Katanga 1960-63

Mercenaries, Spies and the African Nation that Waged War on the World

Christopher Othen

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780750989169, 9780750962889
• eBook ISBN: 9780750965804
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

In King Leopold II's infamous Congo 'Free' State at the turn of the century, severed hands became a form of currency. But some in the Belgian government had no sense of historical shame, as they connived for an independent Katanga state in 1960 to protect Belgian mining interests. What happened next was extraordinary. It was an extremely uneven battle. The UN fielded soldiers from twenty nations, America paid the bills, and the Soviets intrigued behind the scenes. Yet to everyone's surprise the new nation's rag-tag army of local gendarmes, jungle tribesmen and, controversially, European mercenaries, refused to give in. For two and a half years Katanga, the scrawniest underdog ever to fight a war, held off the world with guerrilla warfare, two-faced diplomacy and some shady financial backing. It even looked as if the Katangese might win.

Katanga 1960–63 tells, for the first time, the full story of the Congolese province that declared independence and found itself at war with the world.

1

A SLICE OF AFRICAN CAKE

The Birth and Death of the Belgian Congo

Today it is Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But it used to be Léopoldville, a port city with 4 miles of quays and jetties poking into the black water of the River Congo, hundreds of boats tied up and bobbing on the tide. If you watched the river long enough, said the locals, you would see the bodies of your enemies float past.

Léopoldville’s Ndjili airport, a cross-hatch of runways and white modernist terminals, lay on the eastern outskirts of the city. On Thursday 30 June 1960, it was thick with crowds watching the skies for a royal visitor.

The DC-6 airliner carrying the king of the Belgians touched down with a squeal of tyres in mid-morning. Reporters jostled for position as the aeroplane door opened and Baudouin I, wearing a white dress uniform with gold buttons, emerged into the grey-sky, oppressive humidity of the Congo.

‘Vive le Roi!’ shouted Belgians in the crowd, faces glossy with sweat.1

The 29-year-old Baudouin I had been doing this for nearly a decade. He was a veteran of the parades, state visits and official occasions that made up the daily life of a ceremonial monarch. The young king looked good in his uniform – even if the glasses and neat black hair gave the impression of a bookworm – had a strong speaking voice and could be relied upon by the Belgian government not to do anything embarrassing.

Gravitas and statesmanship mattered to a country still split over the wartime decision by Baudouin’s father, King Léopold III, to remain in Nazi-occupied Brussels when he could have fled to London. Léopold believed he was standing by his people but some Belgians, and the country’s Allied liberators, thought it closer to collaboration.

After the war, Léopold exiled himself to Geneva. When he returned home in 1950, strikes and riots tore the country apart. French speakers in the south pulled down the Belgian tricolore and replaced it with a strutting Wallonian rooster. Poorer, Dutch-speaking Flanders remained loyal. Civil war loomed. Léopold bought peace by passing the throne to his son Baudouin and retreated into his hobby of entomology, spending his days netting rare insects in exotic places.

The royal house survived but a guillotine blade hung over its neck, ready to drop at the first jolt. Baudouin I understood this and had proved himself a talented royal workhorse capable of looking regal and avoiding controversy.

Today, more than any other, he would need those qualities.

The jewel in Baudouin’s inherited crown was the Belgian Congo, close to a million square miles of steaming jungle that hid huge reserves of cobalt, copper and diamonds. White settlers had lived here since the nineteenth century, chopping out roads, building factories and digging mineshafts. The Congo had made Belgium rich.

A piece of prime real estate in the heart of Africa, the colony bordered Rhodesia, Angola, the French Congo, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Uganda and Tanganyika. It divided into six provinces: Équateur in the north-west, Orientale in the north-east, Léopoldville to the east and Kivu to the west, with Kasaï wedged in between, and Katanga hanging down to the south. Baudouin ruled a land that dominated the world copper and cobalt markets, had supplied the uranium that built the first atomic bombs, owned a decent share of the industrial diamond traffic and had profitable interests in palm oil and other sectors.

But now all that was at an end. The Second World War had showed Africans their colonial rulers were not invincible. Nationalist movements formed and demanded self-government. When European powers ignored them they experimented with civil disobedience, then violent revolt.

By the late 1950s, British soldiers were fighting dreadlocked Mau Mau guerrillas in Kenya, Portuguese forces battled Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola – MPLA) partisans in their flagship colony and France was in a bitter war with Algerian independence fighters.

‘The wind of change is blowing right through this continent,’ said British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to an unenthusiastic white audience in South Africa, ‘and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.’2

Slowly and reluctantly, western nations disengaged from their colonies. Today was Belgium’s turn to say goodbye. After seventy-five years, the Belgian Congo had been granted self-government and Baudouin I was in Léopoldville for the official handover ceremony.

It was Independence Day.

King Baudouin was greeted on the runway by Joseph Kasa-Vubu, the new Congolese president, surrounded by his ministers. Patrice Lumumba, both Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, towered over them, a gangly praying mantis of a man with goatee, glasses and a neat side parting razored into his hair. Then there was an inspection of Congolese troops and their Belgian officers before Baudouin and his entourage were guided into a convoy of black limousines. The king placed his ceremonial sword, all polished steel and dark hilt, on the seat behind him.

The cars set off along boulevard Albert I, towards the city centre. The Congo’s new flag, dark blue with seven yellow stars, flew from lamp posts. A few Belgian tricolores snapped in the wind high on official buildings. The king had visited Léopoldville before. In 1955, huge crowds of Africans and Europeans had cheered him. Four years later, Congolese nationalists heckled his speeches.

Today, the sweaty crowds were thinner and whiter. Women in pastel outfits and elaborate hats waved as the convoy drove past. Men with a filterless cigarette hanging from a lower lip lifted up children to see over the fence of Congolese soldiers lining the pavements. The newsreels caught them all in sweeping shots then panned back to the king standing next to President Kasa-Vubu in the back of an open limousine.

The new president, a short and fat-cheeked 50-year-old with some Chinese blood in him thanks to a long-dead labourer on the Léopoldville–Matadi railway, was leader of the Alliance des Bakongo (Bakongo Alliance – Abako) party. Belgian officials had once considered Kasa-Vubu too introverted to be an effective politician; his supporters preferred to see him as aloofly dignified. In 1957, he surprised everyone by campaigning for mayor in Léopoldville’s Dendale district elections wearing a leopard skin and waving a sword. He won. Three years later, he was president.

As the convoy rolled towards the Palais de la Nation, Baudouin made a good show of listening to Kasa-Vubu’s commentary on the sights of the Congolese capital. The Congolese president was pointing out office blocks in the distance when an African man in jacket and tie ran out of the crowd on the right side of the avenue. He dodged the motorcycle outriders and ran up behind the limousine.

The outriders went for their guns as he reached for the king.

Léopoldville was founded in 1881 as a trading post on the banks of the River Congo, the waterway that winds like a giant snake through the country. Thirty-five years later, the trading post had grown big enough to replace Boma, a port town in the far west, as national capital.

The city was named after the man who created the Congo: Léopold II, Baudouin’s great-grand-uncle. The old king, who had eyes like black olives and a waterfall of white beard down his chest, first heard about the jungles of Central Africa in 1878 from his morning newspaper, crisply ironed by the royal butler. It was full of the exploits of a man called Stanley.

Nine years previously, the New York Herald had sent Henry Morton Stanley, a Welsh journalist with a bad temper, in search of a missionary lost in Central Africa for three years. The missing man, Dr David Livingstone, was a Scot determined to save Africans from Arab slavers, find the source of the White Nile and shine the light of Christian capitalism on the jungle. These were the days when so little was known about the heart of Africa that cartographers left the region blank on their maps. Livingstone’s disappearance was headline news.

‘Draw £1,000 now, and when you have gone through that, draw another £1,000,’ the Herald’s owner told Stanley, ‘and when that is spent, draw another £1,000, and when you have finished that, draw another £1,000, and so on – but find Livingstone!’3

Stanley found him near Lake Tanganyika. The missionary was so short of supplies he had been eating lunch in a roped-off enclosure to entertain the locals in exchange for food. Sick but determined to complete his expedition, Livingstone refused to be rescued. Stanley turned defeat into victory with some self-mythologising despatches and a snappy one-liner (‘Doctor Livingstone, I presume?’).4 He returned home a celebrity with a taste for African adventure. Three years later, Livingstone was dead of dysentery near Lake Bangweulu and Stanley had a new quest following the River Congo to the sea.

The Herald journalist was the first to map the twisting river. It nearly killed him. Of the 356 men who started the expedition, hacking through jungle so dark that day and night melted together, more than half died on the way. Stanley was the only European to survive.

Léopold II read about the Welshman’s adventures at the royal breakfast table. The future suddenly seemed clear. He would create a new country out of that blank space in the African interior. And Stanley would help him.

European powers had been gobbling up Africa since the 1870s, turning vast areas into colonies and protectorates. They convinced themselves they were stopping cannibalism, introducing the rule of law, freeing slaves and teaching the true word of God. But the driving force was always money. Africa provided materials unavailable at home, like diamonds, palm oil and rubber, and opened up new markets for European goods.

Belgium had been sidelined in the land grab. The government in Brussels did not share Léopold’s enthusiasm for empire building and refused to finance any overseas projects. The king would have to use his own money. He considered Fiji or part of Argentina, but Africa remained his dream.

On 10 June 1878, Léopold invited Stanley to his palace overlooking the Parc de Bruxelles. After tea and flattery, the king made his offer. To put together a colony he needed Central Africa’s emperors, headmen and warlords to sign up with the Association Internationale Africaine (International African Association – AIA), an organisation Léopold had created to bring Europe’s version of civilisation to the continent. It was a front group: the king had no interest in civilising anyone. The small print would give Léopold absolute power over the other party’s territory.

Stanley, a social climber from the wrong end of the class system, was happy to do the king’s dirty work. Back in Africa, he persuaded 500 chiefs to sign shaky crosses on contracts they could not read. He returned home to find that quarrels over the division of Africa’s wealth had brought Western Europe to the verge of war.

‘We don’t want war because whoever will win the natives will suffer through the struggle,’ Stanley wrote to a friend, forgetting all the Congolese porters he had shot when they tried to desert his expeditions. ‘Why should the natives suffer? What have they done?’5

Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Katanga Confidential
• Dawn
• 1 A Slice of African Cake
• 2 Keys to the Congo
• 3 The Piano Player
• 4 Emperor Msiri’s Ghost
• 5 L’Affaire du Sud-Kasaï
• 6 Assignment – Léopoldville
• 7 We are the United Nations
• 8 Les Affreux
• 9 The Rhodesian Connection
• 10 Pissing Blood in Katanga
• 11 The Counter-Revolutionaries
• 12 Sold Up the River
• 13 Cocktails with Crèvecœur
• Dusk
• 14 Rumpunch
• 15 I am Prepared to Die Fighting in My Own Home
• 16 Katanga against the World
• 17 The Last Flight of the Albertina
• 18 Un Africain Blanc
• 19 The Work of American Gangsters
• 20 Clear Victory
• 21 Mr Brown from Poland
• 22 The Black Eagle
• 23 Occupation: Warlord
• 24 The Flying Horror
• 25 Christmas in Elisabethville
• 26 Katanga ’63
• 27 Vers l’Avenir
• Select Bibliography
• Plates
• Copyright