The elements of power, p.6
The Elements of Power, page 6
Congo quickly fragmented after it won its independence on June 30, 1960. The army revolted and bands of young people, or jeunesse, as they became known, began forming into militias. Parts of the country began to separate from the new government’s rule. Just eleven days after Congo gained independence, on July 11, Moïse Kapend Tshombe and the Conakat proclaimed Katanga’s own. In northern Katanga, Jason Sendwe and his Balubakat party, still committed to a unified Congo, began to fight Tshombe. In August, the Luba of Kasai declared their own independence as a diamond-fueled “mining state.” Their leader, Albert Kalonji Ditunga, took the traditional title Mulopwe, an honorific referring to a sort of king who drew his power from the spirits of ancestors. “The basic idea was to obtain a province for the Baluba [Kasai] because they were persecuted everywhere,” Kalonji would later write. South Kasai would be an Israel of sorts for the Luba-Kasai, who were sometimes called “the Jews of Africa.” The country, which had so recently radiated with hope and proclamations of liberty, was now a series of fragmented fiefdoms, each at war with the other.
One of the most famous, and earliest, victims of the scramble to control Congo was Kufi’s ideological hero from his student years, Lumumba, who had become Congo’s first prime minister, the ruler of a state deeply riven with divisions and outside suspicion. He quickly fell victim to Cold War shadowboxing and was branded a Communist by many in the United States, including the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The country was regarded through a Cold War lens. In fact, the way Congo was seen was not too dissimilar to the way it would be seen in the first decades of the twenty-first century, a prize in a game of great powers, all jockeying for resources. And, just as in the 2010s and 2020s, the people of Congo would be completely ignored in the struggle for power.
Within a few weeks of Lumumba taking power, foreign actors were scheming to have him deposed. Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief in Léopoldville, began to pay Congolese agitators to stage protests against Lumumba’s government. In August 1960, Eisenhower became the first U.S. president to order the murder of an overseas head of state when he suggested to a meeting of the National Security Council that Lumumba be killed. Lumumba’s enemies at home were fiercer; chief among them was his former confidant, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who overthrew the government and placed Lumumba under arrest. A Belgian adviser suggested sending him to near-certain death in Katanga. Devlin did not protest, sealing Lumumba’s fate.
On January 17, 1961, Lumumba, as well as Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito, two politicians who had tried to flee with him, were bundled onto a four-engine DC-4. The plane was crewed by two Belgians, a Frenchman, and an Australian. A group of Luba-Kasai soldiers was on board. They hated Lumumba for a massacre that the Congolese military had carried out in Kasai. The plane’s radio operator vomited after witnessing how savagely Lumumba and his companions were beaten. At the airfield, Tshombe’s officials, supported by Belgian advisers, took Lumumba and the two politicians from the plane, tortured them in a bungalow, shot them in the field at Shilatembo, buried their bodies, and then exhumed their corpses to dissolve them in acid.
* * *
I visited the site in 2022, sixty-one years after Lumumba’s death. A sign at the entrance welcomed Félix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo, Congo’s president, and King Philippe of Belgium. A few weeks beforehand, a gold-capped tooth in a coffin had been paraded there in front of the president and the king. The tooth was the only known remnant of Lumumba. It had been yanked from his bullet-riddled corpse as a trophy by two Belgian brothers who helped the Katangese secessionists dissolve the bodies in acid. In 2016, the tooth was retrieved by Belgian authorities. Now they were returning it to Congo. It was a grisly way to show contrition, but it was one with which the Congolese would have to make do: Even by the mid-2020s, Belgium would refuse to make a full apology for the crimes of colonialism and its aftermath.
The site was empty. Willy Nkuwimba, a semi-reformed rebel, joined me on my visit. Nkuwimba had belonged to a militia that had operated in northern Katanga through the country’s long civil wars in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The group he belonged to had morphed into a separatist enterprise that used Tshombe’s flag. Nkuwimba, whom I had picked up in the town of Likasi, wore a pink three-piece suit and made a point of chatting into two cell phones at the same time. He liked the idea of stopping at the Lumumba site. He said he hadn’t visited before, and he listened intently as a caretaker told us about the landmark and Lumumba’s struggle to unify Congo.
Nkuwimba told me that the visit to Shilatembo had affected him deeply. “I am ready for a fate like Lumumba’s,” he remarked solemnly, despite the difference between both of their political ideologies. “I want to be a great leader.” I wondered what would have happened to the country had Lumumba managed to hold on to power. The site was empty, save for a few people sweeping dust and dozing beneath trees in the midday sun. Perhaps he wouldn’t have managed to keep Congo together and Katanga would have become its own state; maybe Congo would have transitioned to democracy; or maybe the conditions for the wars that would plague the country for more than half a century had already been baked in under colonialism. In any case, the Congolese had been robbed of the chance to decide their future.
At the site, two workers desperately tried to reaffix the severed head of a statue. It kept rolling off.
Chapter 6
A Patriot with a Cause
Mining had provided a full 20 percent of the entirety of Congo’s gross domestic product at independence in 1960. Robbed of it, the rest of Congo was swiftly going bankrupt. In Katanga, Moïse Kapend Tshombe funneled mining revenue into building his state, buying weapons, and hiring mercenaries. He also purged the Luba-Kasai, herding them into internment camps through policies the academic Thomas Bakajika Banjikila has called “ethnic cleansing.”
Despite its wealth, Katanga was now completely divided between Unitarians and secessionists. A UN envoy decried the situation, which was said to be approaching civil war. Kufi, who was studying in Elisabethville when Katangese independence erupted, supported the Unitarians. “He was not a rebel; he was a civil activist, one who believed in the unity of the republic,” Gaylord Kilanga, his son, told me.
Throughout the Katangese secession, the Union Minière and its Belgian and European shareholders continued to make money from Congo’s minerals. Internal memoranda show that the firm even exported more metals during these years than it had during the 1950s. In 1960, the company made commercial agreements that would last for ten years after decolonization. They were banking on little changing. “Africa is still administered in great part by Europeans,” summed up the author of an internal memo circulated at the Union Minière in 1960. “Even if Europeans have become advisers, their needs and their numbers shall not diminish before many years have passed.” In fact, the report suggested that the European presence would double over the next twenty years. In a copy of the note held at the Union Minière’s archives, the word double is underlined, as is a section contending that foreign enterprise could set advantageous terms, given the “risks” inherent in working with newly independent states. The implication was clear: The Union Minière could turn the chaos in Congo to its own advantage.
* * *
In January 1963, the United Nations, fed up with what it saw as Belgian meddling, crushed the fledgling Katangese state. Tshombe made a last stand at Kolwezi. Protected by several thousand of his gendarmes, he announced that he had rigged the giant Union Minière factory there with explosives. He threatened to destroy it, along with Congo’s economy. After thirty-six hours of negotiations through a pair of Belgian intermediaries, however, Tshombe capitulated in return for amnesty for his secessionists. Tshombe’s gendarmes melted westward and began establishing bases in Angola.
As the secession ended, Kufi graduated from college. He took a job as a lecturer, teaching economic science. Katanga enjoyed an uneasy peace, but the rest of Congo was aflame. The central Congolese government used the former leaders of the Katanga secession to consolidate power, and then eliminated them. In 1964, less than a year after his capitulation at Kolwezi, Tshombe was brought back to serve as prime minister; he used his gendarmes, as well as Western mercenaries, to fight against Chinese-backed Simba rebels in the East.
China’s role in the crucible years of the Congo crisis was a considerable one, and it foreshadowed the influence Beijing now wields in the country. Antoine Gizenga, a minister who now led a faction of the rebels, had first been in touch with Beijing in September 1960, when he requested food, finances, and weapons for Lumumba’s government. But the Chinese had vacillated, seemingly unsure as to where they fit between the machinations of the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
Beijing claimed to be spreading Communism through its support of rebel groups like Gizenga’s in the country’s heavily forested East. A secret Chinese intelligence memo from January 1961 judged that Congo was surrounded by enemies whose interests weren’t particularly aligned: the “new American colonialism,” hoping to install a “puppet state” in Kinshasa; Belgium, bankrolling the Katangese separatists; and Britain, stationing troops along the Congolese border. “In their concerted action to enslave and slaughter the Congolese people they cannot conceal the acute struggle among themselves,” the report’s writer averred. “The road of struggle of the Congolese people is winding, but the future is bright. The key to achieve final victory is the further awakening of the Congolese people, the political ripening of the Congolese people,” the report continued. “The situation is favorable, but the leadership is weak.”
In the early 1960s, Beijing generally contended that it took an ideological stance when approaching assistance; another Chinese intelligence analysis from 1961 railed against the “American aggressive plot” in Congo. But Beijing’s agents were also fanning the flames of a brutal war. China supported rebel movements such as the Simbas, a group led by Pierre Mulele, another ex-Lumumbist minister. Mulele fled Congo in 1961, trained in China, and returned as the head of a quasi-religious cult of rebels in 1964. He elevated the struggle to spiritual heights, telling his men, who had trained with Chinese help elsewhere in Africa, that if they were baptized in water that he had blessed, they would be impervious to bullets, a practice that would last into the twenty-first century.
In mid-1964, the People’s Daily, China’s state newspaper, judged that there was an “excellent revolutionary situation” in Congo, and it compared the rebellion to guerrilla action in another Cold War battlefield—South Vietnam. Shortly after that, in October, the Simbas took nearly a thousand U.S. and European citizens in Stanleyville hostage. Belgium and the United States sent troops and planes to crush the Chinese-backed insurgency.
When the government took Stanleyville, the rebel capital, it began its own brutal purge of the city. Foreign mercenaries hired by Mobutu’s government went house to house, shooting and beating people to death. As one observer to the slaughter put it, “Anything black was killed indiscriminately, blindly.” The government troops rounded up the remnants of the population, then led them into a packed stadium one by one. If they were applauded, they were set free; if they were booed, they were taken off to be machine-gunned.
The mass executions caused outrage in the West, and when some of the mercenaries were later interviewed on television about what they had done in Congo, the anger over their overt racism intensified. One young man in sunglasses and a dark hat told a BBC interviewer, “A Black man is like an animal to me.” But the furor did little to stop the U.S. from supporting the Congolese government, which it now had more or less under its control through Mobutu and his circle. Devlin, the CIA station chief, had become one of the leader’s closest confidants.
* * *
In 1964, Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People’s Republic of China, delineated the Chinese framework for aid most robustly as he toured Africa. His speeches show how China saw its aid to African governments, and how many Chinese continue to see their presence on the continent in the twenty-first century. In 2018, when I visited the Beijing headquarters of the National Development and Reform Commission, an arm of China’s overseas economic policy efforts, the commission’s chairman referred to a similar set of principles as the basis for China’s development policy overseas.
In a 1964 speech, Zhou outlined eight guidelines for the provision of economic aid and technical assistance “on the principle of equality and mutual benefit.” Beijing would respect the sovereignty of the countries it was helping and place no conditions on the aid it provided. Low or interest-free loans and “the best-quality equipment and material,” as well as training, would be provided so that countries China was helping could start off on the road toward “self-reliance.” The point, Zhou insisted, was not to make countries reliant on China but to make a world full of healthy—and presumably socialist—states for the betterment of humanity.
But the Chinese were no less enthralled to strongmen than were their rivals in Moscow and Washington. Beijing quickly came to abrogate aid to favored rebel groups, even as it extolled their virtues. In Congo, as the Mulele revolt failed and rebels retreated to the mountains around Lake Tanganyika, China’s leaders adopted what can most generously be described as a spirit of pragmatism. Across Africa, China rapidly began abandoning rebel groups that it had once supported in order to gain acceptance with established governments, even those of former enemies like Mobutu.
A CIA report from 1972 explains that China’s “flexible approach to foreign policy” in Africa involved coupling assistance with ideology. “Peking uses its foreign aid as more than just a lure for recognition. Provision of aid helps project an image of a dynamic, expanding, and modern Chinese economy,” the report states. China was competing with the United States not only in Africa but also in the Soviet Union, which it worried was “colluding” with the U.S. to divide the world. “Peking loses no opportunity to establish the image of China as a champion of third world—hence, African—interests against those of the two superpowers.”
* * *
Mobutu, riding on the success of the anti-Simba campaign, formally seized power through a bloodless coup in November 1965. He was thirty-five years old and close to the CIA’s Devlin. “The Congo was utterly lacking in leaders with international experience, and Devlin had a close personal relationship with a dynamic, popular pro-West young sergeant who trusted him,” a U.S. intelligence officer of the era once explained to me. Mobutu would rule Congo more or less absolutely for the next three decades, and Devlin would be haunted by his descent into greed.
Mobutu consolidated power quickly, and Katanga was not exempt from his machinations. “Mobutu recruited several Katangese, and my father became a parliamentary deputy in 1966,” Kilanga told me of his father, Kufi. The Union Minière, which under Tshombe had slowly been training Congolese staff to fill roles occupied by Belgians, was first in Mobutu’s sights. The government passed a series of laws that increased taxes, but high copper prices allowed the company to weather the levies. New laws were then passed that allowed Mobutu, at the start of 1967, to nationalize the company, which was valued at around forty billion Belgian francs (almost $10.2 billion in 2025 U.S. dollars).
A month later, some among the company’s European workforce tried to send their wives and children home. Mobutu’s men stopped them from boarding planes out of Congo: The dictator still needed foreigners to make his machine run. The company was renamed Gécomin, then Gécomines, and then, in 1971, Gécamines, or the Générale des Carrières et des Mines.
In 1967, Kufi was promoted once more by Mobutu. “He was one of the first Black mayors of Elisabethville,” Kilanga told me, proudly. Administrators like Kufi were tasked with yoking Katanga to Mobutu. “He was recruited as a nationalist; he was an ultra-Mobutist,” Kilanga told me of his father. “His job was to eliminate pockets of the Katangese secession that remained.” The Hemba, he explained, were liked by Mobutu despite their support for the secession—he thought they made good soldiers. The same year that Kufi became mayor, Mobutu finally decided to be done with Tshombe once and for all. The former prime minister had fled, so the general sentenced him to death in absentia, and more of the gendarmes began to filter into Angola. Tshombe died under murky circumstances in Algeria in 1969.
Mobutu also dealt with other enemies. Mulele was lured back from exile in 1968 with a promise of amnesty. Once back in Congo, the former rebel leader was arrested and publicly castrated. His eyes were gouged from their sockets and his limbs sliced from his body.
In the wake of Mulele’s death, Beijing’s qualms with Mobutu were quickly forgotten. Mobutu decided to extend full diplomatic recognition to China in 1972. Six weeks later, less than a decade after quashing the Simba rebellion, the leader visited Beijing. There he met Mao Zedong, who confided in him that China had “lost much money and arms” supporting the Simba rebels. Mobutu agreed to let bygones be bygones and sought investment. Money was forthcoming—in the form of a $100 million interest-free loan. Returning home, he outwardly adopted Maoist vestiges and decreed that everyone would call each other citoyen, or citizens.
After Mobutu’s visit to Beijing, the Chinese government was seemingly unperturbed that Mobutu had a close relationship with the United States, or that he depended on U.S. funding and weaponry, or even that he had ordered the death of Mulele and other socialists with abandon. They closed their eyes, too, when he deployed troops around Africa to quell other left-wing uprisings and when he happily agreed to provide minerals like cobalt and uranium to the U.S. for its defense industry. Ideology had taken a back seat in China’s policy and Beijing’s pragmatic policies that led to the nation’s supremacy in the metals markets of the twenty-first century, and, indeed, in the globalized battery industry, had begun to take shape.
