First Congolese Republic

• 1. Introduction

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  The First Congolese Republic was born on the 30th of June 1960, when the Belgian Congo declared independence after decades of colonial rule. Within days, Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba had wired the United Nations requesting membership, pledging that the Congo accepted "without reservation the obligations stipulated in the Charter of the UN." But the optimism of that message would not survive the year. The questions that follow are stark: how did a nation arrive at freedom only to descend almost immediately into civil war, assassination, and military rule? Who backed the forces that tore the new republic apart? And what does it mean that the man who led the army coup was someone Lumumba himself had appointed to command it?

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• 2. A Colony's Long Shadow

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  Belgium took control of the Congo in 1908, when the Belgian government absorbed what had been a personal possession of the Belgian king, known as the Congo Free State. Colonial doctors worked to reduce the spread of African trypanosomiasis, commonly called sleeping sickness, and some Bantu languages were introduced into primary schools, which was unusual for colonial education at the time. The colonial administration also built railways, ports, roads, mines, and plantations, expanding infrastructure throughout the territory. Yet the Congolese people had no share in political decisions. All policy was decided in Brussels and Léopoldville, and neither the Belgian Colony-secretary nor the Governor-general was elected by the Congolese people. During the Second World War, the Belgian Congo supplied uranium to the United States, material that was used in the atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. By 1955, Congolese évolués, many educated in Europe, had begun a formal campaign to end the inequality built into colonial rule.

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• 3. Independence and Its Rivals

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  In May 1960, the Mouvement National Congolais, led by Patrice Lumumba, won the parliamentary elections. Lumumba became prime minister and Joseph Kasa-Vubu of ABAKO was elected president by parliament. Other parties that had emerged included the Parti Solidaire Africain, led by Antoine Gizenga, and the Parti National du Peuple, led by Albert Delvaux and Laurent Mbariko. Almost immediately, the new state faced a naming problem: a neighboring territory, the former French Congo, was also seeking independence and also calling itself the Republic of the Congo. UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold flagged the conflict, and a delegation from Brazzaville traveled to Léopoldville to negotiate the distinction. The outcome was that the former Belgian Congo would be recognised as the Republic of the Congo, or Congo-Léopoldville, while the French Congo would be known as the Congolese Republic, or Congo-Brazzaville. The name would change again in 1964, after a constitutional referendum, to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

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• 4. The Katanga Fracture

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  Shortly after independence, the provinces of Katanga, led by Moise Tshombe, and South Kasai launched secessionist struggles against the new government in Léopoldville. The Belgian government's interest in the breakaway regions was not abstract: Belgium wanted to retain mining rights for copper and diamonds in Katanga and South Kasai. On the 5th of September 1960, President Kasa-Vubu dismissed Lumumba from office. Lumumba declared the action unconstitutional, and the standoff between the two leaders opened a window for army chief of staff Joseph Mobutu to move. With financial support from the United States and Belgium, Mobutu made payments to soldiers to secure their loyalty, and used the crisis to position himself for a coup by proxy. On the 17th of January 1961, Katangan forces supported by the Belgian government executed Patrice Lumumba and several of his aides at a pig farm near Élisabethville. The United Nations deployed the ONUC peacekeeping mission, which at its peak involved up to 20,000 troops; Katangan forces under foreign mercenaries clashed with the ONUC on at least three occasions before Katanga was reintegrated into the national territory in February 1963.

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• 5. The United Nations and Its Limits

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  From 1960 to 1964, the United Nations operation in the Congo was described at the time as the largest, most complex, and most costly peacekeeping effort the organization had ever carried out. The ONUC's military components were fully withdrawn by the 30th of June 1964. In September 1960, a Fourth Emergency Special Session of the UN General Assembly had to be convened after the Soviet Union vetoed action in the Security Council. UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold was himself a casualty of the crisis: on the 18th of September 1961, he died in a plane crash near Ndola, in Northern Rhodesia, while traveling to cease-fire negotiations. His second term was cut short by that crash. The presence of 20,000 international troops had held some of the conflict in check, but the underlying political instability the mission could not resolve.

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• 6. Mobutu's Final Coup

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  Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, by then a Lieutenant General, overthrew President Kasa-Vubu in 1965 in a coup backed by the CIA. He had already demonstrated, in his first coup years earlier, how Western anti-communist priorities could be turned into personal political leverage. After seizing power, Mobutu declared himself president for five years, arguing that it would take that long to repair the damage politicians had done in the country's first five years of independence. Within two years, he had established the Popular Movement of the Revolution as the country's sole legal party. In 1970, he ran unopposed in the country's first direct presidential election, and two weeks later a single list of PMR candidates was elected to the legislature. One year after that, in 1971, he renamed the country Zaire, a name that would hold until 1997, when the state reverted again to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

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