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Colonialism and Neocolonialism 110
blacks by Western capitalism. Loans and investments are made: the government of the
independent nation is completely dependent on the Europeans and the Americans. This
happened to Cuba in 1900 after a colonial war that it had won. The model still holds
good: it is used every day. The aim is to reserve the same fate for the black continent as
that of Latin America: weakness of central government, alliance of the bourgeoisie (or
remaining feudal landowners) with the Army, a super-government of multi-national
corporations. People are needed for this scam: in the Congo, it would be Kasavubu; his
ambitions and his separatism – even if in the end he accepted a very loose federation –
maintained the old discords sustained by the Belgian administration, and this time
without the whites being suspected of having a hand in it. Ileo and Adoula were able to
second him: their class awareness matched their appetites: protected by the Force
Publique, they could be counted on to finish off the constitution and hasten the
development of the new bourgeoisie. Until now, the évolués had been only salaried
employees, recruited and trained by imperialism and convinced by their masters that their
interests coincided with those of capital: now it was necessary to modify the Congolese
economy, turn some salaried employees into little capitalists, maintain the rural feudal
class, and allow the forces of concentration free rein, even in the countryside. That was
the programme, that was the Congo of 1963; the subject of History between 1960 and
1961, today it is nothing more than the most passive of objects. The fate of Katanga was
settled between Belgians, English, French, Americans, Rhodesians and white South
Africans. The struggles, the uprisings, the war, the brusque and contradictory decisions of
the UN were the effects and the signs of the bargaining which had taken place between
the multi-national corporations, between the governments. If today everything seems to
have been settled, if Katanga is returning to the Congo, it is because the United States has
come to an agree-ment with the Belgians to exploit the Congo’s riches jointly through
mixed companies – against Rhodesia and South Africa and against English and French
designs.
To perfect such delicate compromises, the first thing to be done was to exclude the
Congo from debates and that came down to removing Lumumba. Alone and betrayed, he
remained the abstract symbol of national unity; he was the Congo at the historic moment
of the transfer of powers. Before him there had only been a colony, a jigsaw of dislocated
empires; after him, all that remained was a torn country that would need more than a
decade to achieve its national unity. As prime minister, Lumumba had lost his supports
one after the other and in spite of himself became, by force of circumstances, the agent of
a new separatism which called itself centralization. As a captive and alive, he might
become overnight a principle, a rallying point. He continued to represent a political
approach that he had been prevented from adopting, but which, at the new Government’s
first failures, might appear to be an alternative political solution, one which had not been
allowed to prove itself because it had not been given long enough, and which, if tried,
could possibly turn out to be the only viable one. The mal-contents of the day before had
united against him, those of the day after – doubtless the same – might rally round him. A
prisoner who was once idolized by the crowds continues to be the naked possibility of
praxis; his very existence transforms regrets into hope; because he remains faithful to his
principles, they are much more than a purely theoretical view for new opponents; they are
alive, they are current, humanized by the man who, as people know, is their guardian in