Joseph Kasa-Vubu

• 1. Introduction

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  Joseph Kasa-Vubu took his name from a poison test. His father, a prosperous farmer in the village of Kuma-Dizi in the Bas-Congo, had built his house at the edge of town and traded independently with merchants in Cabinda. That independence made him enemies. To appease the villagers, he volunteered to drink a substance extracted from a kasa tree. He survived. The word "Kasa" was added to the family name in memory of the event, and a son born around 1915 would carry that name into the presidency of a new nation.

  By 1960, that son had navigated Catholic seminaries, colonial bureaucracies, and back-room political conspiracies to become the first president of an independent Congo. He held the office for five years, across one of the most turbulent periods any new country has ever faced: mutinies, secessions, Cold War interference, and the murder of his own prime minister. Yet Kasa-Vubu is, as anthropologist Yolanda Covington-Ward observed, the figure most overshadowed in the history of Congolese independence. His name comes after Lumumba's in almost every account. It comes after Mobutu's. The story of why that is the case is, in itself, the story of the Congo Crisis.

• 2. From Seminary to Civil Service

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  On the 31st of January 1925, Kasa-Vubu was baptised under the Christian name Joseph at the Scheutist Catholic mission of Kizu, near Tshela. He was the eighth of nine children, and his mother had died when he was around four years old. His father followed in 1936.

  In 1927, Kasa-Vubu enrolled in primary school at the third-year level, and the following year transferred to a minor seminary in Mbata-Kiela, some 50 kilometers from Tshela. He was an industrious student. He graduated second in his class in 1936 and was admitted to the Kabwe seminary in Kasai Province to study philosophy and theology. He intended to be ordained as a priest. After completing the philosophy component in 1939, the bishop expelled him.

  Kasa-Vubu returned to Mayombe and took work as a bookkeeper at a mission, earning 80 francs a month, a sum he found insufficient. He passed an instructor's exam and became a teacher at the mission school in early 1941. His pay still did not rise, and he left the post in open disagreement with both the superior and the local bishop. In May of that year he found work at Agrifor, an agricultural and logging company, where his monthly pay reached 500 francs. Financially stable for the first time, he married Hortense Ngoma Masunda on the 10th of October at the Kangu mission in a Catholic ceremony. They had nine children.

  In June 1942 he earned a position as a clerk in the finance department of the Belgian colonial administration in Leopoldville. He stayed there for fifteen years, rising to the rank of chief clerk, which was the highest level available to a Congolese civil servant under Belgian rule. By 1956 he was overseeing the accounting for all of the administration's general stores. It was in that same bureaucratic world that he began his semi-clandestine political organising.

• 3. ABAKO and the Road to Independence

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  On the 21st of March 1954, the leader of the Bakongo Association, known as ABAKO, resigned. Kasa-Vubu was elected to replace him. Under his leadership, ABAKO swept Leopoldville's first open municipal elections in 1957, and Kasa-Vubu became mayor of the Dendale district of the city.

  He quickly became one of the earliest Congolese voices calling for independence from Belgium. His initial position set a 30-year timeline; as ABAKO grew stronger, he shortened that window considerably. When he delivered his inauguration speech as mayor of Dendale, he reiterated his demand for independence directly. Belgian colonial authorities reprimanded him for it. That reprimand only strengthened his standing as a Congolese leader.

  The turning point came on the 4th of January 1959. ABAKO had organised a political gathering at which Kasa-Vubu was to address the crowd on African nationalism. Colonial authorities banned the meeting. They could not contain the crowd. Thousands of Congolese began rioting in what became known as the Leopoldville riots, a pivotal moment in the independence struggle. Kasa-Vubu was arrested along with several other leaders and imprisoned on charges of inciting the riot. He was released two months later.

  By the time the independence elections approached, Kasa-Vubu's ABAKO was a recognised regional force. But it was not the nationally dominant party, a fact the 1960 election results would confirm.

• 4. An Unlikely Coalition

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  In the 1960 Belgian Congo general election, ABAKO received 9.47 percent of the national vote for the Chamber of Deputies, giving the party a third-place finish with 12 seats. In the Senate, the result was worse: just over 5 percent and only 5 seats.

  The winner was Patrice Lumumba's Congolese National Movement, the MNC, a left-wing nationalist party with national reach. Kasa-Vubu's conservative, regionalist party and Lumumba's movement were ideological opposites, but they needed each other. Kasa-Vubu offered Lumumba's party support in government. In return, the Lumumbists delivered him the indirect election to the presidency, in both the Senate and the National Assembly, defeating his former political mentor Jean Bolikango.

  Belgium helped organise the alliance, and the Belgian press reacted warmly to Kasa-Vubu's election, as did pro-Belgian Leopoldville periodicals such as the Courrier d'Afrique. The United States also expressed satisfaction at the election of a conservative to head the Congolese government. Belgian politicians expected Kasa-Vubu to act as a restraining influence on Lumumba's government. Their fallback, if that failed, was the Force Publique.

  Kasa-Vubu was officially sworn in as president on the 27th of June 1960, three days before Congo's formal independence on the 30th of June. Lumumba became prime minister. The arrangement placed executive power with Lumumba and ceremonial authority with Kasa-Vubu. In practice, the division would not hold.

• 5. The Plot Against Lumumba

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  The new republic began fracturing almost immediately. Secessionist movements in Katanga and South Kasai broke away, and the Force Publique mutinied. These events were sponsored by Belgium. Lumumba appealed for help from the Americans, the United Nations, and ultimately the Soviet Union. That last appeal gave Kasa-Vubu his opening.

  While Lumumba made public appeals, Kasa-Vubu worked quietly. He assembled a network of conspirators willing to destabilise the government, bringing together Moise Tshombe, Harold Lynden, Albert Kalonji, Jean Bolikango, Joseph-Desire Mobutu, and Joseph Ileo. At the same time, he faced pressure from his own ABAKO party and from President Fulbert Youlou of Congo-Brazzaville to restrain Lumumba. Publicly, Kasa-Vubu broadcast a national appeal for unity on August 13, his speeches delivered in what the source describes as a "mysterious and dubious tone" intended to provoke destabilization rather than calm it.

  On the 5th of September, Kasa-Vubu dissolved Lumumba's democratically elected government, accusing him, without foundation, of communist sympathies. Lumumba refused to accept the dissolution and announced Kasa-Vubu's own resignation in response. The crisis ran until September 14. It was Kasa-Vubu who then asked army commander Mobutu to seize power and arrest Lumumba. Lumumba was handed over to Tshombe's secessionist state in Katanga and was assassinated in January 1961.

  The source is direct in its assessment: Kasa-Vubu was the main architect of the plot to kill Lumumba, with Mobutu, Harold Lynden, and Tshombe all connected to the plan, financed by Western powers with interests in the Congo's natural resources.

• 6. Five Years of Weak Governments

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  Between 1962 and 1963, with United Nations support, Kasa-Vubu's government suppressed the Katanga, South Kasai, and Free Republic of the Congo rebellions. New pro-Lumumba uprisings emerged in 1963 in the form of the Kwilu and Simba rebellions. Both were defeated by 1965.

  In July 1964 Kasa-Vubu appointed Tshombe, the same man who had facilitated Lumumba's assassination, as prime minister, giving him the task of ending the Simba Rebellion. Tshombe recalled the exiled Katangese Gendarmerie and brought in white mercenaries, integrating them with the national army. Many of those mercenaries had fought for Katanga under Tshombe during the secession. The strategy produced military results against the Simba rebels, but Tshombe's reliance on white mercenaries and western forces damaged his political standing.

  Kasa-Vubu then turned on his own ally. In October 1965 he dismissed Tshombe as prime minister, having conspired to remove him in the same way he had conspired against Lumumba four years earlier. The maneuver created a political stalemate. Mobutu, who had once seized power at Kasa-Vubu's request in 1960, moved again. On the 25th of November 1965, Mobutu deposed Kasa-Vubu and declared himself head of state. Kasa-Vubu's five years of successive weak governments had come to an end.

• 7. Death and Contested Legacy

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  Mobutu placed Kasa-Vubu under house arrest. He eventually allowed the deposed president to retire to his farm in Mayombe. Kasa-Vubu died in a hospital in Boma in 1969, possibly after a long illness, four years after losing power.

  His family went into exile after his death, first to Algeria, then to Switzerland. One of his daughters, Justine M'Poyo Kasa-Vubu, returned to the Congo, by then renamed Zaire, in the 1990s. In 1997 Laurent Kabila appointed her as a cabinet minister and later as ambassador to Belgium.

  A bust of Kasa-Vubu was placed on his tomb in September 2002 at the urging of his supporters. On the 30th of June 2020, he was instituted as a National Hero of the Democratic Republic of Congo. On the 3rd of October 2020, President Felix Tshisekedi awarded him the Grand Cordon of the Order of the National Heroes Kabila-Lumumba.

  Anthropologist Yolanda Covington-Ward argued that ABAKO and Kasa-Vubu were in fact the primary driving force behind the Congolese independence movement, a role that Lumumba's more celebrated position in historical accounts has consistently obscured. Kasa-Vubu had also, decades before those honours, already received the Grand Cordon of the Order of Leopold from King Baudouin on the 30th of June 1960, the very day of independence. That decoration now sits alongside posthumous national hero status in a country that spent decades largely forgetting the man who first held its presidency.