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Congo: the epic history of a people by David Van Reybrouck – 3. The Great War of Africa

“General Bosco Ntaganda told us: ‘When you’re a soldier, women are free. Everything is free.’”
(former child soldier talking to David van Reybrouck)

David van Reybrouck’s complete history of Congo includes a chapter devoted to the conflict variously known as ‘the Second Congo War’ or ‘the Great War of Africa’ which is reckoned by commentators to have lasted from 1998 to 2003. I reread this chapter to compare it with the book-length account by Joseph Stearns, which I’ve just read.

Great War of Africa dates

The war began in August 1998, little more than a year after the First Congo War ended, when the joint forces of Rwanda and Uganda invaded eastern Congo for a second time, this time not to overthrow the old dictator Mobutu – which they had achieved in the first Congo war (October 1996 to May 1997) – but to overthrow the figurehead they’d replaced him with as president, Laurent Kabila. Kabila had come to power solely on the back of Rwandan and Ugandan army units, but once he was firmly established as new ruler of Congo, he expelled the very military advisers who had helped him win power a year earlier. This wasn’t as ungrateful as it sounds. The Rwandans in particular quickly aroused a lot of popular resentment, particularly among the population of the capital, Kinshasa, who they treated badly.

This new, second war of the Congo lasted till July 2003, a complex peace treaty was signed which allowed for the ‘Transitional Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’ to take power. During the war Kabila was assassinated by one of his own bodyguards but the regime in Kinshasa smoothly replaced him with his son, a senior officer in the army who turned out to be a surprisingly effective ruler. Despite the peace treaty, violence continues in many parts of the country, particularly in the Kivu region in the east of the country, to this day.

What made it a ‘great’ war is the way so many neighbouring countries got drawn into it. Ultimately, nine African countries and around thirty local militias became involved in the conflict. By 2008, the war and its aftermath had caused an estimated 5.4 million deaths, hardly any through actual fighting, a fair number through massacre and murder of unarmed civilians, but the vast majority caused by disease and starvation. Another 2 million people were displaced by the conflict.

David van Reybrouck versus Jason K. Stearns

Basically, although van Reybrouck’s account is almost exactly one tenth the length of Stearns’ book-length account (32 compared to 337 pages) it feels, paradoxically, more factual and comprehensive. If asked which text a beginner should read, I’d recommend the van Reybrouck chapter rather than the Stearns book.

Stearns engages in extended digressions based around in-depth interviews with key players, for example the ageing Marxist professor Ernest Wamba dia Wamba who was made the main spokesman of the rebel RCD. He gives profiles of some of the gung-ho entrepreneurs who took part in the Congo government’s firesale of its mining assets which leads into an entire chapter about blood diamonds and so on. By contrast, van Reybrouck manages to include some interviews of his own, but only after he has given a good, clear overview of the conflict.

He divides the war into 4 phases:

1. The invasion August 1998

In August 1998 Rwanda, backed by Uganda and Burundi, invaded Congo. The cities in the east were taken immediately, and General James Kabarebe led a daring air assault on the military base at Kitona on the Atlantic Ocean west of Kinshasa with the aim of making a lightning strike on the capital. Rwanda-Uganda made the invasion out to be the work of a domestic rebel movement, the Congolese Rally for Democracy or RCD, which they cobbled together for the purpose (hence the appointment of hapless professor Wamba dia Wamba who was way out of his depth, and whose extended interview with Stearns provides an interestingly oblique angle on events).

2. The stalemate September 1998 to July 1999

The central fact of the war was that, unlike the assault in the first war, the Rwandan invasion failed to overthrow Congo’s leader. In 1997 Mobutu had no friends and was easily overthrown but, for their own reasons, several neighbouring countries wanted Kabila to remain in power and intervened to make sure he did.

At the last minute Zimbabwe and Angola sent contingents of soldiers who halted then threw back the RCD advance. After Zimbabwe and Angola, Namibia joined in as well. Northern allies were found in Sudan, Chad, and Libya, each of which had its own reasons for preventing Kabila’s fall. Sudan offered help because of its ongoing conflict with Uganda over the latter’s support for rebels in southern Sudan. Libya provided a few planes in order to break out of its international isolation. Chad sent 2,000 soldiers as a gesture of solidarity with Sudan and Libya. In the end, Kabila had a seven-nation army at his disposal. This was enough to blunt and then halt the Rwandan-Ugandan advance.

The front stabilised. In the east of the country, the rebels were engaged by the informal groups: the fanatical Congolese patriots who formed the Mai-mai, which had emerged during the refugee crisis after the Rwandan genocide; and the Rwandan Hutu militias who had also emerged from the same event. Both were now supported by Kinshasa. So now you have ‘official’ armies from Rwanda and Uganda fighting heavily armed and loosely organised militias.

When Chad withdrew from Équateur province in 1998, that part of the country fell into rebel hands but the occupying force was not the RCD but a new rebel army supported exclusively by Uganda: the Mouvement pour la Libération du Congo (MLC), commanded by Jean-Pierre Bemba, son of the wealthiest businessman of the Mobutu era.

So by about this point the map of the conflict sort of settled into place. To the west and south were Kabila with his Angolan and Zimbabwean allies; up in the northern jungle was Bemba with his Ugandan-supported MLC; and to the east Wamba dia Wamba with his Rwandan-supported RCD, which fought against the Kinshasa-backed Interahamwe and Mai-mai.

In July 1999 the heads of state of the seven nations involved in the war signed the Lusaka Peace Agreement. It contained complex provisions and the details of what was and what was not implemented but the summary is, it didn’t work. The conflict continued.

3. The dissension August 1999 to July 2000

Having given up on taking Kinshasa, Rwanda and Uganda who, along with local militias, now controlled the eastern half of Congo, turned to looting it. It wasn’t long before the former allies fell out. Ugandan forces had captured Kisingani, centre of the lucrative diamond trade and Rwandas forces now tried to seize it, leading to prolonged urban warfare which devastated the city. Locals remember a series of street battles, nicknamed the ‘one-day war’ (August 1999), the ‘three-day war’ (May 2000) and the ‘six-day war (June 2000), the latter despite the presence in the city of the UN in the shape of the Mission de l’Organisation des Nations Unies au Congo (MONUC) to supervise the supposed peace deal.

The rebel movement spit into a pro-Rwandan and a pro-Ugandan schism, the RCD-G (for Goma) and the RCD-K (for Kisangani) led by the egregious Wamba dia Wamba. And then another splinter group, the RCD-N for National. Schisms and splinters.

4. The anarchy aka the looting July 2000 to December 2002

In the north, the rebellion crumbled completely. Pro-Ugandan rebels no longer fought against Kinshasa or pro-Rwandan rebels, but simply among themselves. New, smaller armies arose. In Ituri, in the far north-east, the maze of conflicting militias became ever-more complicated. Each side, each militia, looted whatever it could, murdering and intimidating anyone who stood in their way.

Van Reybrouck gives an explanation of Rwanda and Uganda’s expropriation of Congo’s mineral wealth which is shorter but punchier than Stearns’. Both countries suddenly started exporting gold and diamonds and tin, none of which came from their own territory, all stolen from Congo. In a really ringing sentence he sums up the situation:

The scramble for Africa was now being organised by the Africans themselves.

On an almost daily basis I read references to white European colonists and imperialists looting Africa because those sentiments are used as power plays in contemporary political and cultural discourse. You rarely read the extent to which African rulers, in Congo, Nigeria and countless other countries, have mercilessly pillaged and robbed their own countries and peoples.

Van Reybrouck explains that this final phase, the looting phase, dragged on for so long because it was so profitable for so many people. War became business with guns. Violence was commercialised. Locals made more money in coltan or gold mines than subsistence farming, and all manner of middle men up to the exchequers of Rwanda and Uganda profited. For many dirt-poor Congolese joining a militia and looting food, goods, demanding payoffs, partying, destroying property and raping women was a tempting career. Hence the proliferation of militias and the spread of violence across this huge region.

Non-involved nations, especially South Africa, spent a lot of energy trying to negotiate a peace. In July 2002 the Pretoria Accord was signed which pacified a large part of the area, with Rwanda agreeing to the withdrawal of its estimated 20,000 troops from the DRC in exchange for an international commitment to the disarmament of the Hutu militia Interahamwe and ex-FAR fighters.

5. The long tail

This isn’t part of van Reybrouck’s schema, but there was obviously a fifth phase, post 2003, whereby the war, or sustained unrest, continues to this day in the extreme eastern part of Congo, in the areas that border directly on Uganda (Ituri) and Rwanda (Kivu). These areas have been subjected to bouts of extreme violence, massive human rights violations and tremendous human suffering.

Stearns interviews the hapless professor Wiamba put in ‘charge’ of the RCD, who is appalled by details of the massacres he tells him about. But in the second part of his chapter, Van Reybrouck is if anything even more insistent on the organised violence and intimidation, especially as practiced by the RCD.

He interviews a lorry driver who took dissidents and journalists and, after a while, anyone someone had a grudge against and had paid the RCD to get rid of, describing how they were rounded up into a draughty warehouse where they were kept till they were strangled to death or tied with ropes and taken in speedboats out into Lake Kivu and chucked over the side. He describes it all as he and van Reybrouck sit in a cafe, sipping beers and looking out over beautiful Lake Kivu where they disposed of hundreds and hundreds of bodies.

He interviews a doctor whose family were wiped out by shelling but who continued to treat the wounded throughout the six-day war in Kisingani. He tells the extraordinary story of Lieutenant Papy Bulaya who ends up lost deep in the jungle with a handful of comrades and forced to submit to the local warlord and ivory hunter.

Listening to Papy was like rereading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, an immersion in a gloomy, dark-green world full of lethargic violence. A world of shady characters as cruel as they were bleak and drunken.

Both Stearns and van Reybrouck complain that ‘the West’ and ‘the media’ and ‘the public’ are repelled by Africa and focus only on the bad news from Africa, associate Africa only with images of savagery and massacre, and so on. Somehow they both miss the obvious fact that their own books partake in this process: do nothing but ram images of African violence and cruelty and pointless war and disease and famine deep into their readers’ imaginations.

Bulaya tells van Reybrouck how one of the RCD spin-offs he was associated with captured Pygmies and ate them:

The Pygmies’ family members were even forced to consume parts of their murdered relatives’ bodies. The hearts of newborn babies were cut out and eaten…Papy sneered, snorted. His sombre words dripped with contempt. “One day I lost track of my friend, my comrade. At first we couldn’t find him. Then we saw him at a bend in the road. Ramses had got hold of him. His head was impaled on a stick. His penis was tied to the stick a little farther down.”

In Ituri district the two major population groups, Hemas and Lendus, revive ancient ethnic hatreds in their struggle over the lucrative local goldmines. Van Reybrouck interviews a Hemas man who underwent the following experience at the hands of a local féticheur or witch doctor:

“He had two eggs. They tied me up, I was scared to death. He rolled the eggs over the ground at my feet. I was told that if the eggs rolled away from me I would be considered innocent. But if they rolled toward me, then I was a Hema and therefore guilty. I was lucky, the eggs rolled away. But Jean, who was with me, was not as fortunate. The eggs rolled the wrong way and they told him to run for it. While he was running away, the Lendu shot arrows at him. He fell. They cut him to pieces with their machetes, right before my eyes. Then they ate him.”

The books I read a few months ago about the Victorian explorers Henry Stanley or the explorers involved in the quest for the source of the Nile repeat the modern, politically correct view that those old white Victorians exaggerated the extent of cannibalism in the Congo in order to justify their ‘civilising’ mission. It’s typical of our mixed-up values that suggesting Congolese were cannibals in the 1870s is an outrageous racist slur and you have to be careful how you repeat it, whereas absolutely no-one is denying that some Congolese were practising cannibalism just a few years ago. Cannibalism and disgusting human butchery.

“It was in 2000. We were at our own home. My husband imported goods from Dubai. The soldiers came in. They were Tutsis. They spoke Rwandan. They sacked everything and wanted to kill my husband. ‘I’ve already given you everything,’ he told them, ‘so why do you want to kill me?’ But they said: ‘We kill big traders with the knife, not with a gun.’ They had machetes. They started hacking at his arm. ‘We have to chop hard,’ they said, ‘the Nande are strong.’ Then they butchered him, like in a slaughterhouse. They took out his intestines and his heart…. I had pick up all the pieces. They held a gun to my head. I wept. All the pieces of my husband’s body. I had to gather them together. They cut me with a knife, that’s how I got this scar. I have another one on my thigh….I wept and they started raping me. There were twelve of them. And then my two daughters in the next room.” (Masika Katsua in interview)

Summary

Jason K. Stearns’ book about the Great War of Africa is very good. But arguably David van Reybrouck’s chapter is better. It is not only more concise but gives a much better overview of the different phases of the conflict, bringing out its internal logic. And it contains interviews with participants and eyewitnesses which are the equal of anything in Stearns, and – in the case of Lieutenant Papy Bulaya’s narrative – surpass it and almost anything else you could ever read in the most improbable adventure yarn or most stomach-churning horror story.

Credits

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason K. Stearns was published in 2011 in the United States by Public Affairs. All references are to the 2012 Public Affairs paperback edition.

Congo: The Epic History of a People by David Van Reybrouck was published in Dutch by De Bezige Bij in 2010. All references are to the paperback version of the English translation by Sam Garrett, published by Fourth Estate in 2015.

Surprisingly for a contemporary book, Congo: The Epic History of a People is available online in its entirety.

Africa-related reviews

History

Fictions and memoirs set wholly or partly in Africa

Exhibitions about Africa

Congolese soldiers in the world wars

Congo: The Epic History of a People by David Van Reybrouck is a wonderland of a book. The accounts he gives of the involvement of Congolese soldiers in the two world wars are so remarkable and so little known that it’s worth recording them in a standalone blog post.

In his characteristic style, van Reybrouck interweaves traditional, factual history with first-hand, eye-witness memories by veterans or the families of veterans, which add colour and human scale to such huge abstract events.

First World War (pages 129 to 139)

Congo as a buffer state

At the Congress of Vienna in 1815 Belgium itself was conceived as a sort of buffer state between the powers, between France and Prussia. In a similar way, at the Berlin Conference of 1885, King Leopold persuaded the powers that his seizure of this huge chunk of Africa would serve as a sort of buffer between territory controlled by the old rivals Britain and France in west Africa and the territory claimed in east Africa by the new kid on the block, Germany.

The final agreement of colonial borders in Africa meant that Congo shared a 430-mile-long border with German East Africa. Given that the Germans owned Cameroon to the north-west of Congo, it made sense for them to ponder seizing a corridor through the Belgian colony in order to link German East and West Africa. In fact, just before war broke out, the German foreign office actually approached the British with the suggestion of dividing Congo between them, which the British wisely rejected.

Germany attacks

After war broke out in Europe in August 1914, the colonial authorities expected Congo to remain neutral, which it did for all of 11 days, until Germany attacked. A steamship crossed Lake Tanganyika from the German side and shelled the Congo port of Mokolubu, sinking some canoes, then German soldiers landed and cut the telephone wire. A week later the Germans attacked the lakeside port of Lukuga, too.

Main battle zones

Because of the lack of roads and infrastructure, the First World War in Africa wasn’t fought along huge fronts, as in Europe, but was a matter of seizing strategic points and roads. Congolese forces ended up fighting on three fronts, Cameroon, Rhodesia and East Africa.

1. In 1914 a handful of Belgian officers and 600 Congolese troops were sent to help the British in the battle for Cameroon where German resistance to British, French and Belgian colonial units finally ended in March 1916.

2. By mid-1915 South African troops had secured the surrender of German South-West Africa but German forces threatened Rhodesia and so the Belgian government in exile (in Le Havre) ordered seven Belgian and 283 Congolese soldiers to help the British defend it.

Battle of the lakes

3. But the most intense Congo-German engagement was in the East. Here the border between Congo and German East Africa had only been finalised as late as 1910. In 1915 German forces led by Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck made repeated attempts to move into Kivu district (to the west of Lake Kivu, which formed part of the border between Belgian and German territory), with a view to pushing on north to seize the Kilo-Moto gold mines of the Ituri rain forest.

The Germans took initial control of lakes Kivu and Tanganyika which they patrolled with armed steamships. In reply the Allies i.e. the British, organised the transport of steamships broken up into parts all the way up the Congo and then across land to the lakes. They also sent four aquaplanes, which undertook a campaign to bomb and sink the German ships.

The Tabora campaign

Meanwhile, a large infantry force of 15,000 soldiers was assembled on the east Congo border under Force Publique commander, General Charles Tombeur. An important fact to remember is that, in the absence of decent roads, almost all the materiel needed for these campaigns had to be carried by porters, just as in Victorian times. It’s estimated that for every soldier who went into battle there were seven porters. In total, throughout the war years, it’s estimated that some 260,000 native porters were recruited or dragooned, out of a total population of less than ten million. This disruption had a negative impact on local economies and food production, but the conditions of the porters weren’t much better, with all experiencing inadequate food, shelter and little drinking water. As usual in every conflict, disease became rife and about one in ten of the porters died on active service, a total of some 26,000, compared to 2,000 soldiers.

As to the campaign itself, in March 1916 General Tombeur led his army across the border into Rwanda and seized the capital, Kigali, on 6 May. They then marched the 370 miles south-east to Tabora, which had been a key staging post for the explorers of the 1870s and 1880s and was now the nexus of German administration. It was the largest engagement of the campaign. Tombeur’s forces joined with another army which had marched from Lake Tanganyika and, after ten days and nights of intense fighting, Tabora fell to the Belgian-Congo forces on 19 September 1916. The Belgian flag was raised in the town centre amid widespread celebrations.

In 1917 Tabora was used as a staging post for a campaign to capture Mahenge, 300 miles to the south, but the battle of Tabora was the one which went down in colonial memory. Tombeur was given a peerage and songs were written about his famous victory.

Interview with Martin Kabuya

Typical of van Reybrouck’s method of humanising history, he tracks down an army veteran, Martin Kabuya, whose grandfather fought in the Tabora campaign and, he claims, provided cover for the soldier who raised the Belgian flag in the conquered town square (p.135). And then talks to Hélène Nzimbu Diluzeti, 94-year-old widow of Thomas Masamba Lumoso, a Great War veteran who served in the TSF or telégraphie sans fils (i.e. wireless) section from 9 August 1914 to 5 October 1918, so for only a weeks short of the entire duration of the war (pages 135 to 137).

Here’s the map van Reybrouck provides. You can see the black arrows indicating movement of Congolese forces through the two small unnamed states of Rwanda and Burundi towards Tabora in what is now called Tanzania but was then German East Africa. On the top left of the map you can see the borders of Cameroon and understand how German strategists, at one point, might have fantasised about annexing northern Congo in order to for a corridor of German colonial territory from Tanzania through north Congo and joining up with Cameroon. One of many colonial pipe dreams.

The Congolese in Belgium

Not many Congolese soldiers had time to be transported to Belgium before it fell to the Germans’ swift advance in August 1914. Van Reybrouck tells us the stories of two of them, Albert Kudjabo and Paul Panda Farnana, members of the Congolese Volunteer Corps. They were among the tens of thousands deployed to defend the Belgian city of Namur but the Germans swiftly captured it and these two Africans who spent the next four years in various prisoner of war camps. Among transfers between camps, forced labour and various humiliations, they were interviewed by the Royal Prussian Phonographic Committee which recorded Kudjabo singing traditional songs. The recordings survive to this day (p.138).

Van Reybrouck returns to the two POWs on page 178 to describe their chagrin and anger when they were finally repatriated to from Germany to Belgium only to read commentators in the press saying the likes of them should be packed off as soon as possible back to the land of bananas (p.178). They had fought side by side with their Belgian brothers to protect the motherland. Where was the gratitude? It left a legacy of bitterness.

Paul Panda Farnana

We know a lot about Farnana in particular because he played a central role in founding the Union Congolaise in August 1919, an organisation set up to assist ‘the moral and intellectual development of the Congolese race’. The Union called for greater involvement of the natives in the colonial administration and opened branches across Belgium.

In December 1920 Farnana addressed the first National Colonial Congress in Brussels and then took part in the second Pan-African Congress organised by American civil rights activist W.E.B du Bois. In 1929 Farnana returned to Congo and settled in his native village, but died there, unmarried and childless in 1932. He is often considered the first Congolese intellectual, but his was a very isolated voice. It would take another world war and decades of simmering discontent before real change could be affected.

Consequences of the Great War

After Germany’s defeat its African colonies were parcelled out to the allies. England took German East Africa which was renamed Tanganyika (and then Tanzania, on independence in 1961). Belgium was handed the two small states on the eastern borders of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi.

Earlier in the book van Reybrouck described the process whereby colonial administrators defined and helped to create tribal identities. Originally much more fluid and overlapping, these names and categories hardened when the authorities issued identity cards on which every Congolese had to match themselves to a limited list of bureaucratic tribal ‘identities’.

When they took over Rwanda, the Belgian authorities applied the same technique, insisting that the previously fluid and heterogenous Rwandans define themselves as one of three categories, Tutsi, Hutu or Twas (pygmy), an enforced European categorisation which was to bitterly divide the country and lead, ultimately, to the calamitous Rwandan genocide of 1994.

Although the war disrupted societies and led to significant native casualties in the eastern part of the country, the mining regions such as Katanga experienced an economic boom and huge explosion of jobs which increased urbanisation. But after the war there was a sudden drop in demand which led to layoffs, unrest and strikes.

Second World War (pages 182 to 189)

And then it happened all over again, except on a bigger scale, in 1940. In 18 days the German army rolled through Belgium as part of its conquest of France, Belgium was defeated and occupied. While the Belgian government fled to England, King Leopold III was taken prisoner to Germany. For a while there was uncertainty in the colony about which way it would jump – support the victorious Nazis or align with the humiliated government in exile? The decision was taken by the man on the scene, Governor General Pierre Ryckmans who to his great credit decided the Belgian Congo would align with the allies and fight fascism.

Ethiopia

Mussolini had invaded Haile Selassie’s Abyssinia in 1935. In 1940 Churchill sent troops from British Kenya into Ethiopia to neutralise the Italian threat. Starting in February 1941 the Brits were reinforced by the eleventh battalion of the Congo Force Publique. This consisted of 3,000 Congolese soldiers and 2,000 bearers.

They drove across British-controlled Sudan in blistering heat but had to manage the mountainous west of Ethiopia mostly on foot. From scorching heat it started to rain and the troops found themselves mired in mud. The Congolese took the small towns of Asosa and Gambela but faced a stiffer challenge at the fortified garrison town of Saio. After heavy shelling, on 8 June 1941, the town surrendered. Congo forces took nine Italian generals including the commander of all Italian forces in East Africa, 370 Italian officers, 2,574 noncoms and 1,533 native soldiers, along with a huge amount of munitions and equipment.

Van Reybrouck makes the droll point that the expulsion of the Italians (who had only held Ethiopia for 6 years) allowed the return of the emperor Haile Selassie, which gave renewed vigour to the small sect of Rastafarians in faraway Jamaica who had started worshipping the emperor as a deity during the 1930s. Thus Congolese soldiers helped in creating the spiritual side of reggae!

What Tabora had been in World War One, Saio was in World War Two, a resounding victory for African troops. More than that, for the first time in history an African nation had been liberated by African troops (p.185).

Nigeria

Van Reybrouck interviews Congo veterans who fought in the campaign, Louis Ngumbi and André Kitadi. He takes a path through the complicated wartime events in north Africa through the career of Kitadi. Having routed the Italians in the East, the focus switched to West Africa. Kitadi was a radio operator in the Congo army. In autumn 1942 he was shipped up to Nigeria and trained for 6 months in readiness to take Dahomey (modern Benin) from the Vichy French. However during the training period, Dahomey switched to General de Gaulle’s Free French and so the focus now switched to Libya where German forces under Rommel were based and repeatedly threatened to invade Egypt.

Kitadi and the other Congolese soldiers travelled across the desert of Chad (a French colony run by a black governor allied to de Gaulle). Van Reybrouck dovetails Kitadi’s story with that of Martin Kabuya, another radio operator in the Force Publique, who had also been shipped to Nigeria, but now found himself sent by sea right around Africa and up through the Suez Canal.

Egypt

Kitadi spent a year in a camp outside Alexandria. There were lots of Italian prisoners of war, kept in barbed wire POW camps. The Arabs stole everything. Kabuya was stationed at Camp Geneva near the Suez Canal, intercepting enemy Morse code messages. Once he was attacked by a big SS man who he stabbed in the gut with a bayonet and killed.

Palestine

When fighting in Europe ended, both men stayed in the army and were moved to Palestine to help with the new British mandate there (p.188).

The paradox of scale

Paradoxically, although the scale and reach of the Second World War was dramatically larger than the first, the involvement of Congolese was significantly smaller for the simple reason that the army no longer needed bearers and porters – they had trucks and lorries. So the number of Congolese directly involved in the war was nothing like the 260,000 Congolese porters dragooned into service in 1914-18, with the results that casualties were correspondingly much smaller.

The odyssey of Libert Otenga

The strength of van Reybrouck’s approach is demonstrated by the story of Libert Otenga. Otenga joined a mobile medical unit of Belgian doctors and Congolese medics.

The Belgian field hospital became known as the tenth BCCS, the tenth Belgian Congo Casualty Clearing Station. It had two operating tents and a radio tent. In the other tents there were beds for thirty patients and stretchers for two hundred more. During the war, the unit treated seven thousand wounded men and thirty thousand who had fallen ill. Even at the peak of its activities it consisted of only twenty-three Belgians, including seven doctors, and three hundred Congolese. Libert Otenga was one of them.

Van Reybrouck tracks down an ageing Otenga in Kinshasa to hear his story. First the medical unit was sent to Somalia. Then they went with British-Belgian troops to Madagascar, where they tended German prisoners of war. After Madagascar, the unit went by ship to Ceylon, where the medical unit was reorganised, and then on to India, to the Ganges delta in modern Bangladesh, a long way up the river Brahmaputra and then overland to the border with Burma, a British colony which the Japanese had captured in 1942. This was their longest posting, they treated soldiers and civilians, they had an air ambulance at their disposal. As van Reybrouck remarks:

The fact that Congolese paramedics cared for Burmese civilians and British soldiers in the Asian jungle is a completely unknown chapter in colonial history, and one that will soon vanish altogether. (p.189)

The travels of Congolese forces during the Second World War

Congo and the atom bomb

The uranium in the Big Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima contained uranium mined in the mineral-rich Katanga province of Congo (p. 190).

Edgar Sengier, then managing director of Union Minière, saw to it that Congo’s uranium reserves did not fall into the wrong hands. Shinkolobwe had the world’s largest confirmed deposit of uranium. When the Nazi threat intensified just before the war, he had had 1,250 metric tons (1,375 U.S. tons) of uranium shipped to New York, then flooded his mines. Only a tiny stock still present in Belgium ever fell into German hands. (p.190)

The Cold War

During the war the Congo had come to America’s attention as an important source of raw materials for war goods. By 1942 the Japanese had captured most of the Far East, so new sources were needed. the Congo turned out to be a vital source of metals like copper, wolfram, tin and zinc, and of vegetable products such as rubber, copal, cotton, quinine, palm oil for soap and, surprisingly, use in the vital steel industry. (p.191)

This was before the scientists of the Manhattan Project discovered how to make an atom bomb at which point uranium became a vital resource of strategic significance. All this explains America’s interest in the Congo in the 15 years after the war, and then its intense involvement in the events surrounding independence and its support of the dictator Mobutu through the entire Cold War period.

CIA activities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Conclusion

One way of seeing these events are as colourful sidelights on the two world wars and then the low level capitalist-communist antagonism which followed and van Reybrouck’s focus on individual experiences helps the reader understand how all our lives are determined and shaped by vast impersonal historic forces.

Another way of looking at it, is to reflect that from the moment it was first mapped and explored by Stanley in the late 1870s, the second largest country in Africa has never been free of interference, control and exploitation by Europe and America.

Credit

Congo: the epic history of a people by David Van Reybrouck was published in Dutch by De Bezige Bij in 2010. All references are to the paperback version of the English translation by Sam Garrett, published by Fourth Estate in 2015.

Surprisingly for a contemporary book, Congo: The Epic History of a People is available online in its entirety.

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Congo: the epic history of a people by David Van Reybrouck – 3. The Great War of Africa

Great War of Africa dates