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Colonialism and Neocolonialism 106
The Africanization of the administrative cadres began with the debacle of the
Europeans. Civil servants took flight, private companies shut their doors. Lumumba did
what he could to make them stay. But at the same time, Belgian troops were being flown
into the Congo; he had to break with Belgium, which finally made the white population
panic. The masses, however, wished to expel the Belgians and yet reproached them for
leaving. Lumumba remained powerless: he was reproached for not taking leadership of
the movement. The workers were demanding a pay rise, a legitimate claim, but one
which the Jacobin Lumumba considered inopportune. Strikes broke out, no longer against
the Belgians, but against him. He had them suppressed: the Congolese economy had to be
saved, the level of production had to be maintained. And above all, in the confused and
sporadic disturbances that radically, but catastrophically, brought about the
Africanization of the cadres, he did not recognize his political praxis, his revolution or
his personnel. Those people, he thought, have done nothing so far; now we have won,
they are demanding from us what they would never have asked of the Belgians. What
have they in common with us? Lumumba the pacifist took a stand against violence,
Lumumba the évolué abandoned his solidarity with the non-évolués and all the évolués
who did not aim for the common good alone. He repressed these spontaneous
movements, thus losing his last chance of shoring up his faltering power with this wild
revolution. It must be admitted, moreover, that that was only a slim chance: without
organization, without a revolutionary programme, this brutal radicalization of
independence led to nothing. The demonstrations continued, directed henceforth against
the government. To identify with national unity, Lumumba had attempted to separate
himself from his class: he was forced back into it. Just as Lumumba was attempting to
break the protest strikes, deputies awarded themselves an allowance of 500,000 francs.
The extra-coutumier masses discovered at the same time the appetite of the évolués and
the repression of the government. Before colonization, the ‘elite’ earned much more than
unskilled workers, but remained exploited, oppressed: for the same work, a black civil
servant earned half as much as a white. This inequality helped, despite everything, to
bring the lower middle class nearer to the people: in opposition to the Belgians, the
blacks were proud of their évolués. Scarcely had the latter come to power than they
discovered they were a class by the salaries and payments they demanded. The masses
believed they were looking at new masters. They saw in the government – as in the past,
with good reason, under colonial rule – a repressive power. Everything was wrong: the
black lower middle class could only establish its authority by abandoning the Congo to
imperialism, which in return would allow it to manage the country; moreover, Lumumba,
far from representing the interests of the évolué class, saw his power dwindling daily
because he opposed them. Not, it is true, in the name of the interests of the masses, but in
the name of Jacobin universalism. Be that as it may: the contamination occurred rapidly,
and the prime minister was considered to be an apprentice dictator chosen by numerous
privileged people at the very moment when he was losing their confidence. From July on,
Kasavubu, Abaka and the Belgian agents provocateurs knew how to turn this confusion
to their advantage: they presented Lumumba as a tyrant.
Nothing was further from his character: even as he was being accused of the abuse of
power, moreover, he was no longer able to command obedience. But what his enemies
sensed from the beginning was that in a divided country, national unity is a permanent