Moïse Tshombe

Tshombe at the Belgo-Congolese Round Table Conference, 1960

CONAKAT won control of the Katanga provincial legislature in the May 1960 general elections. One month later, the Congo became an independent republic. Tshombe became President of the autonomous province of Katanga.[7] Patrice Lumumba was tasked with forming a national government. Members of his party, the Mouvement National Congolais, were given charge of the portfolios of national defence and interior, despite Tshombe's objections.[8] The portfolio for economic affairs was awarded to a CONAKAT member, but this was undercut by the positioning of nationalists in control of the Ministry and Secretariat for Economic Coordination. Mines and land affairs were placed under separate portfolios. Tshombe declared that this diluting of CONAKAT's influence rendered his agreement to support the government "null and void".[9]

On the evening of 11 July, Tshombe, accusing the central government of communist leanings and dictatorial rule, announced that Katanga was seceding from the Congo.[10] Tshombe had the full support of both Belgium and the Union Minière in proclaiming Katanga independent.[11] One American diplomat described Katanga as a sham, reporting to Washington that the State of Katanga was "designed mainly for the protection of European lives and property".[11] Favoring continued ties with Belgium, Tshombe asked the Belgian government to send military officers to recruit and train a Katangese army. Tshombe's Belgian military adviser, Major Guy Weber, on 13 July 1960 appointed Major Jean-Marie Crèvecouer to train an army for Katanga.[12]

To disguise its lack of a military, the force being raised and trained was called the Katangese gendarmerie, but the name was highly misleading as the gendarmerie was in fact an army.[13] The majority of the officers training the gendarmerie were Belgian.[13] The Belgian historian Jules Gérard-Libois wrote: "During the entire month of August, a veritable race against the clock took place with the objective, for Tshombe and his advisers, of building a more or less efficient gendarmery before the eventual withdraw of the Belgian troops".[13] Tshombe engaged in a successful bluff in the summer of 1960 as he maintained that Katanga had the military forces to repel an invasion while an army was being raised.[13]

Tshombe in Katanga, 1962

Tshombe demanded United Nations recognition for independent Katanga, and he announced that any intervention by UN troops would be met with force.[14] Nonetheless, Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and his successor, Cyrille Adoula, successfully requested intervention from UN forces. UN forces were sent under the direction of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld.

The British diplomat Brian Urquhart, who met Tshombe several times, wrote: "Tshombe was not stupid, but he desperately wanted to be liked and recognized. He tended to agree with the last person he had talked to and could be counted on to go back on any agreement as soon as he had seen his next visitor. He was also an accomplished hypochondriac, using feigned ill health to avoid answering awkward questions. “J’ai mal à la gorge, Monsieur Urquhart” ("I have a sore throat, Mr. Urquhart"), he would suddenly whisper. "Je dois prendre immédiatement une piqûre" ("I must immediately get a [medical] shot.") And that would be the end of the conversation. Tshombe was basically a weak person who was always being manipulated by others-the Union Minière, right-wing politicians in Europe and the United States, mercenaries, arms dealers and other adventurers who were after his money."[15]

France, wishing to take advantage of Katangese minerals, sent to Tshombe the reinforcement of the mercenary Bob Denard and his men. It was supported by the networks of Jacques Foccart, the "Mr. Africa" of the French government.[16]

Lumumba's government was dissolved, and Lumumba taken prisoner by Mobutu and detained at Camp Hardy in Thysville. Harold Charles d'Aspremont Lynden (Belgian minister for African Affairs) sent a highly confidential telegram on 16 January 1961 to the government in Léopoldville (President Joseph Kasa-Vubu and Mobutu) to send Lumumba to Katanga. That would have stemmed from Lumumba's increasing popularity among soldiers, who might release him. Meanwhile, soldier mutinies and unrest increased by the day, at Prison Camp Hardy in Thysville. The telegram has still not been shown to exist.

Whilst being flown in a Sabena Douglas DC-4 plane to Katanga, Lumumba was beaten by the Congolese soldiers escorting him. In custody in Katanga, Lumumba was visited by Katangese notables and Belgian officers, who included Tshombe, Godefroid Munongo, Kibwe, Kitenge, Grandelet, Son, Gat, Huyghé, Tignée, Verscheure, Segers and Rougefort. Lumumba's execution, on 17 January, was carried out by a firing squad led by a Belgian mercenary, Julien Gat.[17]

In September 1961, the United Nations launched Operation Morthor with the aim of reintegrating Katanga into the Congo, causing Tshombe to flee into Northern Rhodesia for a time.[18] However, the Katangese gendarmerie proved to be tougher than expected and in the siege of Jadotville, Irish troops serving under the United Nations flag were forced to surrender.[18] The United Nations secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, flew to meet Tshombe to discuss a ceasefire.[18] After the meeting, Hammarskjöld was killed in an airplane crash.[18]

Tshombe become an iconic figure for American conservatives in the 1960s who saw him as an acceptable African leader.[19] The American historian Kyle Burke wrote: "To them [American conservatives], Tshombe represented a comfortable kind of decolonization, in which elite Africans would manage the transition from colony to nation without altering the existing racial, political and economic order, thereby ensuring that communists would not gain a foothold in these countries".[20] American conservatives presented the Belgian Congo as a place of racial harmony, which Tshombe had tried to preserve.[21]

The principal lobbying group for Tshombe was the American Committee for Aid to Katangan Freedom Fighters that portrayed the United Nations as a communist-dominated organization that was seeking to crush Katanga to achieve Soviet foreign policy goals in Africa.[11] The support for Tshombe was at least in part related to American domestic politics as the Kennedy administration supported the United Nations against Katanga and the support for Tshombe in the United States came mostly from conservative Republicans and Democrats, who used Kennedy's opposition to Tshombe to argue that he was "soft on communism".[11] By contrast, Afro-Americans loathed Tshombe, seeing him as an "Uncle Tom" figure, a black man who was submissive and docile towards whites.[22]

Prime Minister Tshombe touring Stanleyville in 1964

In 1963, UN forces succeeded in suppressing Katanga, driving Tshombe into exile in Northern Rhodesia and then Spain. Tshombe took 890 suitcases full of one million gold pieces with him into exile, which he placed into various European banks, allowing him to live in comfort and luxury.[23] At the same time, the UN forces found that the Katangese treasury had been stripped bare. The entire vault contained only £10 British pounds together with one dead rat.[23]

In early 1964, the Simba rebellion broke out and the Congolese government rapidly lost control of the entire eastern half of the Congo. At the same time, Tshombe started to correspond with several of his former enemies such as the justice minister, Justin-Marie Bomboko; the police chief, Victor Nendaka; and most importantly, the commander of the army, General Joseph-Désiré Mobutu.[23]

As the Armée Nationale Congolaise could not handle the Simbas, Mobutu argued that the Congo needed Western help.[24] Mobutu had been the king-maker of Conglese politics ever since he staged his first coup in 1960. He pressured President Joseph Kasa-Vubu to appoint Tshombe premier on the grounds that he was the Congolese politician most likely to secure Western support.[25]

Most of the economic concessions in the Belgian Congo were para-statal, as the Belgian state had invested its own funds alongside those of European capitalists in developing the concessions.[24] When Belgium granted independence to the Congo in 1960, the Belgians refused to transfer their shares in the concessions to the Congolese state under the grounds that the Congo refused to assume the debts that the Belgians had incurred when developing the concessions, which deprived the Congolese state of much needed revenue.[24]

In March 1964, the Belgian Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak visited Leopoldville and agreed to transfer the Belgian shares of the concessions.[24] During the same visit, Spaak seems to have made appointing Tshombe premier the precondition of the share transfer.[24] Finally, the administration of John F. Kennedy was very hostile towards Tshombe, but on 22 November 1963 Kennedy was assassinated. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson was more supportive of Tshombe, viewing him as a firmly pro-Western politician.[26]

In July 1964, he returned to the Congo to serve as prime minister in a new coalition government. His cabinet was sworn in on 10 July.[27] Tshombe's national support was derived from the backing of provincial political bosses, customary chiefs, and foreign financial interests.[28] Among his first acts in office were the lifting of a curfew in Léopoldville, the release of 600 political prisoners—including Antoine Gizenga, and the ordering of Katangese gendarmes to return from their exile in Angola to the Congo and join the national army.[27]

Tshombe had made extensive use of white mercenaries to fight for Katanga, and as the Congolese premier, he hired the same mercenaries to fight for the Congo.[24] The return of Tshombe to power was met with criticism. Malcolm X detested Tshombe as an "Uncle Tom", and in a 1964 speech in New York called him "the worst African ever born" and "the man who in cold blood, cold blood, committed an international crime-murdered Patrice Lumumba".[29]

In a New Year's message at the beginning of 1965, Tshombe rejected conciliation with the Simba rebels and called for their total defeat.[30] Tshombe formed the federalist Convention Nationale Congolaise (CONACO), a bloc of forty-nine parties for the 1965 general election. The party won comfortably gaining 38 seats with the alliance as a whole winning 122 seats. Despite this victory Tshombe was dismissed from his position as Prime Minister in October 1965 by President Kasa-Vubu and replaced by Évariste Kimba. In November, General Joseph Mobutu, who had just staged a successful coup against Kasa-Vubu, brought charges of treason against Tshombe, who again fled the country and settled in Francoist Spain.