April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

The Ghanaian troops were mostly flown to the Congo by British Royal Air
Force planes. (See W. Scott Thompson: Ghana’s Foreign Policy 1957-66 -
Princeton University Press 1969).
In addition, Ghana sent engineers, doctors and nurses, technicians and
artisans of all types to the Congo, some of them flying in by Egyptian
planes, while others went by Ghana Airways aircraft, piloted by Ghanaians.
The Congolese could hardly believe their eyes: at independence, the
Congo had only six or so university graduates and to see Africans piloting
planes was mind-blowing to those who saw them.
The Ghanaian troops in the Congo, on the other hand, did not always get a
warm welcome from the Congolese, for a lot of their officers were white -
three years after Ghana’s independence. Ghana’s chief of the defence
staff was himself a British officer called General H. T. Alexander. He
lacked the imagination - or confidence - to reconstitute the Ghanaian units
that went to the Congo so that they would be officered by Ghanaians.
The Congolese could not quite get their heads round the fact that if they
were fighting against white Belgians, Ghana should come to their
assistance with troops led by white officers. Belgian propaganda claimed
that the white officers were Russian Communist. To them, all the whites
they knew - Belgians - were racist devils, and they could not understand
that in Ghana, whites took orders from a black government. Thus
misunderstanding was costly to Ghana - in one incident at Port Francqui,
Ghanaian troops came under a surprise attack by Congolese soldiers and
over two score lost their lives.
As a news editor at the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, I was following all
these events carefully and trying to understand what was going on in the
Congo, so as to broadcast bulletins to the people of Ghana that would
make them understand the situation. One day, in September 1960, Radio
Ghana’s monitoring section came up with a news item that was utterly
shocking: President Joseph Kasavubu had announced over Radio
Leopoldville that he had dismissed the Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba.
Kasavubu said that he, as President, had used powers given to him under
the Congolese constitution (the ‘Loi Fondamentale’) to dismiss Lumumba
as Prime Minister.
Very soon, we got another flash: in retaliation, Lumumba had also sacked
Kasavubu.
Lumumba took the precaution of immediately asking the Congolese Senate
to give him a vote of confidence over what he had done. Despite a huge
outlay of secret cash payments made by the Belgians and the Americans to
influence the Congolese Parliamentarians to take Kasavubu‘s side, it was
Lumumba’s dismissal of Kasavubu that the Senators endorsed. Later, the
lower House of Parliament also supported Lumumba with a vote of
confidence.
Meanwhile, the newspapers of the world, unable to decipher Congolese
constitutional matters and distinguish between who had acted legally and
who had acted illegally, had a field day running this mocking headline:
‘Kasavubu sacks Lumumba! Lumumba sacks Kasavubu!’
Lumumba made a very eloquent speech in asking the Congolese Parliament
to dismiss Kasavubu. The speech was probably the last one he made in
public that was fully recorded. Our monitoring station transcribed it for us
and I ran the transcript of it almost in full in our news bulletins.