the Moupende
warriors, the most fearsome in the Congo, prepared to liberate their
chief. They sent warning telegrams to Mobutu: “If Gizenga is not
released tomorrow, all the missionaries and Europeans of Kwilu will be
killed.” Gizenga was released instead of being transferred, as
planned, to Katanga, where he would of course have been put to death.

Lumumba’s calvary began with Mobutu’s takeover. From then on, the
conspiracies against him were carried on openly.

Lumumba’s calvary began with Mobutu’s takeover. From then on, the
conspiracies against him were carried on openly. Each day, Kasavubu
crossed the river to Brazzaville to consult with Youlou and the
Belgian embassy there on decisions for the young republic.

Lumumba knew that his life was in the hands of Mobutu. Fearing
Mobutu’s intentions, he put himself under the protection of the
United Nations, which stationed guards around his residence. But
Mobutu’s troops, with machine guns, also encircled the residence of
Lumumba.

It was then that I remembered an appeal that Lumumba, heartbroken, had
made on the radio, to the people one day:

My Congolese brothers! You’re selling your country for a glass of
beer! A tragedy is engulfing our country, and the dancing continues at
the Cité Congolaise. Léopoldville is a cheap cabaret where the
people think only of their pleasures — dancing and beer.

The Congo was sinking, the Congo was dying, and the best of its
children was soon to be assassinated. Still the Congo danced. Perhaps
the heart was less festive, but the dancing did not stop. Before the
curfew, around the crates of beer, the Congo danced. Cut off in his
residence, Patrice Lumumba lived his last days with courage and
daring.

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