Congo Crisis

• 1. Introduction

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  The Congo Crisis began on the 30th of June 1960, the very day the Republic of the Congo celebrated its independence from Belgium. Within a week, the army had mutinied, Belgian paratroopers had landed without permission, and two wealthy provinces had declared themselves separate nations. By the time it was over, around 100,000 people were dead, and a charismatic prime minister had been executed in the bush outside Elisabethville with Belgian officers present. What happened in those five years between 1960 and 1965 was not simply one country falling apart. It was a Cold War proxy battle, a colonial reckoning, and a contest over some of the richest mineral deposits on earth. The man who emerged from it all was Joseph-Desire Mobutu, who would rule for more than three decades. But the questions that drove the crisis, who controls the Congo, who gets its wealth, and what kind of state it should be, were never answered.

• 2. The Colonial Foundation

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  King Leopold II of Belgium secured personal control of the Congo Basin in 1885, gaining international recognition for what he called the Congo Free State by presenting himself as a useful buffer between rival colonial powers. By the turn of the century, the violence of his officials against the Congolese population had become so notorious that Belgium took official control in 1908, creating the Belgian Congo.

  Belgian rule operated through what administrators called the "colonial trinity": the state, the missionary church, and private companies. The model differed sharply from British and French approaches, which generally kept traditional leaders in authority under colonial oversight. Belgium instead administered every part of the country through a uniform "native policy", with a high degree of racial segregation. White immigrants who arrived after World War II came from across the social spectrum but were always treated as superior to black Congolese.

  By the 1950s, the Congo had a wage labour force twice as large as that in any other African colony. The country's uranium had supplied much of the material used by the American nuclear programme during World War II. Those resources drew deep interest from both Washington and Moscow as the Cold War hardened, turning the Congo into a territory that neither superpower could afford to ignore.

  Urbanisation during the 1940s and 1950s produced a new middle class of Europeanised Africans known as evolues. It was among this class that African nationalism first took root, generating the political parties and rivalries that would collide on independence day.

• 3. The Men and the Movement

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  Patrice Lumumba emerged as the leading figure of the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC), the largest of the Congolese nationalist parties, which by the end of 1959 claimed 58,000 members. The MNC was founded as a united front dedicated to achieving independence "within a reasonable" time, setting itself apart from more ethnically defined rivals.

  Joseph Kasa-Vubu led the Alliance des Bakongo (ABAKO), which called for immediate independence and argued that an independent Congo should be governed by the Bakongo as inheritors of the pre-colonial Kingdom of Kongo. Moise Tshombe led the Confederation des Associations Tribales du Katanga (CONAKAT), advocating federalism and primarily representing the southern province of Katanga.

  The MNC itself fractured in July 1959, when a radical faction headed by Joseph Ileo and Albert Kalonji broke away after failing to induce wider defections. The majority group kept Lumumba's name and his stronghold in the Stanleyville region; the breakaway MNC-Kalonji drew its support from the southern city of Elisabethville and the Luba ethnic group. That split would prove consequential when South Kasai declared independence under Kalonji less than two months after independence day.

  Riots in Leopoldville on the 4th of January 1959 accelerated the pace of everything. At least 49 people were killed, and casualties may have reached 500. The nationalist movement spread beyond the evolue class for the first time. Belgians, alarmed, formed militia groups they called Corps de Volontaires Europeens before colonial authorities outlawed them on the 25th of March. The Belgian government, which had hoped for at least 30 years before independence, found itself agreeing at a January 1960 Round Table Conference in Brussels to a date just six months away.

• 4. Seven Days That Broke Everything

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  At the Palais de la Nation in Leopoldville on the 30th of June 1960, King Baudouin gave a speech framing independence as the culmination of the Belgian "civilising mission" begun by Leopold II. Lumumba then delivered an unscheduled address that angrily attacked colonialism; Malcolm X was among those who praised it, though even some Congolese politicians found it unnecessarily provocative.

  Lieutenant-General Emile Janssens, the Belgian commander of the Force Publique, summoned his black non-commissioned officers the day after the festivities and wrote on a blackboard: "Before Independence = After Independence." He meant that nothing would change under his command. On the 5th of July 1960, several units mutinied at Camp Hardy near Thysville. The insurrection reached Leopoldville the next day and spread to garrisons across the country.

  Lumumba forced Janssens to resign and reorganised the force as the Armee Nationale Congolaise (ANC). Victor Lundula was promoted directly from sergeant-major to major-general. Joseph-Desire Mobutu, an ex-sergeant-major and Lumumba's close personal aide, became Lundula's deputy as army chief of staff.

  On the 9th of July, Belgium deployed paratroopers without Congolese permission to protect fleeing white civilians. As reported by Time magazine, those paratroopers "beat up any stray Africans they encountered, disarmed and arrested Congolese troops" and fired arbitrarily at Congolese citizens. Belgian ships then bombarded Matadi on the 11th of July, killing at least 19 civilians. The exodus of the Congo's roughly 10,000 European civil servants followed, leaving the administration in collapse. The new state had been independent for less than two weeks.

• 5. Two Secessionist States

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  Moise Tshombe declared the southern province of Katanga independent as the State of Katanga on the 11th of July 1960, the same day Belgian ships were bombarding Matadi. "We are seceding from chaos," he announced, with Elisabethville as the new state's capital and himself as president.

  Katanga's mineral wealth had long been administered separately by the Belgians. The Union Miniere du Haut Katanga (UMHK), largely owned by the Societe Generale de Belgique, had begun backing CONAKAT during the final years of colonial rule, fearing that an MNC government might nationalise its assets. Belgium ordered its civil servants in Katanga to stay in their posts and provided direct military support. Tshombe also recruited mercenaries, mainly whites from South Africa and the Rhodesias, to command Katangese troops. No country ever formally recognised Katanga as a state.

  Less than a month later, on the 8th of August, Albert Kalonji declared the Mining State of South Kasai autonomous from Leopoldville, based around the city of Bakwanga. The Belgian mining company Forminiere supported the new state in exchange for concessions. Without control of Katanga and South Kasai together, the central government was deprived of approximately 40 percent of its revenues.

  With Soviet weapons and logistical support, 2,000 ANC troops launched an offensive against South Kasai. The campaign succeeded militarily but turned catastrophic: ANC soldiers became entangled in fighting between the Luba and Bena Lulua ethnic groups and perpetrated large-scale massacres of Luba civilians, killing around 3,000 people and forcing an exodus of thousands more.

• 6. Lumumba's Fall and Death

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  On the 5th of September 1960, Kasa-Vubu announced on national radio that he had unilaterally dismissed Lumumba, using the South Kasai massacres as a pretext and with the promise of American backing. Andrew Cordier, the American UN representative in the Congo, used his position to block communications from Lumumba's faction and prevent a coordinated response. Both chambers of Parliament supported Lumumba and denounced the dismissal, but Mobutu resolved the stalemate with a bloodless coup, replacing both leaders with a College of Commissionaires-General led by Justin Bomboko. Soviet advisers were ordered out of the country.

  Lumumba escaped house arrest and fled east toward Stanleyville. He was captured at Lodi on the 1st of December 1960 and flown back to Leopoldville with his hands bound. A UN Security Council meeting on the 7th of December considered Soviet demands for his release and restoration to power; the pro-Lumumba resolution was defeated on the 14th of December by a vote of 8-2.

  Still in captivity, Lumumba was transported to Thysville and then to Katanga, handed over to forces loyal to Tshombe. On the 17th of January 1961, he was executed by Katangese troops near Elisabethville, with assistance from Belgian officers and personnel. CIA officer Larry Devlin, the Chief of Station at Leopoldville, noted that "several versions of Lumumba's death were circulating in the Katangan capital" before news could be confirmed.

  When the execution was officially announced on the 13th of February, the Belgian Embassy in Yugoslavia was attacked in Belgrade, and violent demonstrations broke out in London and New York. In the aftermath, seven Lumumbists including Jean-Pierre Finant, the first President of Orientale Province, were executed in South Kasai. Gizenga's soldiers then shot 15 political prisoners in retaliation, among them Alphonse Songolo, Lumumba's own dissident Minister of Communications.

• 7. The Simba Rebellion

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  Disenchantment with the government ran deep well before the Katanga secession had even ended. The slogan of a "second independence" from kleptocracy and political infighting spread through the central and eastern Congo, taken up by Maoist-inspired revolutionaries including Pierre Mulele, who had served in the Lumumba government.

  The Kwilu Rebellion broke out on the 16th of January 1964 in the cities of Idiofa and Gungu. Unrest spread to Kivu and Albertville, and between July and August the rebels captured Port-Empain, Stanleyville, Paulis, and Lisala. The rebels called themselves Simbas, from the Kiswahili word for "lion". They used magic to initiate members, believing that following a moral code would make them invulnerable to bullets. The Soviet Union, China, and Cuba all supplied the Simbas with support; Cuba sent a team of more than 100 advisers led by Che Guevara.

  The Simbas founded the People's Republic of the Congo in Stanleyville with Christophe Gbenye as president and murdered between 1,000 and 2,000 westernised Congolese in that city alone. In November 1964, the remaining white population of Stanleyville and its surrounding area was rounded up and held hostage at the Victoria Hotel. On the 24th of November, as part of Operation Dragon Rouge, Belgian paratroopers arrived in American aircraft and secured the city. Around 70 hostages and 1,000 Congolese civilians died in total, but the vast majority of captives were evacuated. The attack, in the words of observers, "broke the back of the eastern insurrection, which never recovered."

  Pockets of Simba resistance continued into the following years. In South Kivu, Laurent-Desire Kabila led a Maoist cross-border insurgency that lasted until the 1980s, a fact that would matter greatly when Kabila returned to depose Mobutu in 1997.

• 8. Mobutu and the Long Aftermath

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  Mobutu seized power in a second bloodless coup on the 25th of November 1965, stepping into a constitutional paralysis created when Parliament twice rejected Kasa-Vubu's choice of Evariste Kimba as prime minister and no compromise emerged. Under what Mobutu called a regime d'exception, he assumed sweeping powers for five years, claiming democracy would then be restored. The United States and other Western governments supported the coup. In 1966 he abolished the post of prime minister, and in 1967 he dissolved Parliament.

  In 1967, Mobutu created the Mouvement Populaire de la Revolution (MPR), which remained the nation's only legal political party until 1990. In 1971, the state was renamed Zaire and he began removing all visible traces of colonial influence, nationalising foreign-owned assets including the UMHK, which was renamed Gecamines. By the time of its dissolution, his rule was characterised by cronyism, corruption, and economic mismanagement.

  Tshombe was exiled again in 1965 and sentenced to death in absentia in 1967. That same year, he was kidnapped in an aeroplane hijacking and held under arrest in Algeria. His death in 1969, attributed to natural causes, provoked speculation about Mobutu's involvement. Mulele was lured back to the Congo from exile with the promise of an amnesty, then tortured and murdered.

  The Congo Crisis rippled outward far beyond the Congo's borders. The União dos Povos de Angola, drawing support from Angolan Bakongo with ties to the ABAKO movement, launched the Baixa de Cassanje revolt in 1961, igniting the conflict in Angola that lasted until 1974. The disorder of Congolese independence was cited repeatedly in diplomatic discussions of Sub-Saharan Africa throughout the 1960s, shaping white-minority politics in Southern Rhodesia, which declared independence unilaterally in 1965. In Chad, the FROLINAT rebellion of 1965-1979 explicitly rejected secessionism, officially stating "there will be no Katanga in Chad." Antoine Gizenga, who had led the rival government in Stanleyville in 1960, lived to found the Parti Lumumbiste Unifie and was appointed prime minister following the 2006 general election in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.