Africa 1960: Dawn of A New Era
Africa 1960 - 1970: Chronicle and Analysis
Author: Godfrey Mwakikagile
Paperback: 588 pages
Publisher: New Africa Press (10 November 2009)
ISBN-10: 9987160077
ISBN-13: 9789987160075
1960:
Dawn of A New Era
THE YEAR 1960 was one of the most important in the history of Africa. It was the year when the largest number of African countries won independence.
A total of 17 countries won independence that year, mostly from France. It was a feat that was not duplicated in any of the following years and 1960 was declared Africa's Year by the United Nations because of the unprecedented number of countries which won independence in that year.
The countries which won independence in 1960 were:
Dahomey (renamed Benin), 1 August 1960; Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), 5 August 1960; Cameroon, 1 January 1960; Central African Republic, 13 August 1960; Chad, 11 August 1960; Congo-Brazzaville, 15 August 1960; Congo-Leopoldville (renamed Congo-Kinshasa, Zaire, and now the Democratic Republic of Congo), 30 June 1960.
Gabon, 17 August 1960; Ivory Coast (renamed Cote D'Ivoire), 7 August 1960; Madagascar, 26 June 1960; Mali, 20 June 1960; Mauritania, 28 November 1960; Niger, 3 August 1960; Nigeria, 1 October 1960; Senegal, 20 August 1960; Somalia, 1 July 1960; and Togo 27 April 1960.
They were all former French colonies except Nigeria and Somalia. Nigeria won independence from Britain. Somalia was an amalgamation of British Somaliland in the north and Italian Somaliland in the south. The two colonies agreed to unite and emerged from colonial rule as one country, Somalia.
But while 1960 was hailed as Africa's Year, and Africans across the continent celebrated the dawn of a new era heralded by the achievement of independence by a large number of countries, marking the beginning of the end of colonial rule on the continent, the year was also marred by some of the bloodiest events in the history of the continent.
The initial euphoria of independence was dampened when the former Belgian Congo descended into chaos just a few days after the country won independence, turning this giant African nation into the bleeding heart of Africa. "It was the best of times and the worst of times," to quote Charles Dickens. And Africa has never fully recovered from the convulsions caused by the Congo crisis in the turbulent sixties.
In a very tragic way, the Congo crisis demonstrated how vulnerable Africa was to foreign intrigue, with foreign powers turning the continent's potentially richest country into a playground and combat theatre in their contest for control of the continent.
Africans couldn't do anything about it.
While ethnic and regional rivalries fueled and may even have helped to ignite the conflict in the Congo, there is no question that the crisis was largely engineered by Western financial, economic and political interests led by the former colonial power, Belgium, and the United States, the leader of the Western world.
And while Lumumba was a staunch nationalist and Pan-Africanist and wanted the Congo to be genuinely independent without being dominated by either the East or West, he was not anti-Western as he was portrayed in the western media.
He even sought assistance from the West to help contain the situation and restore stability to the Congo but was rebuffed by the United States and other western powers; and for good reason, of course, since they were the ones who had engineered the whole thing.
Lumumba's predicament reminds one of what happened to Sekou Toure when he also sought assistance from the West. After the French cut off economic aid to Guinea, Sekou Toure asked for assistance from the United States but was rebuffed. President Dwight Eisenhower dismissed him as a dangerous leftist and a Soviet ally who did not deserve help from any Western country. But unlike Lumumba, he survived assassination and coup attempts through the years.
When Lumumba was assassinated, Africa entered a new era. It was a turning point in the history of the continent.
The assassination of Lumumba, and subsequent chaos that ensued following his assassination and Western intervention in the Congo, was one of the biggest tragedies in the history of Africa since the advent of colonial rule. And it still haunts the continent today almost 50 years after the Congo won independence from Belgium in June 1960.
Once Africa's great hope as its richest country, richer than South Africa in terms of minerals and agricultural potential right in the heart of the continent, the Congo became the bleeding heart of Africa because of foreign intervention. And it is still bleeding today.
At the centre of this maelstrom was the United States and Belgium, the most active and most prominent players on the Congo scene in the sixties and thereafter. In fact, for decades until the fall of Mobutu in May 1997, the largest CIA station in Africa was in Congo's capital, Kinshasa. The country was then known as Zaire, renamed by Mobutu in 1971.
Lumumba's fate and that of the Congo would not have turned out the way it did had Western countries not intervened in the Congo, wreaking havoc on an unprecedented scale since Congo's independence in 1960 well into the 1990s and beyond at a cost of more than 4 million lives.
The civil wars which broke out in the nineties, tearing the country apart, were largely a result of that, with the West having propped up a rotten regime under Mobutu for more than 30 years, triggering an uprising against his kleptocratic, despotic and blood-soaked reign during which he and his Western masters bled the country to death, leaving it an empty shell.
One of Africa's richest countries became of of the poorest. And it all started because Western countries, led by the United States, did not want Lumumba to remain in power and lead the Congo.
Lumumba was a strong nationalist and Pan-Africanist leader who was determined to lead the Congo as a truly independent country. And that was anathema to the West led by the United States. Western countries were equally determined to secure, maintain, and perpetuate their hegemonic control over the Congo and the rest of the continent in order to preserve, protect and promote their own interests to the detriment of Africans, and largely succeeded in doing so.
In many fundamental respects, the Congo became a test case of what the West intended to do to African countries after they won independence. And that was to neutralize them and render their independence meaningless by turning them into client states of the West or by simply destroying them if they resisted Western intervention. Lumumba and his country the Congo became the first casualties.
The downward spiral started with the secession of Katanga Province led by Moise Tshombe.
Tshombe used the chaos that ensued soon after the country won independence as an excuse to seek assistance from Belgium to restore law and order in his province. Belgian paratroopers flew into Katanga but with a larger mission in mind to support the secession of the mineral-rich province.
As the chaos spread across the country, Lumumba sought UN assistance and the United Nations created a peacekeeping force for the country. But just before the arrival of UN peacekeeping forces which had the mandate to make arrangements for the withdrawal of Belgian troops as requested by Lumumba, Tshombe declared independence for his province. The UN forces arrived on July 15th.
Katanga seceded from the rest of the Congo on 11 July 1960, only a few days after the country won independence on June 30th under the leadership of Patrice Lumumba as the first democratically elected leader of this vast country of more than 200 ethnic groups.
Just a few days after Katanga seceded, Tshombe ordered mobilization of his forces on July 20th to resist UN intervention and went on to recruit mercenaries to bolster his defence, making the situation worse for Lumumba as the legitimate leader of the Congolese government which wanted to keep the country united.
Lumumba assumed power as prime minister after winning a plurality of votes and was endorsed by the national parliament composed of representatives of different political parties all of which were regionally entrenched except Lumumba's Congolese National Movement - Mouvement National Congolaise (MNC) - which transcended ethno-regional loyalties and had support in all parts of the country. The MNC was founded on 5 October 1958 and Lumumba was one of its founding members and later its president.
His political base was in Stanleyville, in his home region of eastern Congo, but as a leader of a supra-tribal party, he did not see that as his only strength. He had loyal followers across the country.
Formed less than two years before the Belgians formally relinquished power, the MNC was the driving force behind the independence movement. In mid-1959, the party split into two groups.
One was more militant and was led by Lumumba, a situation similar to what happened in Ghana during the independence struggle when Kwame Nkrumah left the conservative United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), of which he had served as secretary-general, and went on to form the more radical Convention People's Party (CPP) in 1949 which led the country to independence by campaigning on the slogan, "Independence Now."
Lumumba pursued the same goal, invoking virtually the same slogan. And his party won support across the country in a relatively short time.
The other faction of the Congolese National Movement was led by Joseph Ileo, Cyrille Adoula and Albert Kalonji. It was a moderate group and all three leaders went on to play important roles in the country soon after independence and after Lumumba was assassinated.
Ileo and Adoula each served as prime minister at different times; and Albert Kalonji - a conservative who once served as Lumumba's minister of agriculture - is remembered probably more than anything else as the leader who led another secessionist province, South Kasai, thus threatening the territorial integrity of the Congo. Among all these leaders, Lumumba emerged as the only true nationalist leader transcending tribal and regional loyalties.
And the fact that he came from a small tribe or ethnic group, the Batatele, native to Province Orientale in eastern Congo - which includes Stanleyville, now called Kisangani - and to North Kasai where he was born, was a factor that made him more acceptable to many smaller ethnic groups across the country who feared domination by larger groups.
The large ethnic groups included the Bakongo whose most prominent son was President Joseph Kasavubu; the Lunda, of whom Moise Tshombe was its most well-known leader who was also related to the royal family of this large ethnic group. The son of a successful business man in Katanga, Tshombe was the son-in-law of the emperor of the Lunda people.
And then there was the Luba, another large ethnic group dominant in Kasai Province whose most prominent member was Albert Kalonji. And there were other fairly large groups, bigger than Lumumba's ethnic group, the Batatele.
President Kasavubu was the leader of the Alliance of the Bakongo (ABAKO), a party with an ethnic base solidly anchored among his people who constituted the largest ethnic group in the country and after whom the country itself and River Congo were named.
But Lumumba's status as a member of a small ethnic group was also a liability since it did not provide him with a strong ethnic base from which he could derive and mobilize support the way Kasavubu did from the Bakongo; and even the way, for example, Etienne Tshisekedi did years later from the Luba, his people, when he sought the presidency in the 1990s and beyond long after Lumumba was killed.
Although Lumumba did not come from a large ethnic group, the MNC faction he led emerged victorious in the first legislative elections of May 1960 and won the largest number of votes among all the parties in the country.
His minority status as a member of the small Batatele tribe was also a powerful incentive among many members of parliament who backed him up for his prime ministerial position after his party won the largest number of votes in the May 1960 elections.
But it was his appeal to nationalist sentiments transcending ethnic and regional interests - more than anything else - which made him the most popular leader in the Congo whom many people saw as a unifying factor and the leader of all the Congolese and not just those of his small tribe or ethnic groups in the eastern part of the country.
He was the exact opposite of Moise Tshombe, his arch-enemy and the leader of the secessionist Katanga Province.
The events leading to Katanga's secession occurred in rapid succession soon after the country won independence.
The army mutinied against its Belgian officers; the Belgian government deployed troops ostensibly to protect and rescue its citizens and other Europeans who were supposedly under siege and in danger of being killed by Africans; Katanga declared independence, and the country dissolved in anarchy, prompting Lumumba to seek assistance from other African countries and the United Nations to restore law and order and save the country from breaking up along ethno-regional lines. As Brian Urquhart who was in the Congo during that time described years later what happened, in his article "The Tragedy of Lumumba" in The New York Review of Books, 4 October 2001:
"Belgium's exploitation of the Congo was the darkest episode in all the murky history of European colonialism.
To feed King Leopold II's manic appetite for ivory and rubber, mutilations, mass executions, and the use of the chicotte - a hippopotamus hide whip that cut through skin and muscle - administered by the indigenous Force Publique commanded by Belgian officers had halved the population within a few years and left a legacy of oppression and cruelty that poisoned forever the relations of Congolese and Belgians.
At Congo's independence on June 30, 1960, the young King Baudoin, in a paternalistic speech, praised his ghastly ancestor's achievements. Lumumba's fiery response brought into the open the latent rage and resentment of his people (before he spoke, Lumumba was seen scribbling notes when the king was giving his speech).
Perhaps for the first time, Belgian officials realized that after independence, with Patrice Lumumba as prime minister, things would not, as they had hoped, go on much as before.
The Congo, unlike most African colonies, had no longstanding liberation movement either at home or abroad, or any internationally recognized independence leaders like Mandela, Kenyatta, Nkrumah, Nkomo, Nujoma, and others. Such liberationist activity as there was had been sanctioned only in 1957 and was led by Joseph Kasavubu, who was to become the Congo's first president.
Lumumba, a former postal clerk and beer salesman, became the leader of the nationalist, supratribal party, the Mouvement National Congolaise (Congolese Nationalist Movement), in Stanleyville, his political base. He was arrested for the first time in November 1959 and then released to take part in the Brussels Roundtable that set the scene for the Congo's suddenly accelerated independence, precipitated in part by Charles De Gaulle's abrupt granting of independence to France's African colonies. Congolese independence was in every way a last-minute arrangement.
Whether because they believed that independence would be little more than a formality or because of the superiority and contempt they felt for their unfortunate African subjects, the Belgians, unlike other colonial powers, made no practical arrangements for an independent Congo.
No Congolese had ever taken part in the business of government or public administration at any important level. Only 17 (other reports say only 16) out of a population of 13.5 million had university degrees. There was not one Congolese officer in the Force Publique, which was to become the Armee Nationale Congolaise (ANC). No colony had ever faced independence so ill-prepared.
Events in the first days of independence went at a dizzying pace. The army mutinied and threw out its Belgian officers. Europeans were roughed up, and there were reports of white women being raped. The Belgian population panicked and left. Belgian paratroopers were deployed to protect the remaining Europeans.
These troops, believed by the Congolese to have been sent to reverse independence, clashed with the soldiers of the ANC - which had no officers - in the major cities. With the connivance of Belgium, the richest province, Katanga, whose president was Moise Tshombe, seceded from the new republic. Public administration, law, and order evaporated and were replaced by chaos and anarchy."
Brian Urquhart was in a unique position to make those observations not only because he was in the Congo during that time but also because he worked with Dr. Ralph Bunche, a black American senior diplomat who was also the UN undersecretary-general. Dr. Bunche was also in the Congo during that time. As Urquhart explained:
"I should explain here my own connection with the Congo. I was Ralph Bunche's chief assistant and in that capacity was in the Congo throughout the summer and early fall of 1960.
We were in touch with Lumumba more or less on a daily basis during this time, until he broke off relations with Bunche.
In the fall of 1961, after Hammarskjold's death on a mission to the Congo, I became the UN representative in Katanga, was kidnapped and severely beaten up by Moise Tshombe's troops, and was in charge of the UN side during two weeks of fierce fighting after which Tshombe agreed to end secession and reunite Katanga with the Congo.
Bunche, who had drafted the chapters of the UN Charter on decolonization and trusteeship and was awarded the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the armistice agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors, had a unique record as a promoter and expediter of decolonization and was the friend and mentor of many of the African independence leaders.
Lumumba once asked me angrily why Hammarskjold had sent 'ce negre Americain' to the Congo. I replied with some heat that Hammarskjold had only sent the best man in the world to deal with such a situation. Lumumba did not revert to this subject."
The anarchic situation in the Congo had been precipitated by a series of events soon after independence. But the most dramatic of these events before Lumumba's assassination was, of course, the secession of Katanga Province.
Katanga's secession was followed by secessionist threats from other provinces and in fact one such threat was carried out when Albert Kalonji from Kasai Province of the Luba people in south-central Congo declared himself king of South Kasai. Kasai's secession only made the situation worse.
Bordered by Katanga on the southeast, southern Kasai declared independence on 14 June 1960, 16 days before Congo's independence, and declared itself the Federal State of South Kasai. The northern part of Kasai province did not secede.
On 8 August 1960, the state of South Kasai officially became a "sovereign"entity, with Bakwanga, now Mbuj- Mayi, as its capital. Albert Kalonji became president of South Kasai and Joseph Ngalula was appointed head of government or prime minister.
On 12 April 1961, an assembly of South Kasai leaders and elders declared Alber Kalonji's father an emperor, invested with the title Mulopwe which means emperor or king in the Luba language.
But the new emperor immediately abdicated in favour of his son Albert Kalonji, the president of South Kasai. From then on, Albert Kalonji ruled South Kasai as Mulopwe - Emperor/King - Albert I Kalonji.
The head of the Congolese government during this chaotic period was still Patrice Lumumba. To end South Kasai's secession, he sent troops from his national army into South Kasai led by Joseph Mobutu and after four months of fighting reconquered the region. On 31 December 1961, Albert Kalonji was arrested, ending the secession.
On 7 September 1962, Kalonji escaped from prison and attempted to set up a new government but it was dissolved less than one month later.
The secession of South Kasai was one of the major problems the country faced in the early sixties. But it was Katanga's secession which posed the greatest threat to the territorial integrity of the Congo. And its leader, Moise Tshombe, was resolutely opposed to any reconciliation and the establishment of a central government as the supreme authority over the whole country.
Even before Congo won independence, he made it clear that he preferred a loose federation in which the provinces would be able to exercise considerable power over their affairs, the kind of autonomy which amounted to virtual independence with a very weak central government.
Before he declared Katanga a republic after seceding from the rest of the country, he already had formidable influence in his home province because of his family ties to the royal family of the Lunda, the largest ethnic group in Katanga; and also because of his dominant position as president of the Confederation of Associations of Katanga (CONAKAT), the biggest and strongest political party in Katanga Province which was also supported by the Belgian colonial authorities and their government in Brussels.
In January - February 1960, Tshombe attended the Brussels Roundtable, a conference on Congo's independence. The meeting was also attended by other Congolese leaders including Lumumba and Kasavubu under the auspices of the Belgian government.
At that meeting, Tshombe demanded that once the country won independence on June 30th it should form a loose federation of independent states based on the existing regional structure whose provinces were defined by their ethnic identities more than anything else.
He did not prevail but left no doubt in any one's mind that a unitary state for the Congo was the farthest thing from his mind. He wanted no part of it; nor did his sponsors, the Belgians, who wanted to control the mineral wealth of Katanga once Katanga seceded.
In the general elections of 1960, CONAKAT won and secured control of the provincial legislature in Elisabethville, capital of Katanga Province, giving Tshombe considerable power not only in his home province but in the country as a whole as the leader of the richest province and of one of the most powerful and best organized political parties in the Congo, even though it was regionally entrenched like the rest except Lumumba's which transcended ethno-regional loyalties.
Emboldened by this victory and support from the Belgian authorities, and his pre-eminent position on the country's political scene as the leader of the richest province, he pulled Katanga out of the Congo and declared the province a republic only 11 days after the country won independence. It was a bold and dangerous move, and it had dire consequences for the entire country for decades to come. And the country has not yet recovered from what ensued in those turbulent years in the sixties.
After Katanga's secession, Tshombe worked closely with Belgian advisers and business leaders as he had in the past and even appointed a Belgian officer as the commander of his army, in spite of the fact that the Belgians saw him as a racist who worked with whites only to secure his own interests; they denounced Lumumba the same way, of course, although those who knew Lumumba, including his political opponents, say he was not a racist but an uncompromising nationalist and Pan-Africanist.
But there is no question that Tshombe was a tribal chauvinist and champion of the Lunda people and other Katangese but especially the Lunda, his fellow tribesmen. And he refused to cooperate with the UN and the central government under Lumumba to restore the integrity of the Congo, maintaining that Katanga was an independent state and had the right to be one.
In August 1960, he was elected president of Katanga and maintained a large army of mercenaries, many of whom came from apartheid South Africa and other countries including France and Belgium. When the United Nations asked Tshombe to end Katanga's secession, he refused and went to war against UN troops which had been sent to Congo to restore law and order. UN forces were later given the mandate to end Katanga's secession by force, and fighting began.
As the chaos continued, Congolese leaders tried to restore stability in the country and in February 1961, they formed a provisional government with Joseph Ileo as prime minister. Conferences to negotiate reunification of the Congo were held in the first half of 1961 and were attended by representatives from all the country's six provinces.
In July 1961, the secession of South Kasai under Albert Kalonji formally ended, and in August, Cyrille Adoula was named Congo's prime minister. Adoula emerged on the national scene as a moderate trade union leader before independence. Antoine Gizenga was named deputy prime minister. Earlier, Gizenga had served in the same position under Lumumba.
Lumumba served as prime minister from 24 June – 5 September 1960; Joseph Ileo from 12 September 1960 – 27 July 1961; and Adoula from 2 August 1961 – 20 June 1964.
Antoine Gizenga served as prime minister of a rival nationalist government of Lumumba's followers based in Stanleyville from 13 December 1960 – 5 August 1961.
Formation of the government of national unity in July 1961 took place after politicians from all parts of the country, including Katanga, were invited to Leopoldville in July to discuss new arrangements for the country under a federal constitution. And they all agreed to keep Kasavubu as president.
But to appease Lumumba's followers, Lumumba's deputy prime minister Antoine Gizenga was brought into the government. Before then, he was head of a rival government in Stanleyville, one of the three centres of power in the country during that period. The other two were Leopoldville, the nation's capital, and Elisabethville, the capital of the secessionist Katanga Province.
Among all three, the government in Stanleyville, Lumumba's political stronghold, claimed to be and was seen by its supporters as the only nationalist government in Congo in the tradition of Lumumba.
Tshombe and other politicians in Katanga were also invited to the conference but they refused to attend. It was a conference of rival groups and politicians, with different ideologies, but succeeded in reaching compromises in order to form a national government and keep the country united under a federal constitution.
But while all these compromises were being made, the situation in Katanga Province not only remained highly volatile but deteriorated. Tshombe refused to negotiate with the United Nations to end Katanga's secession and his refusal to do so was the last straw.
UN forces began rounding up mercenaries in Katanga Province on 28 August 1960. It was the beginning of a long struggle against the secessionist province and its mercenary fighters which went on until January 1963 when Katanga's secession was finally brought to an end.
About 100,000 Congolese are estimated to have died during the Congo crisis, the bloodiest on the continent in the first years of African independence.
While Katanga's secession formally ended on 15 January 1963, and the central government took over Katanga Province with UN military aid, another rebellion broke out in Kwilu Province in the west in January 1964 under the leadership of Pierre Mulele.
The rebellion spread to other parts of the country, followed by an uprising led by Gaston Soumialot in Kivu Province in the east. It lasted until December 1964.
In June the same year, Tshombe was recalled from exile by President Kasavubu and was appointed prime minister, replacing Cyrille Adoula, in an attempt to achieve national reconciliation. But the honeymoon between Tshombe and Kasavubu did not last long.
Disagreements between President Kasavubu and Prime Minister Tshombe led to a government paralysis and in October 1965, Kasavubu dismissed Tshombe and appointed Evariste Kimba as prime minister. In November the same year, Mobutu overthrew the government and proclaimed himself president. Evariste Kimba and other opponents of Mobutu's regime were hanged. Kimba served as prime minister for less than one month from 18 October to 14 November 1965.
All this downward spiral took place within only five years since the country won independence in 1960 and when Lumumba became prime minister, only to be neutralized after three months in office. His biggest challenge right away was the secession of Katanga Province.
The central government under Lumumba was powerless and couldn't do anything to end the secession of Katanga Province on its own and even with the help of troops from other African countries. As Ahmed Ben-Bella, former president of Algeria who was overthrown in June 1965, said about the African countries which tried to help Lumumba and his followers and about the situation in the Congo in the sixties when he was interviewed in Switzerland in the 1990s: "We arrived in the Congo too late."
Ben-Bella was interviewed by Jorge Castaneda, the author of Companero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara in which he quotes Ben Bella.
A number of African countries - Ghana, Tanzania, Guinea, Mali, Algeria and Egypt - tried to help the nationalist forces in the Congo. But, by then, Lumumba was gone, having been assassinated in January 1961.
When Ben-Bella was interviewed on 4 November 1995, in Geneva, he was referring to the attempts made by those six African countries which intervened later in the Congo to help the nationalist forces when they were fighting the puppet government in Leopoldville and whose leaders played a major in the elimination of Lumumba.
But Lumumba's supporters did not give up the fight. His closest advisers and many of his followers including Laurent Kabila (who was in his twenties then) quickly left the capital Leopoldville soon after his assassination and went to the rural areas of eastern Congo, mainly Kivu, and Tanzania to continue fighting.
Therefore, although Lumumba was gone, his nationalist followers who had regrouped and settled in the northeast continued to fight for his cause well into 1967.
He also had supporters in other parts of the country including Katanga, and in Kwilu Province in the west where resistance led by Lumumba's minister of education and heir apparent, Pierre Mulele, continued until Mulele's assassination by Mobutu on 9 October 1968, although the guerilla campaign by Mulele and his followers virtually ended in 1966.
Mulele, who was living in exile in Brazzaville, was tricked by Mobutu into returning to Leopoldville after Mobutu said he had given amnesty to those who had waged war against the central government and that they could return home to join their fellow countrymen in building the nation.
He didn't mean it and sent his foreign minister Justin Bomboko to Brazzaville to lure Mulele back to Leopoldville. Bomboko had earlier also served as foreign minister under Lumumba and knew Mulele well as a colleague in the first independence cabinet.
Six African leaders, more than any others on the African continent, made the most determined attempt to help the Congolese nationalist forces in their war against the puppet government in Leopoldville and its Western sponsors during the turbulent the sixties.
They were Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Ben-Bella of Algeria, Sekou Toure of Guinea, and Modibo Keita of Mali.
They even had a group of their own within the Organization of African Unity (OAU) known as "the Group of Six," and secretly worked together as Ben-Bella said in the same interview with Jorge Castaneda, author of Companero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara, who was then a professor at New York University and who later became Mexico's minister of foreign affairs under President Vincente Fox.
The interview with Ben-Bella, published in the same book, is one of the most sad reminders of what unfolded in the Congo in the turbulent sixties.
Tragically, Lumumba's fate was sealed from the beginning when he emerged on the political scene as the country's most influential leader. Western governments, led by the United States, saw him as a threat to their geopolitical interests in the Congo and in Africa as a whole because of his strong nationalist views and beliefs as a Pan-Africanist.
On 18 August 1960, a CIA dispatch from the Congo to Washington described Lumumba as "a commie playing the commie game." The American ambassador during that time was Clare Hayes Timerlake.
Americans and other Westerners saw Patrice Lumumba as another Castro and a friend of the Russians who would give the Soviets the upper hand in the Congo at the expense of the West, in spite of the fact that he was not a communist or an ideological ally of the Soviets in the rivalry between the East and the West.
The Americans, including President Dwight Eisenhower and his successor John F. Kennedy and their advisors as well as congressional leaders, saw the Congo as the most prized possession in Africa in pursuit of their geopolitical interests and competition with the Soviet Union because of the country's vast mineral wealth and strategic location including its proximity to the white-ruled countries in southern Africa which were ideological allies of the West against Eastern-bloc countries during the Cold War.
Therefore they did everything they could to gain control of the Congo and prevent the Soviets from getting it, even if it meant going to war, especially by using surrogate forces to secure Western interests. And to them, Lumumba symbolized the worst they could think of. All attempts to portray Lumumba in his true colours and and try to explain to the rest of the world what type of leader he really was, were ignored or dismissed as lies by Western leaders, especially the Americans.
One young American reporter who was on the scene when the tragic events were unfolding in the Congo provided a detailed account of Western machinations against Lumumba masterminded by the United States. And she produced what were probably some of the most balanced reports coming out of the Congo during those tragic years.
Her name was D"Lynn Waldron. She was 23 years old in 1960 when she was in the Congo. She worked for The Cleveland Press and News in Cleveland, Ohio, and her dispatches from Congo before independence were published in that newspaper, although she complained that her editors in the United States censored and slanted her reports to portray Lumumba and the Congolese people in a negative light and added to the published reports some things she never wrote or said.
These are some of the things she said about what happened and what was going on when she was in the Congo with Lumumba:
"In the spring of 1960, I was the only foreign correspondent covering Patrice Lumumba in Stanleyville just before Independence, and as such and an American, I became Lumumba's confidant and the one he entrusted to mediate between himself and the Belgian administration and to get the word to Eisenhower and the American people that he was absolutely not a Communist....
It was well known in the Congo before Independence that Belgium and the banking and mining interests were arranging for the coming Independence to disintegrate into chaos so they could take back Katanga with its gold, uranium and copper, and Kasai with its industrial diamonds, while dumping the unprofitable remainder of the Congo.
The "White Congolese" of Belgian descent were even more aware of this and more angered by the betrayal of a trust, than almost any "Black African", except Patrice Lumumba.
It was these disaffected White Congolese, and especially the colonial governor of Kasai, who told me exactly what the plans of the banking and mining interests were. I even have their hand-drawn maps showing the parts of the country that would be reclaimed from the chaos. The governor of Kasai was so disgusted with the Belgian government that he took down from his wall his prized historical maps of the Congo and handed them to me (I still have them).
Before I went up the Congo River to Stanleyville, which was Lumumba's political headquarters, I had read newspaper stories and been told by some people in the Belgian Colonial Administration that Lumumba was a madman and a Communist puppet of Russia.
What I found was a thoughtful, dignified, dedicated man who naively believed that if... Eisenhower were told the truth, Eisenhower would no longer listen to the Belgian lie that he, Lumumba, was a Communist.
My cabled newspaper stories had things added and removed by Scripps-Howard, and all references to Lumumba's admiration for America and his requests to President Eisenhower for training for his people were cut out.
Lumumba rightly believed that the Russians didn't like him any more than the Belgians did, because he was not a Communist and because he would never do the bidding of any foreign power. Lumumba only wanted what was best for the Congo and that was his death warrant. The Russians would have killed Lumumba, if the Western powers hadn't done it first.
I was with Lumumba in his living room in Stanleyville when Lumumba got the telegram which said that instead of Gizenga's staying in Accra for training with Nkrumah’s people, Gizenga had been taken straight from the airport in an Aeroflot plane to Moscow. Lumumba was terrified by this and said to me, “The Russians will use Gizenga as my Judas.”
However, Gizenga's subsequent life indicates that the Russians would have found him as dedicated to the Congo and as difficult to dictate to as Lumumba. (See the e-mail about their family's travails written to me by Dorothee Gizenga in July 30, 2003.)
The Russians had thought they would be able to wrap Gizenga in Lumumba's mantel and take control of the Congo. Gizenga did establish himself as Lumumba's heir in the Eastern Congo, but, like the rest of the Congo, the area descended into tribal war, plus Maoist inspired massacres aimed at the 'elite', which included anyone who could read, or even wore eyeglasses....
Before Independence, I know from personal knowledge, that Lumumba asked Eisenhower to provide training in government administration for Congolese, who the Belgians had deliberately kept from learning the most basic skills necessary to run a country. Eisenhower replied that would be interfering in Belgium's internal affairs, a position which was later repeated to me by the State Department.
After Independence, when the Congo needed international assistance to restore order, Prime Minister Lumumba asked Eisenhower to send American troops. However, Eisenhower continued to falsely label Lumumba a Communist and handed Lumumba's unwanted request over to Dag Hammarskjold. Hammarskjold, along with Conor Cruise-O'Brien, was part of the cabal that used the UN to destroy the Congo's Independence, in order to take back Katanga on behalf of Western mining interests.
To try to force Eisenhower to send American troops to restore order in the Congo, Lumumba threatened to bring in Russians troops. This was highly publicized by the American government, and no mention was made of the fact that this was only a threat and Lumumba was appealing to Eisenhower to send American troops. (see the book Congo Cables with the actual cables to an from Washington regarding the Congo and Lumumba, as assembled by Madeline Kalb).
Right up to his being turned over to Katanga to be assassinated, Lumumba pinned his hopes on America and his travelling companion and confidant was Frank Carlucci, who it has since been revealed in Congressional investigations was an American intelligence officer and presumably part of Operation Zaire Rifle, the American plot of assassinate Lumumba.
I left the Congo overland just before Independence through Ruanda and Urundi and the Mountains of the Moon to bring Lumumba's requests for help addressed to President Eisenhower to the American Consulate in Uganda, because mail and cables were being stopped by the Belgian postal authorities. The American consulate refused to accept anything from Lumumba. They said he would have to use the Belgian Post and Telegraph in the Congo for any messages he wanted to send to President Eisenhower.
One this site, and indexed below, are newspaper stories I wrote from the Congo which were highly edited back in the States, and documents including Lumumba's own written responses to my questions on his future plans for the Congo, and in Lumumba's own handwriting with my notes using the same pen, the statement I carried to the Belgians in charge of Stanleyville at the height of the crisis."
The preceding comments are on her web site which features scanned copies of some of the original pages from the The Cleveland Press and News containing some of her dispatches from Congo. Her web site, entitled "Patrice Lumumba, Stanleyville, Belgian Congo D'Lynn Waldron," is:
http://www.dlynnwaldron.com/Lumumba.html
She witnessed some of the most tragic events which unfolded in the Congo in the sixties. And although she provided first-hand accounts of what was going on, and dealt with Lumumba on personal basis, she was ignored by Western leaders including her editors at her newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio, because what she wrote and said did not conform to the ideological dictates and interests of Western nations which wrongly, and deliberately, portrayed Lumumba as a communist, hence their enemy.
Patrice Lumumba was prime minister of the Congo for only three months. Yet his influence went far beyond his brief term in office, and beyond the Congo, and was the dominant figure on the country's political scene even after he was removed from office, and even after he was arrested and put in jail towards the end of 1960.
Although the year 1960 was dominated by the Congo crisis, there were other events which took place in different parts of Africa and which deserve attention for a comprehensive picture of what happened on the continent during that period.
But probably the most significant event was the secession of Katanga Province from the Congo on 11 July 1960, eleven days after the country won independence. It was in the news everyday.
I remember when I was growing up in Rungwe District in the Southern Highlands in southwestern Tanzania in a region bordering what was then Nyasaland (now Malawi) and Northern Rhodesia (renamed Zambia), the conflict in the Congo was the dominant story broadcast by the Tanganyika Broadcasting Corporation (TBC) based in the capital Dar es Salaam, about 300 miles away on the east coast.
We also listened almost everyday to broadcasts from Elisabethville, the capital of Katanga Province which is also about 300 miles from my home region in southwestern Tanzania, almost the same distance to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's capital on the coast of the Indian Ocean. We also listened to broadcasts from Leopoldville, the capital of the former Belgian Congo.
The broadcasts we listened to were in Kiswahili - a language also spoken in Congo - on shortwave radio. And they are still vivid in my memory today more than 40 years later because of the tragic events and countless lives lost in that country in 1960 and in the following years.
Although the people of Congo celebrated independence in 1960, they also became the victims of one of the worst tragedies that befell Africa during the post-colonial era. And what happened in the Congo in 1960 is indelibly etched in the minds of many people not only in that country but in other parts of Africa as well. And that was only the beginning of the tragedies that the continent suffered in the sixties.
Another tragic event was the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa on 21 March 1960, when 69 unarmed, peaceful black protesters were killed. Among those killed were 8 women and 10 children.
Most of them were shot in the back as they fled from the police. At least 180 black Africans were injured and there are reports that as many as 300 suffered injuries at the hands of the police.
The protests were organized by the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), a party led by Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe who was a professor of African studies at Witwatersrand University, South Africa's leading academic institution especially for English speakers.
The demonstrators lived in the black township of Sharpeville on the outskirts of the white town of Vereeniging in the Transvaal, about 30 miles south of Johannesburg.
The township was created in compliance with the country's apartheid laws to keep the races apart and the people were protesting against the notorious pass laws which dehumanized them and forced them to carry pass books all time, and restricted them to certain areas while whites enjoyed unlimited access to all parts of the country and enjoyed a lifestyle and privileges blacks could only dream of. As David Sibeko stated in explaining why the Pan-Africanist Congress directed its wrath against and focused its campaign on the pass laws in his article, "The Sharpeville Massacre: Its Historic Significance in the Struggle Against Apartheid":
"The pass system was deliberately chosen because: (i) it is the linchpin of apartheid; and (ii) of all the apartheid laws none is so pervasive, and few are as perverted, as the pass laws.
They show no respect for the sanctity of marriage - men are forcibly separated from their wives or vice versa because one of them cannot obtain the permit to reside in the same area. They tear away children from their parents: a child above the age of 16 needs a special permit to live with its parents outside the bantustan reservation, otherwise it must find accommodation in one of the location barracks they call hostels in South Africa.
They deny men and women the universal right to sell their labour to whom they choose; every African man or woman seeking employment has to obtain a special permit to look for work - within a limited period, usually 14 days; otherwise they face deportation to the `homeland' bantustan reservation they most likely have never known.
The indignities are legion and falling foul with any of the pass law regulations leaves an African open to arrest and imprisonment. Sentences are most frequently served out on prison farms, under the most primitive conditions.
The best known African campaign before Sharpeville was the potato boycott. It came as a result of exposures in newspapers like the Post about conditions for African prisoners in the potato prison farms of Bethal, in the Eastern Transvaal.
Investigative reporters found that prisoners are dressed in nothing but sacks, they sleep on damp cement floors and are out working the potato fields with bare hands from the crack of dawn until dusk. They are continuously whipped by jailers on horse back, and the one meal a day they eat is always half-cooked dried maize without any protein. Many die from disease and torture before they complete the relatively short terms of imprisonment, between two and six months.
The pass laws, therefore, affect every living black person."
Sibeko went on to explain how the campaign in Sharpeville against pass laws was organized and conducted and what the leaders, including Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe, expected and wanted to be done:
"In this non-violent campaign there is none that could have been more concerned to avoid the shedding of even an ounce of blood than the leadership of the PAC. Mr. Stanley Motjuwadi, a long-time journalist with Drum and its current editor, recalls in the issue of his magazine of November 22, 1972:
'A day after the Sharpeville shootings I had an interview in Johannesburg`s Fort prison with Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe ... He was awaiting trial on a charge of incitement and seemed to have aged overnight. He was depressed and almost at the point of tears - the Sharpeville tragedy had really hit him hard.'
Any who have followed Sobukwe`s role at the head of PAC know full well the man`s courage: he went through nine years of imprisonment without flinching and all those who have seen him, during his imprisonment and now under house arrest, including Members of Parliament from the ruling National Party and the white opposition parties, testify that his convictions remain as strong and his determination as unwavering.
Mindful of the panic a threat to their power creates in despots, Mr. Sobukwe wrote to the Commissioner of Police of South Africa, on the eve of the campaign, emphasising that the PAC campaign against passes would be non-violent and imploring the Commissioner to instruct his men to refrain from the use of violence in an attempt to put down demonstrations. As a further precaution Mr. Sobukwe sternly told PAC leaders and cadres all over the country:
'My instructions, therefore, are that our people must be taught now and continuously that in this campaign we are going to observe absolute non-violence.'”
The authorities did exactly the opposite. Their racist attitude towards blacks, and their total disregard for the lives of black people whom they did not even consider to be equal human beings, largely explains why they opened fire on the peaceful demonstrators. As Lieutenant-Colonel D.H. Pienaar bluntly put it, the mere gathering of blacks was seen as provocation by the white authorities and, by implication, justified the shooting. And typical of the stereotypes about blacks among many white racists, he bluntly stated:
"The Native mentality does not allow them to gather for a peaceful demonstration. For them to gather means violence."
That alone was enough justification for the white police to shoot the demonstrators. In justifying the shooting, Pienaar was also quoted by the BBC saying: "It started when hordes of natives surrounded the police station. If they do these things, they must learn their lessons the hard way."
In fact, the authorities stated that the police opened fire because they panicked and feared for their lives; a ridiculous assertion as if heavily armed security forces were indeed under siege and were threatened by unarmed, peaceful demonstrators many of whom were women and children. And as David Sibeko explains what happened on that fateful day, Monday, 21 March 1960:
"It is appropriate to focus on Sharpeville itself at this stage. Under the chairmanship of Nyakale Tsolo, the PAC branch at Sharpeville approached almost every house and the men`s hostel in the township, mobilising support for the strike against passes planned for Monday, March 21, 1960.
The full story of Sharpeville is still to be told, hopefully by those who helped to make this history. I was fortunate as head of the regional executive committee of the Vaal from 1963 to work in the underground amongst many of the organisers and participants in the historic event. Like most veterans of war the people of Sharpeville hate to relive their wartime experience but I was able to learn from direct participants a great deal of what took place.
Not a single bus moved out of Sharpeville to take passengers to work on that Monday. PAC task force members started out before the break of dawn lining up marchers in street after street. By daybreak the marchers, under the leadership of the task force, were moving to a preappointed open ground, where they merged with other demonstrators.
In line with the instruction of the Party leadership, when all the groups had been assembled, the 10,000 and more men, women and children proceeded to the local police station - chanting freedom songs and calling out campaign slogans 'Izwe lethu' (Our land); 'I Africa'; 'Awaphele ampasti' (Down with passes); 'Sobukwe Sikhokhle' (Lead us Sobukwe); 'Forward to Independence, Tomorrow the United States of Africa'; and so on and so forth.
When the marchers reached Sharpeville`s police station a heavy contingent of police was lined up outside, many on top of British-made Saracen armoured cars. Mr. Tsolo and other members of the Branch Executive moved forward - in conformity with the novel PAC motto of 'Leaders in Front' - and asked the white policeman in command to let them through so that they could surrender themselves for refusing to carry passes. Initially the police commander refused but much later, towards 11 a.m, they were let through.
The chanting of freedom songs was picking up and the slogans were being repeated with greater volume. Journalists who rushed there from other areas, after receiving word that the campaign was a runaway success in this mostly ignored African township, more than 30 miles south of Johannesburg, confirm that for all their singing and shouting the crowd`s mood was more festive than belligerent.
But shortly after the PAC branch leaders had been let through into the police station, without warning, the police facing the crowd opened fire and in two minutes hundreds of bodies lay sprawling on the ground like debris.
The joyful singing had given way to murderous gunfire, and the gunfire was followed by an authentic deadly silence, and then screams, wild screams and cries of the wounded.
Littering the ground in front of that police station in nearby dusty streets were 69 dead and nearly 200 injured men, women and children; a revolting sight which appalled decent human beings the world over as pictures of the massacre got around.
The same pattern of events had taken place in nearby Vanderbijl Park, where two Africans were gunned down by white police a few minutes later, and at Langa and Nyanga, a thousand miles away in Cape Town, where five people were shot dead by white police.
With that savagery the apartheid regime sealed the path of non-violence and PAC resolved to continue the struggle through arms in future."
Other reports including witness accounts tell basically the same story that the shooting was unprovoked, the protesters were unarmed and did not in way threaten the police.
What is clear is that the police response and shooting was a reflex action triggered by the "natural" bias and hostility prevalent among many whites who saw black people as worthless human beings, if not just some creatures who were less than human beings; a sentiment forcefully expressed by one leader of the ruling National Party which instituted apartheid. As Sibeko wrote about the reaction among many whites, including leaders, after the shooting:
"It was a revealing comment, the one made by Carel de Wet, the Member of Parliament for Vanderbijl Park, a former cabinet minister in Mr. Vorster`s Government, who is currently serving a second term as ambassador to the Court of St. James. He complained: 'Why did the police kill only two kaffirs in my constituency?' Clearly the mass killings were by design and they were intended to 'teach the kaffirs a lesson.'"
And the lesson assumed another dimension because of the highly symbolic value and significance of the place where it was taught and, not only for blacks in Sharpeville, but for black people all over the country.
The town of Vereeniging, of which Sharpeville was an integral part as a segregated township for blacks, occupies a special place in the history of South Africa, especially in the history of white nationalism in that country.
It was in that town on 13 March 1902, that the treaty which ended the Anglo-Boer War was signed and the whites of South Africa - the British and the Afrikaners - patched up their differences in pursuit of a common objective to consolidate their position as the dominant racial group in the country at the expense of blacks and other non-whites.
Almost 60 years later, the same place became the scene of bloodshed and one of the worst racial incidents in South African history when powerless blacks protested against the inhuman treatment they endured everyday at the hands of their white oppressors. And the words "Sharpeville massacre" were indelibly etched on the consciences of many people around the world as a constant reminder of the brutal treatment black Africans suffered under the apartheid regime.
The government viewed the protest against the pass laws as a challenge to its authority and the legitimacy of the abominable institution of apartheid whose walls finally came tumbling down more than 40 years later in 1994 when the country held its first multi-racial democratic elections and Nelson Mandela, leader of the African National Congress (ANC), was elected president of a country that had been dominated by whites for more than 300 years.
The consistency of the reports from different sources and by different people of different backgrounds and political persuasions including news reporters lends credibility to the conclusion that the shooting of the protesters was unprovoked and the Sharpeville massacre could have been easily avoided had the police reacted with restraint and concern for the well-being of the demonstrators.
But because the protesters were black, it was a different story, and their fate was sealed simply because of who and what they were. As the assistant editor of Drum magazine, Humphrey Tyler, who was at the scene described what happened:
"Protestors were chanting 'Izwe Lethu' which means 'Our land' or gave the thumbs up 'freedom' salute, and shouted 'Afrika.,' nobody were afraid, in actual fact they were in a cheerful mood. There were plenty of police and more ammunition than uniforms.
A Pan Africanist leader approached us and said his organization and the marches were against violence and were demonstrating peacefully. Suddenly I heard chilling cries of 'Izwe Lethu' it sounded mainly like the voices of women. Hands went up in the famous black power salute. That is when the shooting started.
We heard the clatter of machine guns one after the other. The protestors thought they were firing blanks or warning shots. One woman was hit about 10 yards away from our car, as she fell to the ground her companion went back to assist, he thought she had stumbled.
Then he tried to pick her up, as he turned her around he saw her chest had been blown away from the hail of bullets. He looked at the blood on his hand and screamed 'God she had been shot.'
Hundreds of kids were running like wild rabbits, some of them were gunned down. Shooting only stooped when no living protestor was in sight.”
The protesters were told by the leaders of the Pan-Africanist Congress to leave their passes at home and to offer no bail, seek no defence, and pay no fine, if arrested. About 5,000 people - some reports say 7,000 or more - are said to have participated in the protest that morning, marching through Sharpeville to the municipal offices at the entrance of the township.
Before the protests Sobukwe wrote the police commissioner on 16 March 1960, stating that the Pan-Africanist Congress would hold a five-day, disciplined, peaceful protest against the pass laws starting on March 21st. And he further stated at a press conference on March 18th that he was sure the protesters would conduct themselves in a peaceful manner. As he put it:
“I have appealed to the African people to make sure that this campaign is conducted in a spirit of absolute non-violence, and I am quite certain they will heed my call. If the other side so desires, we will provide them with an opportunity to demonstrate to the world how brutal they can be.”
And they did.
Sobukwe was sentenced to three years in prison for leading the demonstrations against the paw law. He was released on 3 May 1963, but was immediately rearrested and sent to Robben Island where he spent six years in detention and solitary confinement without trial. The provision of the law which empowered the government to continue detaining anyone found guilty of "incitement" came to be known as the "Sobukwe clause."
He was released from Robben Island on 8 May 1969 but was not really free. He was placed under house arrest in Kimberley until his death on 27 February 1978. He was 54.
Born to poor Xhosa parents on 5 December 1924, he was an excellent student and a gifted orator. He also earned more degrees, in economics and law, from the University of London after he was released from Robben Island and will always be remembered for the Shapervelle massacre and as the most prominent black leader in South Africa besides Mandela.
He was also a man of peace.
Had the apartheid regime agreed to talk to him, and with Mandela and other anti-apartheid leaders, there would have been no Shaperville and other bloody incidents including the Soweto uprising.
The Sharpeville massacre was one of the most significant events in the struggle against apartheid and was not even eclipsed years later by the events in Soweto when hundreds of school children were massacred by the South African police and security forces in June 1976, an event that is widely acknowledged as having signalled the beginning of the end of apartheid. As Ambrose Reeves, a minister in South Africa, stated in "The Sharpeville Massace: A Watershed in South Africa":
“History records that on May 13, 1902, the treaty which ended the Anglo-Boer war was signed at Vereeniging, then a small town some thirty miles from Johannesburg. Nobody could then have realised that some fifty-eight years later the whole world would learn of another event occurring in that part of the Transvaal; this time in the African township of Sharpeville.
As with most towns on the Reef, as the white population of Vereeniging grew so did the township for Africans on the outskirts of the town....
The events at Sharpeville on March 21, 1960,... shocked the world and...are still remembered with shame by civilised men everywhere.
Early that morning a crowd of Africans estimated at between 5,000 and 7,000 marched through Sharpeville to the municipal offices at the entrance to the township.
It appears that much earlier that day members of the Pan Africanist Congress had gone around Sharpeville waking up people and urging them to take part in this demonstration. Other members of the PAC prevented the bus drivers going on duty with the result that there were no buses to take the people to work in Vereeniging.
Many of them set out on bicycles or on foot to their places of work, but some were met by Pan Africanists who threatened to burn their passes or "lay hands on them" if they did not turn back. However, many Africans joined the procession to the municipal offices quite willingly.
Eventually this demonstration was dispersed by the police, using tear gas bombs and then a baton charge, some sixty police following them into the side streets. Stones were flung and one policeman was slightly injured. It was alleged that several shots were fired by Africans and that only then some policemen opened fire without an order from their officer to do so. Fortunately nobody was hurt.
I was not at Sharpeville when the shooting occurred but it was familiar territory to me. Time and again I officiated at the large African Anglican church there and knew intimately many of the congregation, some of whom were to be involved in the events of that tragic day. I could so well visualise the scene.
Near my home in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg was a large zoo situated in acres of parkland. By a curious anomaly the lake near the zoo was the meeting place for Africans working in the northern suburbs on a Sunday afternoon.
Work finished for the day they would leisurely make their way there in small groups - a gay, colourful, jostling crowd - families and individuals - some political, some not, chatting, laughing, singing, gesticulating and occasionally fighting. The thud of home-made drums could be heard shattering the Sunday calm, and over all the plaintive notes of the penny whistle - shrill and penetrating. It could so easily have been like that on that crisp autumn morning in Sharpeville. Like that, but so very different.
During the morning news spread through the township that a statement concerning passes would be made by an important person at the police station later that day. The result was that many who had been concerned in the earlier demonstration drifted to the police station where they waited patiently for the expected announcement. And all the time the crowd grew.
Reading from the police report on what subsequently happened the Prime Minister told the House of Assembly that evening that the police estimated that 20,000 people were in that crowd. This seems to have been a serious exaggeration.
From photographs taken at the time it is doubtful if there were ever more than 5,000 present at any particular moment, though it may well be that more than this number were involved at one time or another as people were coming and going throughout the morning.
They were drawn to the crowd by a variety of reasons. Some wanted to protest against the pass laws; some were present because they had been coerced; some were there out of idle curiosity; some had heard that a statement would be made about passes.
But whatever may have brought them to the police station, I was unable to discover that any policeman ever tried either to find out why they were there or make any request for them to disperse. And this in spite of the fact that the presence of this crowd seems to have caused a good deal of alarm to the police. So much so that at ten o`clock that morning a squadron of aircraft dived low over the crowd, presumably to intimidate them and encourage them to disperse. This was surely a most expensive way of trying to disperse a crowd.
The police claimed that the people in the crowd were shouting and brandishing weapons and the Prime Minister told the Assembly that the crowd was in a riotous and aggressive mood and stoned the police. There is no evidence to support this.
On the contrary, while the crowd was noisy and excitable, singing and occasionally shouting slogans it was not a hostile crowd. Their purpose was not to fight the police but to show by their presence their hostility to the pass system, expecting that someone would make a statement about passes.
Photographs taken that morning show clearly that this was no crowd spoiling for a fight with the police. Not only was the crowd unarmed, but a large proportion of those present were women and children. All through the morning no attack on the police was attempted.
Even as late as one p.m. the Superintendent in charge of the township was able to walk through the crowd, being greeted by them in a friendly manner and chatting with some of them. Similarly, the drivers of two of the Saracen tanks stated subsequently that they had no difficulty in driving their vehicles into the grounds surrounding the police station. And their testimony was borne out by photographs taken of their progress.
As the hours passed the increasing number of people in the crowd was matched by police reinforcements. Earlier there had only been twelve policemen in the police station: six white and six non-white. But during the morning a series of reinforcements arrived until by lunch time there was a force of nearly 300 armed and uniformed men in addition to five Saracens.
Yet in spite of the increased force that was then available, no one asked the crowd to disperse and no action was taken to arrange for the defence of the police station. The police just strolled around the compound with rifles slung over their shoulders, smoking and chatting with one another.
Scene was set for explosive situation
So the scene was set. Anyone who has lived in the Republic of South Africa knows how explosive that situation had already become. On the one side the ever-growing crowd of noisy Africans - the despised Natives - the Kaffirs who, at all costs, must be kept down lest they step outside the place allotted to them. On the other side the South African police.
Every African fears them, whether they be traffic police, ordinary constables or members of the dreaded Special Branch. Most policemen expect unquestioning deference from Africans. If this is not forthcoming they immediately interpret it as riot and rebellion. In part this is due to the widespread prejudice of white people the world over to those who happen to have a different coloured skin than their own. But in South Africa it is underpinned by the hatred, fear and contempt that so many white police have for all non-white people.
The only action taken during that morning appears to have come not from the police but from two Pan Africanist leaders who urged the crowd to stay away from the fence around the perimeter of the compound so that they did not damage it. Then Lieutenant Colonel Pienaar arrived in the compound. He appears to have accepted that he had come into a dangerous situation and therefore made no attempt either to use methods of persuasion on the crowd or to attempt to discover what the crowd was waiting for.
Instead, about a quarter of an hour after his arrival he gave the order for his men to fall in. A little later he said, "Load five rounds". But he said no more to any of his officers, or to the men. Later, Colonel Pienaar stated that he thought his order would frighten the crowd and that his men would understand that if they had to fire they would not fire more than five rounds. Unfortunately, this was not understood by the policemen under his command.
During this time Colonel Spengler, then head of the Special Branch, was arresting two of the leaders of the Pan Africanist Congress. Afterwards he arrested a third man. Colonel Spengler said subsequently that he was able to carry out his arrests because while the crowd was noisy it was not in a violent mood.
It is extremely difficult to know what happened next. Some of the crowd near the gate of the police station compound said later that they heard a shot. Some said that they heard a policeman say, "Fire". Others suddenly became aware that the police were firing in their midst. But all agreed that practically all of them turned and ran away once they realised what was happening.
A few, it is true, stood their ground for some seconds, unable to understand that the police were not firing blanks. Lieutenant Colonel Pienaar was quite clear that he did not give the order to fire. Moreover, he declared that he would not have fired in that situation. It was stated later that two white policemen opened fire and that about fifty others followed suit, using service revolvers, rifles and sten guns.
Police action caused devastating consequences
But whatever doubts there may be of the sequence of events in those fateful minutes, there can be no argument over the devastating consequences of the action of the police on March 21, 1960, in Sharpeville. Sixty-nine people were killed, including eight women and ten children, and of the 180 people who were wounded, thirty-one were women and nineteen were children.
According to the evidence of medical practitioners it is clear that the police continued firing after the people began to flee: for, while thirty shots had entered the wounded or killed from the front of their bodies no less than 155 bullets had entered the bodies of the injured and killed from their backs. All this happened in forty seconds, during which time 705 rounds were fired from revolvers and sten guns.
But whatever weapons were used the massacre was horrible. Visiting the wounded the next day in Baragwanath Hospital near Johannesburg, I discovered youngsters, women and elderly men among the injured. These could not be described as agitators by any stretch of the imagination. For the most part they were ordinary citizens who had merely gone to the Sharpeville police station to see what was going on. Talking with the wounded I found that everyone was stunned and mystified by what had taken place. They had certainly not expected that anything like this would happen.
All agreed that there was no provocation for such savage action by the police. Indeed, they insisted that the political organisers who had called for the demonstration had constantly insisted that there should be no violence or fighting.
Arrests follow massacre
To make matters worse, some of the wounded with whom I spoke in hospital stated that they were taunted by the police as they lay on the ground, being told to get up and be off. Others who tried to help were told to mind their own business.
At first there was only one African minister of the Presbyterian Church of South Africa who tried to help the wounded and the dying. It is true that later the police assisted in tending the wounded and summoned ambulances which conveyed the injured to Vereeniging and Baragwanath Hospitals. Later still, 77 Africans were arrested in connection with the Sharpeville demonstration, in some cases while they were still in hospital.
In fact, it was clear on my visits to the wards of Baragwanath Hospital that many of the injured feared what would happen to them when they left hospital. This wasn`t surprising, for Baragwanath Hospital was an extraordinary sight. Outside each of the wards to which the wounded were taken were a number of African police, some white policemen, and members of the Special Branch in civilian clothes.
The attitude of the South African Government to the event at Sharpeville can be seen from its reaction to the civil claims lodged the following September by 224 persons for damages amounting to around 400,000 arising from the Sharpeville killings.
The following month the Minister of Justice announced that during the next parliamentary session the Government would introduce legislation to indemnify itself and its officials retrospectively against claims resulting from action taken during the disturbances earlier that year. This was done in the Indemnity Act, No. 61 of 1961. Not that money could ever compensate adequately for the loss of a breadwinner to a family or make up for lost limbs or permanent incapacity. But it would have been some assistance.
It is true that in February 1961 the Government set up a committee to examine the claims for compensation and to recommend ex gratia payments in deserving cases. But this is not the same thing, and in fact by October 1962 no payments had been made.
Failure of police to communicate with the people
Few commentators since Sharpeville have attempted to justify the action of the police that day. In fact, many of them have drawn special attention to the complete failure of the police to attempt to communicate with the crowd at the police station. If it had been a white crowd the police would have tried to find out why they were there and what they wanted.
Surely their failure to do so was due to the fact that it never occurred to them, as the custodians of public order, either to negotiate with the African leaders or to try to persuade the crowd to disperse. Their attitude was summed up by the statement of Lieutenant Colonel Pienaar that "the Native mentality does not allow them to gather for a peaceful demonstration. For them to gather means violence."
The same point was demonstrated even more graphically by one of his answers at the Court of Enquiry under Mr. Justice Vessels. When he was asked if he had learnt any useful lesson from the events in Sharpeville, he replied, 'Well, we may get better equipment.'
Not that all members of the South African Police Force are cruel or callous. No doubt many of them were shocked by what happened. At the same time what happened at Sharpeville emphasises how far the police in South Africa are cut off from sympathy with or even understanding of Africans. And this is underlined by the fact that at no time did the police express regret for this tragic happening.
Yet it would be folly to attempt to fasten the whole blame for the events at Sharpeville on the police. By the mass of repressive legislation which has been enacted every year since 1948, the South African Government has given the police a task which ever becomes more difficult to fulfill.
The pass laws
It was this legislation which was indirectly responsible for the tragedy of Sharpeville, and in particular the "pass laws". Indeed, the immediate cause of many in the crowd assembling at the police station was the growing resentment of Africans to the system of passes.
This system originated in 1760 in the Cape Colony to regulate the movement of slaves between the urban and the rural areas. The slaves had to carry passes from their masters. Subsequently, the system was extended in various forms to the whole country and was eventually collated in the Native (Urban Areas) Consolidation Act of 1945.
This Act made provision for a variety of passes including registered service contracts and for passes permitting men to seek work in particular areas. But through the years an increasing number of Africans had been given exemption from these laws.
This was the situation which obtained until 1952 when a new act ironically called 'The Abolition of Passes Act' made it compulsory for every African male, whether he had previously had to carry passes or no, to carry a reference book. If the holder had previously been exempted from the pass laws he was now privileged to carry a reference book with a green instead of a brown cover! But the contents were identical.
The advent of the reference books meant that technically there were no longer any such things as passes. But, as will be understood, to the Africans reference books are passes for they contain all the details which were previously entered on the various pass documents. They contain the holder`s name, his tax receipt, his permit to be in an urban area and to seek work there, permits from the Labour Bureau, the signature each month of his employer to show that he is still in the employment he was given permission to take, as well as other particulars.
Even more objectionable than having to possess a reference book is the fact that this book must be produced on demand to any policeman or any of the fifteen different classes of officials who may require to see it. Failure to produce it on demand constitutes an offence for which an African may be detained up to thirty days while inquiries are being made about him.
What this means in practice can be seen from the fact that in the twelve months ending June 30, 1966 no less than 479,114 Africans were prosecuted for offences against the "pass laws". At the time of Sharpeville there were 1,000 prosecutions a day for these offences. By 1966, this had risen to over l,300 a day. These figures speak for themselves.
In 1960 a new development occurred when the Government of South Africa decided for the first time in South African history to extend the pass laws to African women. In their case another fear was added that they might be subjected to manhandling by the police with a further loss of human dignity. In fact, by the time of Sharpeville it was estimated that three-quarters of African women were in possession of reference books.
But many of the women who had not obtained reference books were strenuously opposed both to the pass system and to its extension to themselves. To them reference books stood for racial identification, and therefore for racial discrimination.
Intolerable economic situation
But this was by no means the only reason for unrest in Sharpeville. Anyone who knew the township at that time was aware that there had been increasing tension among the inhabitants because in that area wages were too low and rents were too high. Prior to March of that year rent had been increased in Sharpeville and this had added to the burdens of Africans living there.
The previous year (1959) a study of the economic position of Africans in Johannesburg had shown that 80 per cent of Africans were living at or below the poverty datum line. The probability is that the lot of Africans in Sharpeville was worse than in Johannesburg.
A survey carried out by the Johannesburg Non-European Affairs Department in 1962 in Soweto showed that 68 per cent of families there had an income below the estimated living costs. A subsequent study in 1966 showed that this figure remained the same. So in spite of the increased prosperity of South Africa the economic position of a high percentage of Africans does not seem to have improved much since Sharpeville.
African wages in Sharpeville in 1960 were low, partly because African trade unions were not (and still are not) recognised for the purpose of bargaining with employers. But also, the continuing colour bar in commerce and industry meant, and still means, high minimum wages for white workers and low maximum wages for the black workers who make up the great majority of the labour force. All this means two wage structures in South Africa which have no relation to one another: in the fixing of the black wage structure the workers frequently have no say at all.
Several months before the tragic events at Sharpeville it was becoming obvious that those living in the township were facing an intolerable economic situation. It is too easy to dismiss the Sharpeville demonstration at the police station as the work of agitators and the result of intimidation. A11 that those who led the demonstration did was to use a situation which, for political and economic reasons, was already highly explosive.
Growing resistance
Not that Sharpeville was an isolated incident. The ten years before Sharpeville had seen feverish activity by the opponents of apartheid. By means of boycotts, mass demonstrations, strikes and protests, the non-white majority had attempted by non-violent means to compel those in power to modify their racist policies. For example, on June 26, 1952, the Campaign of Defiance against Unjust Laws had been launched.
The same day three years later (June 26, 1955) 3,000 delegates had adopted the Freedom Charter which had been drafted by the Congress Alliance. This took place at a massive gathering at Kliptown, Johannesburg.
The following year the Federation of South African Women held a series of spectacular demonstrations against the extension of the pass system to African women. These culminated in a mass demonstration at the Union Buildings, Pretoria, on August 9, 1956. Some 10,000 women gathered there in an orderly fashion to present 7,000 individually signed protest forms.
Again, from January 7, 1957, many thousand African men and women for months walked eighteen to twenty miles a day to and from work in Johannesburg in a boycott of the buses. Although in this particular case they gained their objective, a11 the various endeavours by Africans to secure change by peaceful means brought little tangible result.
The surprising thing was that in a11 this activity there was very little violence on the part of boycotters, demonstrators and strikers. In spite of great and frequent provocation by the police, Africans remained orderly and disciplined. They were in truth non-violent. As could be expected there were, however, occasions when the resentment and frustration of Africans spilled over into violence.
One such occasion was at Cato Manor near Durban on June 17, 1959. On that day a demonstration of African women at the beer hall destroyed beer and drinking utensils and was dispersed by the police. Several days later the Director of the Bantu Administration Department met 2,000 women at the beer hall.
Once they had stated their grievances they were ordered to disperse. When they failed to do so the police made a baton charge. General disorder and rioting followed, with the result that damage estimated at 100,000 (Rands) was done to vehicles and buildings. Later that day Africans attacked a police picket and were driven off with sten guns.
After this, things remained comparatively quiet in Cato Manor until a Sunday afternoon in February, 1960, when the smouldering resentment of Africans there again burst into flame. An ugly situation developed in which nine policemen lost their lives. This was a deplorable business. Whatever may be said of the actions of the South African police these men died while carrying out their duties. The blame for their deaths must in the first instance lie on those who murdered them.
The fact that these deaths occurred in Cato Manor only a few weeks before the demonstration at Sharpeville must have been well known to the police gathered at the police station in Sharpeville that morning. Certainly more than one spokesman of the South African Government linked these two affairs together. There is not the slightest evidence, however, that there was in this sense any connection between the tragedies of Cato Manor and Sharpeville.
But in another sense they were both intimately connected because more indirectly they both arose out of the action of those in power during the previous decade, who had taken every possible step to ensure that the whole life of the millions of Africans was encased within the strait-jacket of compulsory segregation.
Civilisation without mercy
Yet there the similarity ended. The crowd at Sharpeville was not attacking anything or anyone. Further, there is abundant evidence to show that they were unarmed. While nothing can justify the killing of police at Cato Manor, that incident cannot in any way exonerate the vicious action of the police at Sharpeville. As the late Sir Winston Churchill pointed out in a debate in the British House of Commons on July 8, 1920:
"There is surely one general prohibition which we can make. I mean the prohibition against what is called `frightfulness'. What I mean by frightfulness is the inflicting of great slaughter or massacre upon a particular crowd of people with the intention of terrorising not merely the rest of the crowd, but the whole district or the whole country." (This is precisely what the police did at Sharpeville).
On that occasion Sir Winston concluded his speech with some words of Macaulay - "... and then was seen what we believe to be the most frightful of spectacles, the strength of civilisation without mercy." These are words which aptly summarise a11 that happened at Sharpeville that March morning.
Many people inside South Africa, though shocked for a time by the events at Sharpeville, ended by dismissing them as just one incident in the long and growing succession of disturbances that down the years have marked the implementation of apartheid. Certainly the Government of South Africa, though badly shaken in the days immediately following Sharpeville, soon regained control of the situation.
On March 24, the Government banned all public meetings in twenty-four magisterial districts. On April 8, the Governor-General signed a proclamation banning the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress as unlawful organisations, the result being that they were both driven underground. But neither of them became dormant.
At the same time the Government mobilised the entire Citizen Force, the Permanent Force Reserve, the Citizen Force Reserve and the Reserve of Officers, and the whole of the Commando Force was placed on stand-by. Already on March 30, in Proclamation No. 90, the Governor-General had declared a state of emergency which lasted until August 31, 1960.
During that time a large number of prominent opponents of government policy of a11 races were arrested and detained without being brought to trial. In addition some 20,000 Africans were rounded up, many of whom were released after screening.
So after some months eventually, at least superficially, life in South Africa became at least relatively normal. But underneath the external calm dangerous fires continue to smoulder: fires that can never be extinguished by repressive measures coupled with a constant and growing show of force.
Outside South Africa there were widespread reactions to Sharpeville in many countries which in many cases led to positive action against South Africa: action which still continues. But here, too, most people, even if they have heard of Sharpeville, have relegated what happened there to the archives of history, just one of the too many dark pages in the human story.
Sharpeville marked a watershed in South Africa
Yet it is my personal belief that history will recognise that Sharpeville marked a watershed in South African affairs. Until Sharpeville, violence for the most part had been used in South Africa by those who were committed to the maintenance of the economic and political domination of the white minority in the Republic.
Down the years they had always been ready to use force to maintain the status quo whenever they judged it necessary to do so. When the occasion arose they did not hesitate to use it. Over and over again, non-white civilians were injured by police action or by assaults on them when in prison.
Until Sharpeville the movements opposed to apartheid were pledged to a policy of non-violence. But on March 21, 1960, when an unarmed African crowd was confronted by 300 heavily armed police supported by five Saracen armoured vehicles, an agonising reappraisal of the situation was inevitable. Small wonder is it that, having tried every peaceful method open to them to secure change without avail, the African leadership decided that violence was the only alternative left to them.
Never again would they expose their people to another Sharpeville. As Nelson Mandela said in court at his trial in October l962:
"Government violence can do only one thing and that is to breed counter-violence. We have warned repeatedly that the Government, by resorting continually to violence, will breed in this country counter-violence among the people till ultimately if there is no dawning of sanity on the part of the Government, the dispute between the Government and my people will finish up by being settled in violence and by force."
Outwardly things may go on in South Africa much as before. Visitors may find a booming economy, the white minority may seem secure in their privileged position for any foreseeable future, some urban Africans may have higher living standard than formerly. But all this ought not to deceive anybody.
The fact is that for the first time both sides in the racial struggle in South Africa are now committed to violence; the white minority to preserve the status quo; the non-white majority to change: change from society dominated by apartheid to one that is non-racial in character. Already there are clear indications that the opponents of apartheid are turning deliberately to violence.
The fact that at the moment this is being expressed through small bands of guerillas who may be neither very well trained nor well-equipped does not mean that they ought therefore to be dismissed as having little significance.
After a11, we have the examples of Algeria, Cuba and Viet Nam before us as powerful reminders of what may result from very small and weak beginnings.
In spite of the present calm in South Africa and a prosperity unparallelled in its history, within the Republic the seeds of violence have already been sown. Unless there is a radical change in the present political and economic structures of South Africa, that which has already been sown will be harvested in a terrible and brutal civil war which might easily involve the whole African continent in conflict before it ends.
Indeed it may be that in the present situation in the Republic of South Africa are hidden forces which will involve humanity in a global racial conflict unless the present racist policies there are changed radically.
The choice before the international community has been a clear one ever since Sharpeville. Either it takes every possible step to secure the abandonment of the present policies in South Africa or the coming years will bring increasing sorrow and strife both for South Africa and for the world.
Sharpeville was a tragedy showing most plainly that the ideology of apartheid is a way of death and not of life. Can the nations recognise this before it is too late?”
The apartheid regime obviously did not recognize that and was reinforced in its belief that it would survive because some of the most powerful countries in the world, especially the industrialized nations in the West, continued to support it.
It did not take the massacre seriously. It believed that the white power structure was invincible, virtually an impregnable fortress that could withstand the most sustained assault even by its fiercest opponents. And it invoked the inspired canon of scripture to justify its diabolical policies as if they had been sanctioned by God and white people had divine mandate to rule members of "the lesser breed": black people and other non-whites.
Shortly after the massacre, the apartheid regime declared a state emergency which lasted from March 30 to August 31, 1960.
The emergency declaration was prompted by widespread demonstrations, protests ans strikes across the country in condemnation of the massacre and what the apartheid regime perceived to be a threat to the nation's security and white domination of the country.
More than 18,000 people including most of the country's leading anti-apartheid politicians of all races were arrested when the emergency was declared. And on April 8, both the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) were declared illegal, forcing them to go underground and resort to other means to try and bring about change.
The establishment of Umkhonto we Sizwe (The Spear of the Nation), the military wing of the African National Congress; and of Poqo, PAC's armed wing, was largely inspired by the massacre and by the government's refusal to negotiate with the opponents of apartheid and find ways to achieve racial equality in the country without resorting to violence.
Although both the ANC and the PAC were banned in South Africa, they remained active in the country and from their operational bases in other countries such as Tanzania and Zambia. It was not until 40 years later, in 1990, that they were unbanned.
Thus, instead of bringing about fundamental change, the government became even more repressive following the Sharpeville massacre. And in October 1960, the white electorate voted for a republican form of government under the leadership of the National Party dominated by Afrikaners and which instituted apartheid in 1948. South Africa withdrew from the Commonwealth in March 1961 and on May 31 the same year, it became republic.
The withdrawal of South Africa from the Commonwealth was a result of a concerted effort by African leaders to keep the apartheid regime out of this community of nations, once former British colonies. The campaign was led by Julius Nyerere who made it clear that if South Africa remained a member, his country Tanganyika would not join the Commonwealth once it became independent. As he bluntly stated: "To vote South Africa in, is to vote us out."
There is no question that the Shaperville massacre galvanized the anti-apartheid movement worldwide. It drew worldwide condemnation and played a critical role in changing the attitude of many African leaders who had earlier embraced non-violence as a means to achieving racial justice in the land of apartheid. After the massacre, armed struggle was seen a viable alternative that could be used to compel the apartheid regime to accept fundamental change and was effectively used through the years as a complementary strategy, along with diplomacy, to achieve this goal.
Coincidentally, the year 1960 was a year of hope and optimism for both Africa and the United States. While Americans celebrated the election one of the youngest, and one of the brightest, presidents in the history of their country who exuded confidence, was full of energy and vitality, and promised the nation a better and bright future, millions of Africans across the African continent were also celebrating the dawn of a new era marking the end of colonial rule.
Many events had taken place across the continent through the years but independence was different.
It was a phenomenal event and probably the most significant since the advent of colonial rule. As British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said in his speech to the South African parliament in Cape Town on 3 February 1960, "the wind of change is blowing through this continent," as more and more Africans in the colonies demanded the right to rule themselves. And "whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact."
The rulers of apartheid South Africa did not like what he said. But, as the saying goes, the rest is history.
Africa 1960 - 1970: Chronicle and Analysis
Author: Godfrey Mwakikagile
Paperback: 588 pages
Publisher: New Africa Press (10 November 2009)
ISBN-10: 9987160077
ISBN-13: 9789987160075