South Kasai

• 1. Introduction

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  South Kasai was born on the 9th of August 1960, when Albert Kalonji, standing in the neighbouring territory of Katanga, declared a new state into existence. It would last barely two years. And for most of the world, it would never officially exist at all.

  The state that Kalonji conjured had a capital, a flag, a coat of arms, its own postage stamps, and a population estimated at two million people by 1962. It produced three separate constitutions and supported a small army that grew from 250 soldiers to nearly 3,000. It even had an official journal: the Moniteur de l'État Autonome du Sud-Kasaï. Yet not a single foreign government granted it diplomatic recognition.

  How does a state that no one recognises manage to sustain itself for two years in the middle of one of the most violent political crises of the 20th century? And what happens to the people caught inside it when it collapses?

  The answers reach back decades, to a colonial administration that drew ethnic lines where none had clearly existed before, to a nationalist movement that fractured before independence was even won, and to a leader who eventually crowned himself king of an empire that had ceased to exist in the 1880s.

• 2. The Ethnic Trap

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  Before Belgian colonisers arrived, the Baluba spread across large parts of the Kasai-Katanga savannah and developed into a number of subgroups, including the Luba-Kasai and the Luba-Katanga. They shared the Tshiluba language and a set of cultural practices. They were not a single centralised state, but they held a common emotional attachment rooted in shared origin myths.

  Colonial administrators looked at the people living along the Lulua river and decided they were ethnically distinct from the Baluba, dubbing them the Bena Lulua. The colonists also decided that the Baluba were more intelligent, more hardworking, and more open to new ideas. From the 1930s onward, they applied different policies to each group and elevated the Baluba above other ethnicities.

  By the 1950s, Belgian administrators began to fear the Luba elite they had helped create. The administration shifted course and began supporting Lulua organisations instead. In 1952, a group called the Lulua Frères was established to campaign for the socio-economic advancement of the Bena Lulua.

  The reversal lit a slow fuse. In 1959, Luba communities discovered a colonial proposal to move their farmers off Lulua land onto less fertile Luba territory. Demonstrations broke out in August 1959 and were violently suppressed by colonial forces. Attempts to broker peace continued into early 1960 but failed. By the time the Belgian Congo moved toward independence, the fracture between the two groups had been engineered over decades of deliberate, contradictory policy.

• 3. The Split That Built a Secessionist

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  Patrice Lumumba led the Mouvement National Congolais, the largest of the anti-colonial parties, which by late 1959 claimed 58,000 members. Albert Kalonji was one of its rising figures. Then, in July 1959, Kalonji and a federalist faction led by Joseph Iléo broke away to form the MNC-Kalonji, known as the MNC-K.

  The split divided the MNC's support along geographic and ethnic lines. Lumumba retained followers chiefly in the Stanleyville region; Kalonji drew support in the south and among the Baluba. The MNC-K then formed a coalition with Kasa-Vubu's ABAKO party and the Parti Solidaire Africain to push for a federated Congo.

  The 1960 elections in Kasai turned into what the source describes as an "anti-Baluba plebiscite." The MNC-K won 21 of the 70 seats in the provincial assembly and eight seats in the Léopoldville Parliament. That was not enough to control the assembly. Lumumba promoted a Lulua candidate, Barthélemy Mukenge, as provincial president, while denying Kalonji a meaningful ministerial portfolio in the national government. Kalonji rejected the Agriculture portfolio he was offered.

  On the 14th of June, the MNC-K resolved to establish an alternative provincial government under Joseph Ngalula. Kalonji refused to recognise it. He was already looking south, toward Tshombe's Katanga, where a strongly federalist and anti-Lumumba movement was taking hold. The groundwork for secession was laid not by ideology alone but by the repeated experience of being shut out.

• 4. A State That Dared Not Declare Independence

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  On the 9th of August 1960, Kalonji named the new entity the Mining State of South Kasai, or the Autonomous State of South Kasai. He declared this from Katanga, where he had visited just days after Tshombe's full secession on the 11th of July. On the 8th of August, Kalonji had declared that Kasai "must be divided at all costs."

  The wording of South Kasai's secession was carefully chosen. Unlike Katanga, it did not formally reject Congolese sovereignty. The title "Autonomous State" was intended to suggest a federally-governed region rather than a rival republic. One Léopoldville newspaper called it "a model by which the many new states now mushrooming in the Congo might form a new federation."

  In practice, the distinction was thin. South Kasai forwarded no taxes to Léopoldville. MNC-K deputies initially refused to sit in the Congolese Parliament. The state's borders were contested and never stable. Locals sometimes called it "Little Katanga." The capital was Bakwanga, and the population in 1962 was estimated at two million.

  Kalonji was declared president. Joseph Ngalula became prime minister. Joseph Ngalula and Kalonji differed sharply on how the state should function: Kalonji relied on customary chiefs and traditional authority, while Ngalula preferred a democratic structure built around the intellectual elite. That tension would eventually tear the government apart. South Kasai had five different governments in the first few months of its existence.

• 5. Diamonds, Belgium, and the Cold War

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  South Kasai's ability to function at all depended heavily on a single export: diamonds. A Belgian company, Forminière, was the state's principal commercial backer and received concessions in exchange for financial support. After secession, South Kasai's diamonds were rerouted through Congo-Brazzaville to reach international markets.

  State revenue was estimated to total thirty million dollars annually. That income funded public services, resettled displaced Luba refugees, and paid a gendarmerie that grew from 250 to nearly 3,000 members by 1961. Social services were described by contemporaries as "relatively well-run."

  Belgium backed both South Kasai and Katanga because it distrusted the central Congolese government and had large commercial interests in both territories. In the Cold War context, Western powers viewed Kalonji as a moderate anticommunist, making him useful at a moment when Lumumba was turning to the Soviet Union for military support. A South Kasaian delegation travelled to South Africa in September 1960 carrying a letter from Ngalula to Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd requesting military aid. Verwoerd's government declined to supply weapons but told the delegation they could purchase hardware on the South African market.

  Despite support from Belgium, South Africa, France, and the Central African Federation, no government ever formally recognised South Kasai. The state maintained no diplomatic missions abroad and retained the Congolese franc as its currency. The gendarmerie, though it grew substantially, remained poorly equipped and constantly short of supplies and ammunition.

• 6. Massacre and Its Aftermath

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  Within days of South Kasai's secession, with Soviet logistical support, 2,000 troops from the Armée Nationale Congolaise launched a major offensive against the territory. On the 27th of August, ANC soldiers arrived in Bakwanga.

  When government troops entered Bakwanga, they released Lulua detainees from prison and began requisitioning civilian vehicles. David Odia, the South Kasai Minister of Public Works, protested; soldiers beat him and fatally injured him. Baluba civilians first fled, then began resisting with home-made shotguns. The ANC responded with large-scale massacres.

  In September, Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN Secretary-General, described the killings as "a case of incipient genocide." Around 3,000 Baluba were killed in the violence, with ANC and Katangese troops both participating. More than 35,000 Luba civilians fled to refugee camps in Élisabethville alone. As many as 100,000 sought shelter in Bakwanga itself.

  Between October and December 1960, diseases including kwashiorkor, malaria, smallpox, and anemia reached epidemic proportions among refugees. The World Health Organization sent one million smallpox vaccines. A famine preceded the epidemic and by December was killing an estimated 200 people daily. UN appeals brought government and private aid that, by late January, had reduced mortality by 75 percent. An emergency food airlift from the Food and Agriculture Organization helped resolve the famine almost entirely by March 1961.

  The violence of the ANC offensive served a political purpose in Léopoldville. Allegations of brutality were used to justify Kasa-Vubu's removal of Lumumba as prime minister in September 1960. Lumumba was later arrested and assassinated. South Kasai, having survived the military assault with its government still functioning, found itself on relatively stable terms with the new Congolese authorities who had benefited from the crisis.

• 7. The King Who Lost His Crown

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  On the 12th of April 1961, the title of Mulopwe was formally bestowed on Kalonji's father, who immediately abdicated in favour of his son. On the 16th of July, Kalonji assumed the title himself. Mulopwe, usually translated as "King" or "Emperor," had last been used by rulers of the pre-colonial Luba Empire; it had been out of use since the 1880s.

  Kalonji added the name Ditunga, meaning "homeland," and renamed the state the Federated Kingdom of South Kasai. The intention was to tie the secessionist project to a deep historical legitimacy, connecting the Baluba people of the present to an imperial past. In Western media, the move was widely mocked.

  Among Kalonji's own supporters, the reaction was worse. The South Kasaian évolués, the educated elite who had backed the secession, viewed the royal elevation as opportunism. On the 2nd of December 1961, the communist deputy Christophe Gbenye accused Kalonji in Parliament of ordering corporal punishment against a political prisoner. Parliament voted to remove his immunity, and ANC soldiers took him into custody in Léopoldville. A delegation of around 400 Luba tribal elders who arrived to protest were also briefly arrested.

  Ferdinand Kazadi assumed power as acting head of state. On the 9th of March 1962, the Léopoldville Parliament agreed to give South Kasai official provincial status. In April, UN troops were ordered to occupy the territory. In Léopoldville, Kalonji was sentenced to five years in prison. On the 7th of September, he escaped and returned to Bakwanga. Within weeks, on the night of the 29th to the 30th of September 1962, military commanders led by Albert Kankolongo launched a coup. The appeal broadcast over Radio Bakwanga offered all South Kasaian officers integration into the ANC at their current rank and pay. Kalonji fled to Katanga, then to Paris, and eventually settled in Barcelona, in Francisco Franco's Spain.

• 8. What Remained

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  On the 5th of October 1962, central government troops arrived in Bakwanga to support the mutineers and suppress the remaining Kalonjist loyalists. The secession was over. South Kasai was formally reintegrated into the Republic of the Congo.

  The majority of South Kasaian soldiers were absorbed into the ANC, but nearly 2,000 loyalists went into hiding. Led by General Mwanzambala, they fought a guerrilla war against the new provincial government until 1963, when they also accepted integration. The city of Bakwanga was renamed Mbuji-Mayi, after a local river, in a gesture toward Luba reconciliation. Violence among Luba factions continued through 1964. A political resolution was not reached until 1965, when J. Mukamba was elected Provincial President of South Kasai.

  South Kasai survived as a unit within the federalist constitution of 1964, becoming one of 21 formally established provinces. When Mobutu seized power in 1965 and began centralising the Congolese state, South Kasai was one of the few provinces retained. It was later expanded to include territory in Kabinda and Sankuru Districts and renamed Eastern Kasai, or Kasaï-Oriental.

  State of Katanga held out until January 1963, when UN forces under Secretary-General U Thant adopted a more aggressive posture. Mobutu consolidated control, renamed the country Zaire in 1971, nationalised foreign-owned assets, and created a single-party state under the Popular Movement of the Revolution. The questions of federalism, ethnic representation, and state centralisation that had driven the South Kasai secession were never settled. They became, instead, part of the longer story of why the Congo has been described as a failed state.