In recent weeks we have been assailed with news of a peace accord in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Significantly, the accord was signed at a formal ceremony in the South African administrative capital of Pretoria, with President Thabo Mbeki witnessing the historical agreement that he had personally engineered between the presidents of two other African states — Joseph Kabila of Congo and Paul Kagame of Rwanda.
Underlying this heady imagery was the idea that the Congolese peace talks that had been held, at some expense to the South African taxpayer, at Sun City a few months before had in fact borne fruit. Peace was about to come to the Congo, a ship adrift for more than 40 years.
Not long after, TV news services across the world carried images of Rwandan soldiers withdrawing from the vast landmass of the Congo into the tiny neighbouring country from which they had been sent to wage war. The implication, for those who had been following this complex and debilitating saga over the past few years, was that the Rwandan flea had tamed the Congolese elephant, and was now free to return to its nest, comfortable in the belief that the elephant would no longer be something to fear.
You have to stand back and look at the map of Africa to understand the scale of all this. The Congo sprawls across the belly of Africa from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Great Lakes in the east. Rwanda, on the other hand, is pressed into a tiny corner between Congo, Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda, with no access to the sea, and no room to expand. How can tiny Rwanda have held the Congolese monolith to ransom for so long?
But you also have to stand back and look at the map of Africa’s recent history to judge just what kind of political and emotional strings are being pulled in the presentation of an inter-African diplomatic settlement triumphing over a seemingly endless scenario of military catastrophe — the first big breakthrough of the loudly touted New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) and a suitable note of optimism for the newly launched African Union (AU.)
How much of this is fire and how much merely smoke?
The first question is: what kind of logic can ever be brought to the irrational boundaries of the state called the Congo?
The only reason for the Congo’s coming into being was an insane dream, held by the king of an obscure and tiny European entity called Belgium, newly brought into being somewhere in the 19th century, in the course of the wane and flux of various European principalities. King Leopold II believed that the only route to greatness was through the seizing of overseas colonies.
The Congo was King Leopold’s badge of acceptance among his equally grasping peers in the interrelated royal houses of Europe. It was to become his personal cash cow, but also an albatross around his neck that he had ultimately to use as a bargaining chip with the royal treasury — a burden that he would bequeath to his unsuspecting subjects on his deathbed.
The Congo, viewed in this light, is ”the horror”, in Joseph Conrad’s words, that Europe never wanted to face — a horror that, once taken on, could never quite be abandoned.
The Congo, ridiculous as it was, was here to stay. But who would dare to take on the burden of the Congo, once Leopold was gone?
The intense relationship that still exists between the Belgians and the Congolese, more than 40 years after Belgium reluctantly ceded independence to the beast that Leopold had created, is nowhere more evident than in the southern Congolese city of Lubumbashi.
As far as the rest of the Congo is concerned, Lubumbashi is literally out on a limb. It is the chief metropolis of the province of Katanga, situated in the Congo pedicle that juts rudely into the copperbelt region of neighbouring Zambia.
Katanga has always had an odd relationship with the rest of the country of which it is nominally a part. Its capital city of Lubumbashi is a few hours drive away from the Zambian copper mining town of Ndola and far closer to the Zambian capital, Lusaka, than it is to the Congolese capital Kinshasa. In fact it takes as long to fly to Kinshasa as it does to fly to Johannesburg.
Given the Congo’s pitiful infrastructure, it is no surprise that Lubumbashi is only accessible to the rest of the country by air.
It is also not surprising that the province has attempted to secede from the rest of the country on a number of occasions — not, as one might have expected, to join neighbouring Zambia, with which its people have much more in common than with most of the other ethnic groups squashed together into vast expanses of the Congo. The secessionists of the past have usually sought to put the embarrassment of the Congo behind them and go it alone as a sovereign state.
The reason is simple. Katanga is a mineral rich province that once supplied a major part of the country’s mining revenues. And yet all the benefits of post-independence development, such as they were, went almost exclusively to Kinshasa, at the expense of the rest of the country. The Katangese were justified in asking themselves why they should continue to provide when they saw little benefit from their labours, particularly under the long and fruitless reign of Joseph Mobutu Sese Seko.
But of course nothing is as simple as that. Katanga has also long been a pawn in a lengthy political game that has drawn in players from across the world. From the early 1960s to the late 1980s it was an important bargaining counter in the secretive strategies of the Soviet-American Cold War. And in the internal politics of the nascent Congo nation, Katanga, and Lubumbashi in particular, walked a constant tightrope of enlightened engagement and destructive withdrawal, and even perfidy.
Lubumbashi was founded in 1910, at a time when European prospectors had identified substantial deposits of copper and other minerals in the region. The neighbouring Congolese and Zambian sides of these rich mineral fields used to share the honour of being the world’s largest copper producers — until the world pulled the plug on them when it found more interesting metals to spend their money on elsewhere — including massive deposits of strategic minerals deeper in the Congo.
Today the network of subterranean mine workings that criss-cross the borders of the two countries with impunity is a liability neither country can any longer afford. But equally, neither country can simply shut down its mining operations, for fear of the seismic repercussions this would have among the communities that have been brought into existence purely for the purpose of exploiting those deposits of copper, cobalt, and, more recently, uranium.
Lubumbashi (then known as Elizabethville) grew rapidly into the standard Southern African mining town, carefully following the model that had been established in South Africa in the latter part of the 19th century. There was a white town that occupied the slopes, away from the intense fumes of the mining operation, complete with shops and recreation facilities such as swimming pools and tennis courts. It was also supplied with schools for the education of its offspring.
Closer to the mine itself were the first of a series of native townships providing shelter for the mine’s labour force. As this expanded, more townships were built on the outskirts of the town. None of them had any significant recreational facilities to speak of. And none of them were supplied with schools. The governors of the day saw no point in providing educational facilities for people who were never to be brought into the main stream of civilisation.
It was only in 1954, when the Belgian government woke up to the inevitability of impending black rule in the Congo, that the first government schools were built. Until then education for the Congolese had been left in the hands of Protestant and Catholic missionaries and Islamic madressas where these existed.
It is as if Lubumbashi has been frozen in time since that moment. The tall chimney stack of the copper smelter still dominates the city, backed by the mountainous heap of washed out slag that continues to grow as the mine proceeds with the unprofitable process of digging into the bowels of the Earth.
The swimming pools and tennis courts of the old white town lie disused and cracked under the relentless heat of the sun, as if no one had looked at them since the Belgians made their hasty departure in 1960, turning their backs on the ungrateful Congolese.
And fanning out into the dusty landscape sit the townships that house more than a million black people, stranded on the rocks of an unresolved history.
Virtually nothing has been built in Lubumbashi since the colonialists withdrew. The Congo has never been stable for long enough for any sustainable form of development to take hold. And so Lubumbashi remains almost exactly as the Belgians left it.
The Belgians created a semblance of order in Lubumbashi. But in reality they left behind a trail of chaos that has never been resolved.
Patrice Lumumba was the first Congolese to attempt to bring some sense of order and Africanness into the void that the Belgians had left. As the country’s first elected prime minister, he had an agenda that was based on maintaining the unity of the country by rapidly uplifting its impoverished citizens. He was prepared to use any means necessary to succeed, even in the face of the destabilisation that Belgium and its European and North American allies were prepared to use against his endeavours — including going as far as enlisting the support of the Soviet Union, bete noir of the West.
He was also a Pan-Africanist, strongly influenced by the rhetoric of Kwame Nkrumah in particular. And he was not afraid to constantly remind his people of what Belgium and the West had done to deny them their rightful place under the African sun.
But Lumumba fell victim to the sin of optimism. His clear electoral victory was based on strong support particularly from the country’s other urban conglomerations, especially Kinshasa (then Leopoldville) and Kisangani (then Stanleyville.)
But Lubumbashi was not Lumumba territory. Apart from the Katangans’ natural alienation from politicians in the distant capital, there was an ethnic issue that put Lumumba beyond the pale.
Lumumba was from another southern region called Kasai. Kasaians, seemingly better educated (under the missionaries) than many other regions, had been brought into Lubumbashi to work in junior clerical capacities on the mines and in related industries, creating a buffer black middle class. They had consequently come to be seen by working class Katangans as over-privileged foreigners invading from a province that was far poorer than their own.
The Belgians had wasted no time in exploiting these differences during colonial times. So when they decided to act against the upstart Lumumba, just a few weeks into his premiership of an independent Congo, Katanga became a useful tool in the overall strategy.
Lumumba had hardly got started when he was ousted in a military coup in which the Belgian government has now acknowledged that it played a major part. He was placed under house arrest in Leopoldville, from which he escaped with his family, hoping to make it by land and river to his power base at Stanleyville. But he was overtaken and captured along the way — and flown, in a Belgian aircraft, not to Leopoldville, but to Lubumbashi, where he was brutally tortured by Katangan troops for several days, before being killed, along with two of his colleagues. Their bodies were later disposed of by Belgian soldiers.
Lubumbashi today is a mournful place — mournful because of the sense of a boom town that has slipped into a long decline, but also because you imagine a sense of mourning for the unification that Lumumba was not able to achieve, which might have brought Lubumbashi closer to the mainstream of Congolese life. But this is deceptive.
Lubumbashi mourns the spirit of Lumumba only grudgingly and is evasive about its role in his death and dismemberment.
Lumumba’s road ended in Lubumbashi. But Lubumbashi is far more concerned about another road that began here.
Laurent Kabila was a Lubumbashi boy. In 1994 he had hooked up with Rwandan and Ugandan troops who were determined to end the rule of the despotic Mobutu Sese Seko, who had taken the helm of the Congo as his own private fiefdom in the true spirit of King Leopold. The first city the troops had captured was Lubumbashi — from where they had begun their triumphant march over many thousands of kilometres towards the final prize of Kinshasa, far to the northwest.
It is Laurent Kabila, rather than Patrice Lumumba, that Lubumbashi mourns today. All over the city poster-size images of Kabila peer down on passers-by. Almost two years after his assassination by one of his own soldiers in the presidential palace in Kinshasa, Kabila, clearly a despot in the making during his brief hold on power, still holds a place in the hearts of the people of Lubumbashi.
The reason is, first of all, that Kabila was a homeboy. Secondly, he wisely chose to start his great march on Kinshasa from here and promised never to forget the hospitality of the people of Lubumbashi once he had succeeded.
In the three brief years he was in power, Kabila seemed to be as good as his word. Throughout the country he is revered for starting to repair roads in some of the major urban centres, for example, and for breaking the endless logjam that kept soldiers and civil servants from being paid. It did not take much to give the impression that money was circulating once more in the Congolese economy, with trickle-down benefits all round.
Kabila also went so far as to decree a certain amount of much-needed decentralisation for the Congo, seizing Lubumbashi’s cultural centre building and declaring it the seat for the new (but as yet unelected) national Parliament. Things seemed to be moving, at last, for the distant, fading colonial outpost of Lubumbashi.
But whatever fragile hope the elder Kabila might have held out for Lubumbashi, his death has snuffed out. And the fact that it is his son who now holds power in the still-distant Kinshasa, and is being courted by both Nepad and the West, makes no difference to the prospects of its citizens.
While the world’s power players have seen no problem in accepting Joseph Kabila’s ”natural” succession to his father’s mantle, the people of Lubumbashi see nothing but gloom and despondency. Rather than hailing the advent of an heir, the people on the streets are calling instead for the resurrection of the father — a forlorn hope that expresses the particularly poignant condition of this heavily populated ghost town.
The withdrawal of Rwandan troops from eastern Congo, and the reported withdrawal of Zimbabwean troops from other areas of the besieged Congo, might seem like astoundingly good news for the outside world.
For those living in Lubumbashi, and in other communities within the Congo’s tragic boundaries, these are portents filled with sound and fury, but signifying nothing. For Lubumbashi, the poverty of alienation continues.
John Matshikiza attended the colloquium ”Memories of Lubumbashi”, hosted by the University of Lubumbashi, as a fellow of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research