MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 23 May 1997.
Online here https://web.archive.org/web/20120416011318/http://www.candw.ag/~jardinea/fanflame.htm.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
On May 16, I was happy. Happier than happy. Mobutu had fled. An American, French and Belgium created tyrant in Africa had been defeated by a mass movement. Allah be praised!
Way back in 1960, as a boy of 17, Clarvis Joseph and I had followed with enthusiasm the independence of the Congo. From this distance we became supporters of the man who had led the Congo to independence – Patrice Lumumba.
Lumumba cut a figure of earnestness, of an unyielding will to make the Congo, genuinely independent. Belgium had milked the Congo, the third largest country in Africa, a 900,000 square mile nation at the very heart of Africa, of its riches. The Congo is, potentially, Africa’s richest country with 46 million people and vast reserves of timber, diamonds, cobalt and copper.
Yet Zaire, as Mobutu called the Congo, had been reduced to pauperdom. Overwhelmed with debt. Awash in corruption. Mobutu’s African and foreign cronies had plundered the nation. He himself had stashed away billions. Mobutu was ranked as the 7th richest man in the world while his country was among the poorest. Western companies had made billions more raping the Congo and benefitting from Mobutu’s corrupt rule.
The Congo had been decisive in my own development. The great Kwame Nkrumah, an African tragedy, had won Ghana’s independence, to become the first black country to gain independence in Africa, in 1957. Clarvis Joseph and I had listened by radio to such broadcasts as we could hear of Ghana’s independence. We were early partisans of African emancipation.
Later in 1959, Cuba had won its independence from the USA, which had assumed colonial authority by the Platt Amendment of 1902, under the revolutionary leadership of Dr Fidel Castro, 33, and the romantic revolutionary, an ideological Lord Byron. The world was a changing. One of Castro’s first decrees was the abolition of all laws enforcing racial discrimination, against the majority of Afro-Cubans. A class-mate of the time, a Bird, had followed the Cuban revolution and I with him. He had brought to school the New York Times articles by Hubert Matthews. We lapped them up. Not just the times, the world was a changing.
On June 30, 1960, the former Belgium Congo became independent. I was then a devout Roman Catholic. I had entertained thoughts of the priesthood. And then a Belgian priest asked us to pray for “priests and nuns who were being killed in the Congo by savages.” The words stick in my head to this day. The Church, mainly black, knelt and prayed. It was July 1960. I was furious. Blacks, my own people, some far more sensible than the priest, were being misled by a Belgian priest, in the name and rituals of Christianity. I never went back. I broke with the Roman Catholic Church.
My mother had knelt and prayed. It had shocked my puritan soul. She was the most anti-colonial of women. If there was a strike against Bryson at the time, no Bryson soft drinks, even if bought before the strike, could be had in the house. She and my grandfather had made me follow on radio, the struggle of the Mau Mau in Kenya. On the partition of my bedroom I had written in chalk the name Dedan Kimathi the last of the Mau Mau leaders to fall in Kenya at the hands of British colonial forces. Yet she had knelt and prayed – against her own people – who were being characterised as ‘savages’. We discussed it. She, thankfully, did not rely on parental authority. The priest was Belgian she said, what else did I expect? They, as Belgians, could not live with the loss of the Congo as a colony that had enriched them. But, I countered, he had called us ‘savages’. That was his way of seeing, she said. We were savages too in his eyes, I responded. She accepted he was a racist. She did not accept, though, that by kneeling and praying against our people struggling to be free, it was a sin against the Holy Ghost. Unforgivable. And unpardonable.
“They never expected us to rise up and try to be free. They thought they would rule us forever,” she said. Those words stuck too. The Priest, said she, had bent religion for his own purposes. But do they not always mystify us, and lead us unto mystification for their own colonising sake. That is, their enrichment, and our mystified ignorance. She had no counter for this I thought.
However, smilingly, she took cover behind “Render unto God the things that are God’s and unto Caesar ...” She said it, for once, without conviction. God could not want us to be colonial subjects, I argued. So Caesar and God’s purposes were united – in the struggle for freedom. You too bright for me, she concluded, if you feel that strongly about it, you don’t have to go back to Church. I was most pleased. It was my declaration of independence. I was free, free at last of the colonial and colonising church. My mother insisted though that I had to read the Bible for an hour every Sunday. No problem. I was free!
But hope was quickly dashed. Lumumba was killed in 1961. The U.S. invaded Cuba that same year. But Cuba beat them back at the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy then a hero for me, thanks to U.S. media, fell and remained fallen. Lumumba’s death hurt as though it were a death in the family. Reg Samuel explained. We, as Africans were up against the West and the East. The Soviet Union etc. would only support us, so far and no further. Their interests, Reg Samuel explained, were tied to the West. This remember was as early as 1961. Reg Samuel was more perceptive than most, at home or abroad. It was a view I was to maintain. Later C.L.R. James’s writings would deepen that understanding into a credo. We had to overcome corruption, bring the people in economics and politics, and hold on. Hold on, until a major industrial country broke with old post-feudal exploitative system and set out on a new path, freed from corporate rule.
Meantime the Congo fell into disorder. Dashed hope turned to ashes. Later Nkrumah would fall. Padmore, whom I was instructed by then, in the 50’s, Sonny Benjamin was a decisive factor in African emancipation would die, mysteriously. I spent what was for me then a private fortune, $10 US to get the NBC transcript hailing and proclaiming George Padmore as the “Father of African Emancipation”. To this day Padmore is still unknown in unconscious Antigua and Barbuda. African emancipation though, had replaced Roman Catholicism on my agenda.
Everyone knew, that with the assistance of the CIA, Mobutu had helped to organise the execution of Patrice Lumumba. It was the worst of crimes. Criminality was central to what passes for international affairs in the capitalist order of things as was the case with Stalin.
So, on November 24, 1965, my birthday, Mobutu assumed power in the Congo. I thought it a cruel irony of a birthday gift. Backed by the CIA and the United States Mobutu allowed western mining companies to plunder the Congo’s vast mineral wealth. Their corruption was worse than Mobutu’s, appalling as his was. Shortly thereafter, Mobutu hanged four Cabinet Ministers, before a crowd of 65,000 in the Kinshasa stadium, allegedly for treason. The U.S. did not remember either human rights or democracy. The CIA station chief met with Mobutu every morning and guided him in the path of “democracy”. The U.S. claimed Mobutu was a Cold War ally. Not true! He was their ally. Period. Their idea of a Modern African ruler. Corrupt to the core. Marcos, Duvalier and Somoza are but other examples, the Cold War is but excuse for those who secured America’s interests in violation of their own national interests, and for their personal enrichment.
Then Mobutu established a single party, ridiculously called the Popular Revolutionary Movement. He called the Congo, Zaire. All Zairians were to be members of Mobutu’s party. Flatterers surrounded Mobutu. Mobutu’s picture first appeared in government offices. Then everywhere. School children had to recite everyday, “One Party, One Country, One Father, Mobutu, Mobutu, we follow the father till death.” I heard it myself in 1974, inquired what the children were saying with such zest, and every time since I have heard the phrase “Follow the Leader”, I am overwhelmed by a sense of dread. The Personality Cult, being developed now by Lester Bird remind one of Mobutu’s. They have the same stench.
Mobutu said he had created a new ideology – Mobutuism. He was for “Zairianization.” He exploited cultural nationalism to the hilt with his African name, clothes, and leopard skin hat. He proclaimed grandiose projects. (Note the similarity) The largest project of all was the “state-of-the-art” Inga Dam near Kinshasa at the time, one of the world’s largest hydro-electric dams. He ripped the project off. Then there was the Inga-shaba power grid, spanning dense forest and empty savannah. Mobutu ripped that off too. The World Bank withdrew from the project. The United States Export-Import Bank stepped in where the World Bank fled from the US$1 billion project. The US Export-Import Bank, assorted U.S. suppliers, and Mobutu reaped a bonanza from the project. Zaire reeled under the debt. The bankers had paté de frois and clicot champagne. The poor got misery and more immiseration. The personality cult thrived exploiting traditional culture.
In the meantime, the last follower of Lumumba kept up sporadic struggles against Mobutu. Ché Guevara joined him in 1965. The Cuban and Congo struggles were thus united, more than symbolically. Internationalism, for sure at work. Guevara departed, disappointed. The lone supporter of Lumumba, carried on in the Fizi-Baraka mountain range of South Kivu Province. Lumumba’s lone supporter who had organised this rebellion was one Laurent Desiré Kabila. He would not give up. Indomitable. Sometimes he was reduced to a handful of supporters. Several left him to join the enemy – Mobutu. Yet he persevered. Unyielding. Not like Wordsworth’s lonely leech-gatherer on the moor. But like what he was, an African freedom fighter. This is the essential fact to be noted about Kabila, not the drivel written in the so-called western press.
In 1973, the year before I spent two days there, Mobutu took over a number of Belgian, Greek, Jewish and Pakistani trading houses. These were “nationalisations”! I laughed my head off. Now all those who saw nationalisation as “socialism” could no longer repeat that nonsense. The same year Apartheid South Africa “nationalised” even taverns which sold beer and booze to blacks. All those who saw nationalisation as socialism could no longer hold fast to that fiction. The fiction that socialism was nationalisation had long ago exploded before the collapse of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. State Capitalism is not socialism.
Capitalism is the organisation and control of production and science by the fewer and fewer owners of capital, based on the exploitation of working people primarily as producers, but also as consumers.
Socialism, on the contrary, is not state ownership of the means of production. That has proved disastrous. Socialism is the organisation and control of production and science, by the self-organised working people. At that stage, the exploitation of man by man is ended, as is the heedless and ceaseless violation of the environment in pursuit of greed.
Ended too is the exploitation of race by race, which has intensified, in various forms, in the 20th century. Abolished as well, as the socialist stage, is the long history of the exploitation of women as workers, as domestic producers, and as objects of sexual gratification. After that, but only after that, truly human history begins. Mobutu knew nothing about this and cared even less.
The businesses which Mobutu nationalised he distributed among his “cronies”. Eight of the largest of these nationalised companies were controlled by Mobutu’s family. Mobutu, his family and cronies, bled Zaire. By 1978 Mobutu, his family, and his cronies had stashed away US$300 million out of these companies in foreign, mainly Swiss, bank accounts.
The foreign mine owners bled the country too. They evaded taxes, and paid Mobutu instead. Mobutu’s wealth grew exponentially to the country’s decline into debt and pauperisation. There were two revolts in Shaba Province in 1978. Mobutu’s army could not put down the revolts. He called in French troops, Belgian troops and U.S. transport planes to put down the rebellions. He was, evidently, dependent on foreign power and foreign arms too, so that he and the foreign companies could plunder with impunity.
Shaba Province alone has 80 per cent of the world’s cobalt reserves and 20 per cent of its copper. The companies followed the French and Belgian troops and U.S. transport planes and exacted tribute out of the mineral wealth of Shaba. Not a few black nuns and priests were killed. No one knelt and prayed, not here, for sure. I wept, inwardly. African emancipation, by way of African independence, despite Fanon’s profound and timely warning, was turning acrid and putrid.
Angola became independent in 1975. The day before Angola’s independence the CIA, South African troops, and Savimbi’s US-backed UNITA counter-revolutionary movement tried to seize the oil producing Cabinda Province in Angola. They were beaten back then. South Africa would try again, using Mobutu, backed by Washington. The Angolans fought, fought bravely against the South Africans, but they were outgunned. The Cubans came to the rescue. They brought with them a famous piece of artillery, known as the Stalin organ. The South Africans backed by the U.S. which provided logistics, were forced to retreat.
The South Africans and Mobutu and the U.S. needed a weapon to counter the Stalin Organ. Lester Bird in Antigua, aided and abetted by the CIA, would supply Mobutu, apartheid South Africa with Howitzers 155, modified by Space Research Corporation, and its famous or infamous scientist Dr Gerard Bull, who lived here. He brought this sophisticated artillery here for South Africa. Antigua willingly served as South Africa’s conduit. The South African Defense Minister came here. He was spirited through Customs and Immigration. South African military came here. Spirited in the same way. Examined the sophisticated artillery. They bought them. They were shipped from here, along with small arms, on the SS Tugelaland. Mobutu collected money on this transaction. Somebody here, rotten rich, a Mobutu counterpart collected money. The blood of Africa is on their hands. Not all the waters in the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea can wash the blood from their hands.
Before Mobutu fled, his army had become a crime syndicate. Its senior officers made vast sums from weapons deals and running protection rackets for diamond dealers and foreign businessmen or their own smuggling operations.
Ordinary soldiers were given their gun and told to make a living as best as they could. Robbery was the obvious method. Mobutu’s soldiers, armed and dangerous dispersed all over the Congo.
It is in these circumstances the U.S. is insisting on Kabila to hold elections. They got to be kidding. They are appealing, of course, to those who think they are informed by Western ‘un-biased’ media. They are ‘un-biased’ against the truth, for sure.
When Mobutu bolted from the Congo, on May 16, I rejoiced. I saw in it what my mother would call the day of reckoning. It had to come. Kabila had persisted all these years. He had organised a march through the Congo, in seven months, sweeping all before him. The people of the Congo, had joined him after 32 years in the wilderness. The U.S. and France were trying to cheat Kabila and what they call his rag-tag army of victory. They are now calling for democracy which they themselves denied the Congo for 37 years. They want “democracy” like instant coffee in the Congo. This is not democracy, but clearly hypocrisy.
Someone should remind the United States that it was 13 years after 1776, after its glorious declaration of Independence, before the U.S. held elections in 1789. They want, of course, the Mobutu forces to re-emerge. They want too, Tishekedi to play the role that Moise Tshombe played against Lumumba. They want the Congo to be divided against itself, the better for their mining companies to reap a bonanza, as usual, at the expense of the people of the Congo. Kabila will be up against a sea of troubles. I wish him well.
But Mobutu has gone. He enriched himself out of a nation he left strangled with debt, a vassal of foreign banks. His billions are stashed away. Now they are frozen in Swiss banks. His counterpart here had better take note. Their end is swift. As though in the twinkling of an eye. Mobutu is gone. I rejoice and I am exceedingly glad. The knell knolls the passing of corruption through grandiose un-economic projects. The writing is on the wall. Africans are rising again.
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