THE COLONIAL REVOLUTION REACHES
THE "BELGIAN CONGO" AND RUANDA-URUNDI
By PHILIPPE VAN DAMME
For many long years the colonial revolution, which erupted in Kenya and has been developing in various parts of Negro Atrica, seemed to have halted at the frontiers of the Congo.
The only political development of some importance before 1956 in the Congo was the appearance of the politico-religious Kimbanguist sect, whose propaganda, recalling that of the Anabaptists, spread mainly in the province of the Lower Congo during the twenties and up to our own day.
Condemned to death by the Belgian colonial administration, Simon Kimbangu, founder of this sect and one of the initiators of the Congolese revolution, died in 1951 in a prison where he had been held for 30 years.
The great anti-imperialist victories represented by the independence of Ghana and then that of Guinea, the unfolding of the Algerian people's struggle and of the Arab revolution in the Middle East, and, simultaneously, the economic crisis which seriously affected the Congolese economy during the course of 1957 through the lowering of the prices of primary raw materials; these are the decisive tactors which have given rise to an extremely rapid political awakening of rulatively large sectors of the Congolese masses in all the urban centres and a good number of the rural areas. THE ECONOMY OF THE CONGO AND CONGOLESE SOCIETY
The industrialisation of the Congo, slow enough before 1940, has been greatly accelerated over the last 20 years. Thus electrical production in the mining province of Katanga has increased from 300 million to 2,000 million kwh between 1949 and 1957, thanks to the building of three new hydro-electric stations. The production of copper by the Union Minière du Haut katanga (U M H K), the main Congolese trust - copper being the principal export product - increased from 143,000 tons in 1946 to 247,000 tons in 1956.
On the other hand, the mining industry has been mechanised to a very large extent, so that in 1957 it emploved no more than 6.63 % of the manual workers of the Congo, an extremely low figure for a colonial-type squally, industrialization has promoted the formatio
† enterprises concentrating a great number of workers In May, 1957, there were in the Congo 89 enterprises employing more than 1,000 wage-earners, of which 11 employ more than 10,000. These latter employ 170,000
The number of wage-earners, not including domestic servants, reached 1,198,000 in 1956, which represents 39% of the "healthy adult males," 1 against 27% ten years
1 The total number of wagearners, by province, is (1956 figures): Leopoldville, 306,000; Kivu, 216,000; population. In the other provinces, the percentage is lower:
and equatorial provinces, 30-32%; Kasai proearlier. That figure, if we take into account the mechanization, especially of the mines, amply demonstrates the extent of industrialization and the extremely rapid proletarianization. The Congo has thus become the second industrial power of Africa, coming after the Union of South Africa but before Egypt.
However, industry remains oriented fundamentally towards export, and Congolese economy exhibits the basic defects of all colonial and semi-colonial countries. It is only within the last few years that a certain amount of light industry has developed, in a pretty unbalanced way, in two or three big towns (textiles, bicycles, etc.)
Brutal techniques for the recruitment of forced labor and bad treatment have been replaced over the last 15 years by a of laborers Paternalistic attitude typified in the building towns, etc.
The rural exodus towards the urban and industrial centers has assumed enormous proportions, destroying the institutions of tribal society. As Basil Davidson puts it in his book, The Awakening of Africa: "It can be said that in reality the chief no longer anywhere leads his tribe; the tribal group nowhere remains intact. The bonds which, in former days, united the members of a tribe with one another and with their chief have everywhere loosened, and often snapped... Village life is disintegrating. It is a fact that the development of the towns has reached down into the tribal areas themselves. Tribal organization runs counter to the wishes of those who wish to participate in this development. The villagers seize on the ideas of urban civilization. They seek out ways to apply them to their daily lives, as the people of the towns do" (retranslated from the French. - Ed.).
The population which has deserted the tribal areas has increased from 1,017,000 (being 9.83 %) in 1945 to 3,047,000 (23.13 %) in 1957 and this feature has continued to increase thereafter.
The wages of these African workers have been very low until almost right up to the present, although noticeably higher than those of French Equatorial Africa, the British Central African Federation and Poruguese Angola. During the first tour months of 1951 15% of wagearners in the Congo earned less than 1] Congolese francs a day, and 73% earned less than 20 francs (one Congolese franc is roughly equal to 10 "light" French francs). A perceptible increase has taken place in the last two years, but the standard of living remains very low.
In Leopoldville and the industrial centers of the Katanga, "high"-wage areas, the rates now prevailing are around 40 to 50 francs a day for workers in heavy industry, and 35 to 40 francs a day for workers in light
In 1953, the grand total of wages of more than a million Congolese workers amounted to only 10 billion 130 million Congolese francs, while the national revenue was estimated at more than 43 billions. Of this sum, some 24,000 civil servants and European wagearners allowed themselves nine billion 700 million, the rest
34 representing other revenue, duties, saving and, for the most part, the profits of European businesses and private individuals. 2
The profits of the UM HK alone rose, on a capital of three billions, to one billion 454 million in 1948, only to climb in 1956, on a capital of eight billions, to the sum of five billion 471 million Congolese francs, of which 900 million was turned over to sundry amortizations and four billion 571 million comprised the net profits. I Ninety million of the latter were divided among the 15 Belgian and British directors.
The net profits alone of ten important Congolese companies forming part of the financial group of the U M HK - the Société Générale - rose in 1957, notwithstanding that it was a year of recession and falling profits, to the sum of one billion 810 million Congolese
If the income of wage-workers has risen during the last two years, that of rural workers remains very low, and can be estimated at less than half that of the industrial workers. :
Beside this considerable body of African workers and peasants at a very small income-level, the number of Europeans is very restricted: 0.7% of the population; some 100 to 105 thousand of the 14 million inhabitants of the Congo. This is a feeble percentage; noticeably weaker, for example, than that in Tanganyika, which is by no means considered a settlers' territory, and where Europeans are about 1.4% at the present moment.
These 100.000 Europeans, of whom three-quarters are Belgians, specially included at the end of 1957: 2,000 civil servants, 8,000 missionaries and about 2,000 settlers. Staff of the different companies comprised the overwhelming majority of the rest of the European working population: 21,700 persons in 1957, of whom 17,200 were Belgians. The number of self-employed persons, members of the liberal professions and small businessmen is very low. THE POLITICAL EVOLUTION OF THE CONGO
Before becoming a Belgian colony in 1909, the Congo, under the name of "the Independent Kingdom of the Congo," underwent 20 years of unheard-of exploitation and brutalities, widely denounced during the period by the social-democratic and even the throughout Europe. The name of King Leopold I remains linked in a sinister way to this period, when gangs of adventurers in his service hurled themselves on central Africa. This first phase of colonization can be called the rubber and ivory phase, since these two natural products were the greatest source of profits for the bands of European pillagers who came to "civilize" the Congo by organizing spectacular raids into its territory. They
2 Europeans' salaries in 1957: Earning less than 10,000 Cong. fr. per month: 1,5% from 10,000 to 20,000 : 56 % 20,000 to 30,000 : 31.5% 30,000 to 40,000 : 7 %
3 "A statutary order of May 19," more than 40,000 1959 fixes the price of : 4 % raw cotton bought from the natives, the sole producers, to prices varying from 4 to 5.85 Congolese francs according to quality. The price of sale FO B in Matadi, the export port, fixed by the monopolist COTONCO company at the same time reached some 46 Congolese francs per kilo of cotton bails, after a processing and handling of relatively slight importance.
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL left ruin and desolation in their tracks, and where, as in numerous cases, villages did not supply the quantity of rubber and ivory exacted, they massacred the healthy adults or cut off their right hands by way of reprisal. Victim to this barbarous repression, the population of the Congo was reduced by two or three million between 1890 and 1905, according to estimates made at the time and mentioned by Basil Davidson.
Forced human transport was introduced during this period and - the fact should be underlined - it was not until 1928 that the "Permanent Commission for the Protection of the Natives" set up by the Belgian parliament obtained the abolition of forced transport by humans in the case of Congolese women.
The countless deaths should also be recalled - one under each tracksleeper - which were the cost of constructing the Lower Congo railway, along the course of the river rapids from Matadi to Leopoldville...
From 1929 to 1940 the economic crisis and its consequences led to a very clear strengthening of the powers of the police in the Congo. Till a quite recent date penalties were imposed upon "negligent" workers, who on conviction were swiftly transformed into forced laborers used by the administration for building roads,
In 1957 the total number of exiles sent to work camps under police supervision rose to 4,815, being a decrease of 300 by comparison with 1956. In December 1957 the decision was taken no longer to place people under house arrest for the mere fact of their belonging to a forbidden religious sect (this fact is referred to in the report for 1957 of the "Native Affairs and Labor Depart-
Towards May 1956 it was possible to divine the development of precise political tendencies out of the Kitawala and Kimbanguist clandestine politico-religious sects. The national movement was born in reality with the support of the members of these sects, but more on the basis of the tribalist movements such as the ABAKO, born in 1952 in the Lower Congo, groups the peoples of the Bakongo tribe, some of whom are in Portuguese Angola and French Equatorial Africa, in the "Republic of the Congo."
The Catholic Church which, with the royal family and the financial holding companies, forms one of the three powers which in effect govern the Congo, for several years has favored independence. For a long time
Vatican and the all-powerful Belgian Catholic missions have cherished the dream of an independent Catholic state in the Congo. From May 1956 the sions have favored the formation of the group "Conscience Africaine," which published a moderate nationalist manifesto in that month. In 1957 other political groups came into being representing different tendencies. At the beginning of 1958 "L'Action Socialiste Congolaise" was created by the African trade unions affiliated to the Congolese General Federation of Labor (F GT), an affiliate of the Belgian General Federation of Labor (F G T), led by Belgian socialists living in the Congo.
in December 1957, the administration dared to make the timid turn represented by the municipal elections in Leopoldville, then in the county towns of four out of the five other provinces, the result of these surprised everybody. In Leopoldville more than half the votes were cast for the candidates of the
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL ABAKO, regarded by the administration until then as a cultural association without influence among the Bakongo. The election results in Leopoldville unquestionably marked a forward leap in national consciousness. The ABAKO showed itself at once as the first Congolese nationalist organization of some importance.
The speech delivered by its leader, Kasavubu, before 15.000 people on April 20, 1958 stimulated another bound of the national consciousness: the mayor of Dendale (a district of Leopoldville) on assuming office called for treedom of the press and internal autonomy, demands which would have been considered extremist one and a half years before.
A stepping-up of developments marked the rest of the year 1958, underlined especially by the May Day demonstration in Leopoldville, organised by l'Action Socialiste, and by the subsequent publication of its manifesto on May 26. Nationalist groupings appeared everywhere, even in Bukavu, chief town of Kivu province and main seat of the reactionary and racist settlers, where the "Centre for African Regroupment" sought to win legal recognition in the face of a thousand difficulties.
The Congolese National Movement (MN C) was formed in the autumn of 1958 and united a host of different groups under the leadership of Patrice Lumumba and Kalonji. Lumumba represented the M NC at the panafrican conference at Accra in December 1958.
On January 4, 1959 Kasavubu called a meeting of the ABAKO on this last question. The meeting was banned and the demonstration which followed, in conjunction with a police provocation, set off the bloody repressive measures of January 4, 5 and 6 in the huge township of Leopoldville, which numbers half a million inhabitants. To the 72 deaths officially announced, the murderers being principally the police commanded by whites, it is absolutely certain that about a hundred other killings should be added, inflicted by the police and by armed white civilians. The report made to the Chamber by the commission set up to enquire into the January events in Leopoldville makes the point, on this subject, that the "European volunteer corps" established by a decree of 1948 with the aim of organizing "selfdefense of factories and to ensure the defense of certain points of vital importance" numbered 120 members on January 4, but rapidly reached a thousand. Guns were out at the disposal of these volunteers. They were taker THE BELGIAN BOURGEOISIE FACES UP TO CONGOLESE NATIONALISM
Taken aback by the scope of the Leopoldville events, the bourgeoisie had to make its choice. Under vigorous pressure from the royal palace (Baudouin's speech), the Church (John XXIII and the missions) and big capital, the bourgeois politicians were obliged to yield, notwithstanding the grandiloquent pretensions of some of their representatives. The minister van Hemelrijk, providential man of the Social Christian party, handed down the line in a speech on January 13: he promised independence (without fixing a date), announced a face-lift of the colonial administration, a big accession of indigènes to the administrative cadre and sundry other reforms. The independence promised was formal enough, to be sure, and would allow the salvation of the investments which Belgian capitalism has sunk in the Congo, and the preservation of the essence of the profits which
35 the Belgian bourgeoisie extracts from it, which represent one-third of its total profits in Belgium and abroad.
Belgian imperialism, which unlike France has no solid military tradition at its disposal, felt too feeble and illanned to engage in a colonial war which would have as its main result a more or less complete stoppage of Congolese exports or an enormous increase in the cost price of mineral and vegetable products, which it would have to export by rail across Angola or Tanganyika instead
There exists a certain confusion in Belgian public opinion, unprepared, by the apparent calm of the preceding years, suddenly to receive the idea of independence for the Congo. During the first four or five months of this year the socialist press fostered this confusion by persistently exaggerating the social character of the Leopoldville uprising (poverty of the unemployed without a dole, jealousy of unschooled children for those with opportunity for study, etc) and by minimizing its national character, far more real, and clearly shown in the slogan and the chant repeated a thousand times: "Independence!"
The leadership of the Socialist Party of Belgium, embarrassed and divided, took up a soft-pedalling attitude, profoundly careful of its associations with Mol let-Lacoste, with the settlers and the reactionary layers of the colonialist petty-bourgeoisie.
By contrast, the progressivistic program of van Hemelrijk necessarily called forth understandable resistance on the part of the diehard colonial administration, the settlers, a section of the Belgian financehouses which had least capital tied up in the Congo (Brufina, the Launoit group) and, finally, the royal family, which has uncovered the mirage of an independent kingdom of the Congo, attributed to Leopold or to his son, Albert.
This opposition came into the open with the demonstration of the settlers of Kivu - the only province where their influence is of some importance - at the time of the Minister's journey to Bukavu on June 13 and 14. The joint pressure of all these forces resulted in an immobilism leavened with fine words from the Minister in the course of his very reticent speech in Leopoldville on June 25. However, during the summer the situation continued to "deteriorate." After the repression in the district of Cataractes in the province of Leo from January to April, there were nationalist demonstrations throughout the Congo, and it became obvious that the oolice forces were no longer sufficient for them to be active everywhere at once. Minister van Hemelrijk, faithful to his ambition to be the Belgian Mendès-France quit the government rather than carry out the policy forced on him and which he judged was well behind events. His successor de Schrijver, a Social Christian like himselt, was quickly torced to proceed tarther along the road of concessions than he had foreseen.
The attitude of the nationalist movement has sharpened out since the beginning of the year. The Congolese nationalist leadership as a whole now represents, in the complete absence of a national bourgeoisie, a very radical petty-bourgeois current with a program of nationalization, etc, comparable in this respect to the old Algerian M T L D, or to Sekou Toure's party, which led Guinea to independence.
So far from being bourgeois, the Congolese nationalist leaders are in general not even representatives of
36฿ the "liberal professions" but more often clerks, holders of middle-school certificates. The members of their organizations are mostly wagearners living in the townships.
For its part l'Action Socialiste Congolaise, which since April 18, 1959 has published a semi-monthly called Emancipation, "organ of socialist combat, edited by . Congolese," since April 26 has transformed itself into a Party called "The People's Party." Organized on a class basis this workers' party numbers some 1,500 members distributed over several provinces. At the present moment its relations with the ABAKO, which still represents the principal Congolese political current although its audience is limited to two provinces, seem very good. It is hardly likely that the mass of the workers will assemble around the People's Party before Congo indebut its creation before the culminating point of the independence struggle gives it a fairly serious chance of plaving a decisive rôle. Despite their influential part in the formation of the first Congolese nationalist tendencies (Conscience Africaine and even the MN C at its beginnings) the missions see their political importance diminishing day by day. The activity of the clergy will certainly not be a determinant factor in the independent Congo of the future. In fact, the missionaries appear almost everywhere today as small business bosses, hypocritical exploiters whose paternalism arouses a sullen hostility in the Congolese. During the last days of November a heterogeneous well received by the administration, saw the light of day. It calls itself the "National Party of Progress" and rallies the moderates of divers different hues.
Mention should also be made of the fact that various weeklies published by the main nationalist tendencies have been appearing for some months now, mainly in Leopoldville; that is the case with 'Independence, the MN C organ, and with Congo, the journal of the ABAKO. THE LATEST EVENTS: FROM OCTOBER TO DECEMBER
Towards mid-October there was a sudden inter-racial explosion originating at Luluabourg and in the environs of that city, capital of the province of Kasai: the Lulua and the Baluba, the two tribes in the region, hurled themselves at each other in internecine conflict. The provocative role of the administration, and more particularly of the Governor of the Province, appears incontrovertible, the more so since he knew of a study made on July 8 by the district office at Luluabourg which suggested the taking of discriminatory measures in regard to the Baluba people at the time of the Decem›er municipal elections. The Belgian big bourgeois press made the best of it: The proof is given, it said, that the Congolese will put each other to death once they are independent; they are not ready for independence,
Another provocation, yet more obvious, was brought about a few weeks later at Stanleyville, capital of the eastern province. The M N C was holding its inaugural conference there. On October 28, in closing the conference, Patrice Lumumba gave a lively criticism of the new proposals of the Minister for the Congo. During the course of his meeting a warrant was issued for his arrest and the police, aboard armourplated lorries, intervened with the object of arresting him. Captured on
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL the following day, he is still in prison at the present moment. By November 3 calm had been restored, the number of victims, according to reports, being 70 killed and 200 wounded.
We come now to an important incident. Near Matadi on October 13 the police wanted to disperse a gathering of the Kimbanguist sect. Officially there were six dead
Belgian opinion did not remain indifferent in the face of so much bloodshed. The Minister de Schrijver, in office since the beginning of September, on October 16 made a declaration in which he specified that independence would be granted to the Congo after a waiting period of four years, and that a Congolese government presided over by the governor-general would be set up at the end of 1960. During the vear
The announced, those elected at the December municipal elections would elect, at one degree removed, provincial assemblies which, at two degrees removed, would designate a sort of parliament, part of whose members would be nominated by the administration in its own right. This declaration went much further than that of January, but still was not acceptable to the Congolese parties. Lumumba's clear reply explains this well: 'The divorce between Belgium and the Congo is definitive."
M Kalonji, second leader of the MN C, arrested after the provocation of Luluabourg, was shortly afterwards released and associated his movement with the position very firmly taken by the ABAKO, the People's Party and the other nationalist Parties: from the beginning of November, there was total and obvious disagreement between the Minister for the Congo and the Congolese Parties. The latter reckoned quite rightly that they did not have the necessary guarantees for putting forward candidates at the municipal elections on December 15. The tension increased. There was an important session of the Belgian Chamber throughout November 3. The bureau of the socialist trade unions (FGT) had just decided that "it will oppose by every means the despatch, on whatever pretext, of troops to the Belgian Congo." That afternoon, in parliament, Leo Collard, the Socialist Party leader, interrupted the Minister and made a declaration demanding a round table conference of all the Belgian and Congolese parties: "Announce that the discussion is open to all and that it is the whole Belgian people who are coming to sit at the round table. Do this great deed, and do it now, or you will go into an adventure and you will go it alone!"
This is the first time since 1945 that the leadership of a great workers' movement, socialist or Stalinist, has spoken so firmly on a colonial matter and unmistakably refused at a critical moment to associate itself with preparations for a colonial war or, at the very least, a partial repression of nationalism in a country under its
This firmness, though surprising in itself, does not run counter to the evolution to the Left which since December 1958 has been apparent in the Belgian Socialist Party. Its refusal to associate itself with the repressive plans of the bourgeois government is explained by the constant pressure from the "Renardist" trade-union Leftwing, the Jeunes Gardes Socialistes, and the Left-wing of the Party, which for three years has found expression
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL in the weekly La Gauche and its Flemish equivalent Links (for one year).
This firmness from a social-democratic Party which commands nearly 40% of the votes of the Belgian electorate obliged the bourgeois to beat an important retreat. The Defense Minister, Gilson, stated that there was no question of sending troops to the Congo. As for the Minister for the Congo, de Schrijver, he agreed to meet the leaders of the Congolese parties, who had decided on an electoral boycott, before the elections. These two Ministers were thus led to act in opposition to their own more recent pronouncements. The Social Christian Prime Minister, necessary to create a second ministerial post for Congo affairs and to confer it on his Social Christian colleague Scheyven, known for his progressivist attitudes.
These events deserve special study. They show to what extent the bourgeoisie needs the social-democracy in order to carry through a colonial war or merely to court the risk by beginning repression on a large scale. If the leadership of the workers' movement decides, for whatever reason, not to take part itself in the indispensable propaganda for a colonial war, which will cripple and isolate its vanguard, and disorient the mass of the workers, pushing them into nationalism; the bourgeoisie, deprived of this indispensable support in the working-class movement and momentarily cut off from its usual agent, the social-democracy, is virtually paralyzed and dare not act alone.
It is impossible, to be sure, to place any serious confidence in Belgian social-democracy after this Left zigzag, which can be followed by a Right zig-zag after a resurgence of its existing centrist current.
Indisputably the bourgeoisie is committed, even more clearly than from January to October, to a concessionary course; and so the very big fears, still existing at the beginning of November, seem to have been overcome for the time being. The journey of de Schrijver to the Congo and the masterly strategy of the Congolese coalition of the three main Parties (the ABAKO, the M NC and the PS A) - whose leaders arrived in Brussels on December 3 demanding an immediate interview with the Belgian SP leadership, and making their participation in the December 15 elections conditional on negotiations in the form of a democratic round table conference - show the extent of the ministerial retreat. THE CIVIL WAR IN RUANDA
Whereas the Congo is an industrialized country, the primary or secondary producer of uranium in the world, the fifth producer of copper, etc., the small territories of Ruanda and Urundi are above all reserves of manual labor for the mines of the Katanga, a thousand miles away, and are almost untouched by industry.
An overpopulated portion of the old German colony of Tanganyika, these two feudal kingdoms had in 1958 about 4,700,000 inhabitants, 85 per square kilometer, of whom at least a tenth were Watutsi, a Hamitic race - the nobility, landowners and cattle-owners (one million oxen) - and nearly 90% Bahutu, a Bantu race -
Belgian administration has patently been reluctant to touch the feudal structure of the country, and has heaped honors on the two kinglets and the few great feudal families who share the chieftaincies and the power. The staple food of the country, based on
37 maize (150,000 tons in 1955) gives the population an inadequate standard of health. During the Second World War a bad harvest year gave rise to a terrible famine, which perceptibly reduced the population... it 770 million Belgian trancs. Electricity productio reached only a million kwh before 1954 and four mil lion since then, that is to say less than the 5,000 inhabitants of Greenland consume (!) and, per head of the population, two thousand times less than those of Belgium. In addition to which, in 1954 there was only one doctor per 67,000 inhabitants (as against one per 20,000 in the Congo and one per 950 in Belgium).
In this country under Belgian suzerainty, three political Parties whose programs appear to differ only slightly have been conducting an agitation over the past year which, together with the events in the Congo, has prepared the way for an eruption of social and racial hatred among the Bahutu against the Watutsi. The news from Ruanda and Urundi announced suddenly, on November 12, miltary operations conducted by the civil and military police and, for the first time, by Belgian troops flown from bases in the Congo. These operations were carried through following the outbreak of a veritable civil war between the serfs in revolt against their overlords. As early as the 13 th, a communique from the headquarters of "the Belgian Forces of the Congo, operating in Ruanda - Urundi," announced the death of 50 "incendiaries" as a balance sheet of the activity of "air and land patrols". . The next day the Socialist daily Le Peuple ran a headline "State of emergency proclaimed in Ruanda! Hundreds of Watutsi fleeing to Uganda. " Ever since, information, carefully doctored, has left the impression that these military operations are going on: "pacification" is not yet over... TOWARDS INDEPENDENCE
The main difference remaining between the Belgian government and the Congolese Party leaders flows from the desire of the government to grant, rather than to negotiate independence. Failing to find on confronting them any "interlocuteurs valables", sufficiently corrupted or corruptible, the Belgian bourgeoisie, unable to negotiate with a non-existent Congolese bourgeoisie, affects to deny the representative character of the Congolese Parties. It has beaten a retreat in connection with the electoral machinery imposed in Leopoldville, but hesitates before entrusting the future Congolese state to people capable of thinking in terms of nationalizing the rich mineral deposits of the country!
Prompted by this fear, some of them even openly contemplate the eventual secession of the mining province of the Katanga and its neighbor, Kivu, center of white settlement. This policy, however, could only be a last desperate remedy for the bourgeoisie, as problems of transport would liquidate its gains.. Another nascent separatist tendency exists within the ABAKO. Some of its leaders, afraid of seeing those provinces more backward than the capital, Leopoldville, bury the progressive votes of the pilot province beneath their electoral weight, are not content with demanding a federal structure (in any case rejected by the administration). They dream of reëstablishing, without delay, the unified state of the Bakongo, with its boundaries extending from the limits of Gabon, in the north, to the middle of Portuguese Angola, in the south; this was the
38 kingdom in existence at the time of the Portuguese colonization in the fifteenth century.
The journal of the People's Party, Emancipation, has given a clear answer to this question in its issue of June 15 last: the problem of the various national groupings contained within the frontiers of the "Belgian" Congo or cut in two by those frontiers, should be solved after independence. At this moment what is required is to unite all forces in the struggle for independence and against colonialist oppression.
This viewpoint is correct. The revolutionary Marxists of Belgium, however, should show their unconditional solidarity with the Bakongo people if it were the victim of colonialist repression in a struggle waged by the masses for Bakongo independence. The fact of their belonging to the nation whose bourgeoisie maintains colonial and national oppression over the Bakongo and the other peoples of the Congo, prohibits them from taking a position on the question of the way in which the victims of Belgian colonialism choose to organize: whether to unite or separate, to preserve or abolish the frontiers imposed upon them by imperialism at the end of the 19th century, when the colonial booty was shared out.
During the summer the bourgeoisie took special measures to preserve its possessions. Capital was withdrawn and repatriated to Belgium. To be sure, the main part of the 160 to 180 billion Belgian francs invested in the Congo remained untouched by these measures; but certain companies, big companies included, stopped reinvesting an important part of their profits on the spot. At the same time the government set about undermining the economy of the future Congolese state, already now fastening firm financial ties between Belgium and the Congo, whose currencies are of equal value. Moreover, horsedealing has already commenced in connection with the eventual construction at Inga, on the Lower Congo, of the biggest dam in the world, planned over the last two years.
It is clear that the financial powers-that-be are hesitant about vesting enormous sums of capital in the construction of this dam and the ancillary industries which will make use of its potential of energy, notably the production of aluminum.
crEased thou bone Congo, hich shas se more in
this one year than in the whole of its history! Some have been really big, like that of the 25,000 transport vorkers of Otraco. Others have been violently repressed. This was especially the case in the "Huileries du Congo Belge" at Elisabetha, a small city in the eastern province, where many workers were wounded. The Congolese working class has still scarcely been touched by rade unionism. Built by Belgians, the Congo CSC
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL (Christian trade unions), and the Congo FG T, have mainly served to form cadres for the future African mass trade unions linked with the nationalist movement. These have perhaps already come into being with the "General Union of Congolese Workers", , but this trade union of recent creation, frowned on by the administration, not yet found the road to the broad masses of the
The experience of the last 15 years has shown that the gaining of political independence, and even a certain degree of struggle against the economic positions of imperialism, were possible under a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois nationalist leadership these leaderships were able to retain control and leadership of the mass movement. Possessing already, even before independence, a working-class Party well rooted in the various regions; lacking any kind of national bourgeoisie on the one hand, and provided by contrast with a numerous working class; the Congo will very probably, and in a relatively short time, have an organized working-class movement capable of claiming the leadership of the state and of seizing real power from Belgian imperialism which will, however, remain the master of the mines, the factories and the plantations on the morrow of independence.
Throughout Negro Africa, the struggle for independence is today combined with a profound longing for a vast panafrican federation of the "United States of Africa", grouping the states and the national federations and covering the whole continent south of the Sahara.
But no more than the genuine unification of the Arab nation from Morocco to Iraq can be realised under the bourgeois leadership of the Nassers or the Kassems, can that of Negro Africa be effected under the leadership of bourgeois politicians like Nkrumah or Senghor, or of the Congolese petty-bourgeois. Only a mass working-class Party, only a revolutionary Marxist leadership will be able to accomplish an historic task of such immense proportions. Only a federation of workers' states would moreover be able to expropriate the big colonial companies and effect a general industrialization of Negro Africa, which would imply for the Belgian Congo the creation of a large consumer goods industry, at the moment scarcely sketched out.
in active support of the young Congolese workers novement by the Belgian and European proletariat will prove, after independence, as important as is their present unconditional support to the struggle for independence and against the colonialist claims of Belgian imperialism. Then, as now, the Belgian revolutionary Marxists and the vanguard of the workers' movement of this country should strive to lead the whole proletariat of this country in that sense. December 1, 1959