despite UN protection, was transported to
Katanga by Mobutu’s soldiers. There, in January
1961, he was killed ‘while trying to escape’.
Nothing can excuse what was in all probability a
murder; but a myth was in the making.
The dead Patrice Lumumba was celebrated in
Moscow as the anti-colonialist hero of African
independence, true patriot and Marxist. Had
Lumumba lived it is unlikely that he would have
acquired such an exalted reputation. As a politi-
cian he had lacked adroitness and good judge-
ment, and this had contributed to his fall from
power. He was indeed an African patriot, but an
unrealistic one, and his brand of socialism,
common among Africans struggling against colo-
nialism, had little in common with Soviet com-
munism.
The year 1961 saw no lessening of the chaos in
the Congo. Tschombe, installed in Katanga and
effectively separated from the rest of the Congo,
though supported by the Belgian mining interests,
talked and talked, claiming that he was ready
to negotiate with the UN, but gave up nothing of
substance. In the Congo a new parliament assem-
bled under UN protection and a weak new civilian
regime was installed. Katanga meanwhile contin-
ued to maintain its independence, in practice
helped by the Belgians’ decision to pay the mining
royalties to Tschombe and not to the central gov-
ernment. But Tschombe had not reckoned with a
determined and ambitious UN secretary-general.
Dag Hammarskjöld wanted to crown this first
major UN peacekeeping effort with success. It
cost Hammarskjöld his life. In rather mysterious
circumstances his plane crashed in September
1961, while he was engaged in negotiations
with Tschombe. This hardened the attitude of
the UN towards Katanga. Fighting had broken
out between UN troops and Tschombe’s forces
in Elisabethville, the capital of Katanga. With the
central Congolese government now pro-Western
in orientation, the situation had changed. The
UN ordered the forcible occupation of Katanga,
and in January 1963 the province at last fell to an
international force.
Tschombe had left Katanga only to return in
July 1964 as prime minister of a united Congo.
But he did not last long in office. In October
1965 Mobutu, exercising the real power in the
Congo with his army command, organised a coup
and once more took over the country. The
Belgian colonial pact was expunged. The major
towns were renamed, Léopoldville becoming
Kinshasa, and the Congo became Zaire.
The immediate post-colonial turmoil in the
Congo, the atrocities and the savagery and the
hiring of white mercenaries, all seemed to justify
the cynical view that black Africa was unfit to
govern itself. What was really shown in the Congo
and elsewhere in black Africa, however, was the
weakness of democracy and elected national par-
liaments; parliaments whose members were trib-
ally divided could not maintain unity in countries
as underdeveloped as Zaire, where in many rural
areas there was little education. Loyalties were
tribal and ethnic in such conditions. Pent-up
resentments against the better-off of other races,
whether European or Asian, could and did
explode into violence. If unity and order were to
be maintained, the country needed a strongman
with an obedient party or a soldier who could
count on an obedient army.
For the first thirteen years of his rule Mobutu
was occupied in putting down rebellions with
European aid. For the next twelve years he ruth-
lessly eliminated all political dissent. But the col-
lapse of the communist regimes in Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union seemed to convince
Mobutu that one-party authoritarian rule had
become even less acceptable to the outside world
on which Zaire relies for aid and trade. In 1990
he promised to introduce multi-party govern-
ment. Mobutu explained that his version of a
multi-party state envisaged himself as above
politics, the final arbiter and guarantor of national
unity. Unrest and dissenters were ruthlessly put
down, and at the university in Lubumbashi large
numbers of students were massacred on their
campus. In 1991, 130 political parties combined
for a time against the president. More seriously
the army rioted when it was not paid. In the fol-
lowing year more units of the army mutinied and
the Belgians evacuated thousands of their citizens.
The country was economically in ruins, despite its
rich resources. The West cut off aid to register its
displeasure but was determined not to become