Congo and Ghana: Early examples of inter-African co-operation

The recent commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Congo, has touched off a series of reminiscences in my mind, which I’d like to share with those interested in the modern history of our continent.

Ghana’s first president, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, was an ardent Pan-Africanist who sought to promote African unity and began to work for it just one year after Ghana achieved its independence in March 1957. In 1958, Guinea was left penniless by its coloniser, France, for opting for independence. Guinea had been the only French African colony to vote ‘Non’ in a referendum called by the French president, General Charles de Gaulle, ostensibly to determine which of the French colonies wanted to be independent or continue their association with France.

Guinea exercised its right to opt out of the ‘French Community’, and in revenge, the French packed up and left Guinea with immediate effect. They emptied Guinea's treasury as they left, flew away all their doctors and technicians, vandalised offices of state and even went as far as tearing telephone wires off the walls.

When Nkrumah heard of this, he immediately offered Guinea a ‘loan’ of over £10 million (US$28 million at the exchange rate of those days). Everyone knew it was a gift, as Guinea had no money to repay such a big sum.

On 23 November 1958 Nkrumah and the Guinean president, Sekou Toure, formally announced that Ghana and Guinea were to form a ‘union’. This was in spite of the fact that the two countries were separated by the Ivory Coast, another French colony that had voted in exactly the opposite manner to Guinea, and was more than happy to remain in the pocket of France.

The objective of the Ghana-Guinea union, as envisaged by Nkrumah and Toure at the time, was to demonstrate that culture and distance need not separate African countries politically. Indeed, political union would open the doors to wider co-operation in the economic and social fields.

The practical difficulties that faced the Ghana-Guinea union turned it into a laughing stock for the Western media, especially Time magazine, which imagined a ‘Cabinet meeting’ of the union, at which no minister from English-speaking Ghana would understand a word of what his counterpart from French-speaking Guinea was trying to say! (As if simultaneous translation had never been invented and wasn’t already in use at the United Nations…)

The union was in fact joined by Mali in April 1961. Mali received £5 million (US$14 million) from Ghana on acceding to the union.

When Patrice Lumumba, who had attended the All-African People’s Conference in Accra, Ghana, in December 1958, emerged as prime minister of the Congo in June 1960, Dr Nkrumah was anxious to get him to join the union. On a visit to Accra, Lumumba did sign a secret agreement of union with Dr Nkrumah. But the agreement was not publicised, because the two men were aware that the Western powers had lucrative economic interests in the Congo and would therefore try to bribe the Congolese parliament to oppose a Ghana-Congo union.

But when Lumumba’s army, the Force Publique, mutinied soon after independence, Dr Nkrumah pulled out all the stops to try and help Lumumba restore order. He was clever enough to provide all his assistance to Lumumba under the aegis of the United Nations. He first got the UN to prevail on the British government and the government of Egypt to provide transport planes to ferry more than 2,000 Ghanaian soldiers to the Congo in a matter of days.

Dr Nkrumah also sent policemen, nurses, doctors, engineers, electricians and other artisans to replace Belgian personnel, who had left the country as a result of attacks they had endured during the army mutiny.

Ghana was also quick to open an embassy in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa). It obtained Belgium’s co-operation in doing this, by allowing the Belgians to open an embassy in Accra, headed by an ambassador called Gerard Walravena.

Ghana’s first ambassador to the Congo was a businessman, Mr A Y K Djin. He discreetly assisted Lumumba with financial resources at crucial moments. But he was later replaced by a far more flamboyant figure, Nathaniel Azarko Welbeck, propaganda secretary of Dr Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP).

Welbeck had been extremely good at the job of spreading propaganda on behalf of Dr Nkrumah. First of all, he created an excitement around the CPP that other parties could not match. He used what was, in the 1950s, ‘new media’. Instead of gathering people into assembly halls or open grounds, and bombarding them with speech after speech, Welbeck’s outfit made the day it held a ‘rally’ in any locality, an occasion for partying.

The CPP had propaganda vans, mainly Peugeot 203s, each brightly painted in the party colouirs – green, red and white – and each equipped with an ear-splitting public address system. These cars would drive round and round the streets of the town or village where a ‘rally’ was to be held, playing special songs commissioned from the best popular band in the Gold Coast of the time – EK’s Band. The songs were full of catchy encomiums of Dr Kwame Nkrumah, and all the kids and even people who were not politically inclined but liked the music, sang along. The partying had begun.

Welbeck & Co. also invented ‘dramas’ for concert parties to perform at ‘concerts’ on the stage. In one such drama, Welbeck got an actor to dress himself up unmistakably – streak of grey hair and all – like Nkrumah’s most notable opponent, Dr J B Danquah, and represented him as taking a bribe from the British. Some people bought into this infantile libel! Welbeck believed, correctly, in the Goebbels dictum that ‘The greater the lie, the greater the possibility for its belief’.

Once, I saw Welbeck operating, close at hand, when he and Dr Nkrumah came to address a rally at Asiakwa, my home town. I ran away from school in nearby Kyebi to go and attend the rally. Three die-hard anti-Nkrumah guys in Asiakwa prepared some questions and when Dr Nkrumah had finished speaking, they gave the questions to one of their number, who walked up boldly to the podium and gave it to Dr Nkrumah to answer.

Dr Nkrumah politely took the questions from the man's hand, read them and immediately burst out laughing.

‘I have done politics in America,’ Nkrumah said, ‘And I have done politics in Great Britain. But nowhere have I seen such silly politics as this!’ And he tossed the piece of paper over to Welbeck.

Welbeck read the questions and then began to answer them. ‘Ha –’, Welbeck said, ‘listen to this! The people who brought these questions want to know whether Kwame Nkrumah stole anything and was jailed for doing so, when he was a student in America!’ He made sure that his voice fully conveyed the contempt with which he viewed the question.

‘All right,’ said Welbeck, ‘let me also ask them – even if Kwame Nkrumah had stolen anything in America, and I mean “even if” – have you heard that, since he came back home, he has stolen anything from any of us?’

‘NOOOOOOOO!’ the crowd shouted.

‘Ahaaaah!’ Welbeck yelled back.

He went on: ‘They also want to know whether Kwame Nkrumah stowed away to go to America.’

Some in the crowd groaned audibly.

WELBECK: ‘Even if – and remember the big “if” – Kwame Nkrumah did stow away to America, did the ship on which he stowed away belong to anybody from the Gold Coast?’

CROWD: ‘Nooooooh!’

WELBECK: ‘How many Gold Coasters have enough money to buy a ship? Could he have stowed away on a ship owned by somebody from the Gold Coast?’

‘NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!’ roared the crowd.

Welbeck rolled the piece of paper up contemptuously and threw it away. The men had no choice but to beat a quick retreat. They had been disgraced, for the subtext of Welbeck's explanation s had been that these anti-Nkrumah men were preoccupied with things that did not strictly concern us, a people whose wealth had been pilfered for decades by imperialists in America and Britain.

It was this formidable agent provocateur that Dr Nkrumah dispatched to the Congo to replace the sedate businessman, A Y K Djin.

Not long after Welbeck had arrived in Leopoldville, I was working as an editor on the news desk of the Ghana Broadcasting System, when our monitoring section brought me an item from Radio Leopoldville announcing that the Ghana Charge d’Affaires in the Congo, Welbeck, had been ‘expelled’! No one who knew Welbeck's character would have been surprised by that.

Welbeck had been behaving in Leopoldville as if he was unmindful of the ‘diplomatic hat’ he was supposed to wear in his new job. Instead, he went into full propaganda mould, using his eloquence in French to denounce Lumumba’s enemies – especially President Joseph Kasavubu and army chief of staff, Joseph Mobutu – as Belgian stooges. He even allowed himself to appear at a press conference, seated beside Lumumba, interrupting and correcting Lumumba on occasion!

Mobutu didn’t need a copy of the ‘canon of diplomatic practice’ in order to use these lapses on the part of Welbeck as a reason to declare him persona non grata. For good measure, Mobutu produced evidence of speeches Welbeck had been making to Congolese politicians and soldiers, as well as $600 – plus (so Mobutu’s officials alleged) a plan for Lumumba to end Katanga’s mooted secession – which Mobutu claimed Welbeck had been trying to smuggle to Lumumba after Mobutu had placed Lumumba under arrest. In other words, the Ghana charge d'affaires had been engaging in interfering in Congolese affairs to an intolerable degree.

I received the news on 14 November 1960. I realised immediately that it was political dynamite. If I broadcast it, it would cause panic all over Ghana, because Ghana did not only have the thousands of soldiers we had placed under the UN in the Congo, but also the many civilian workers we had dispatched to be of service to the Congolese in their work places. Their relatives back in Ghana would be struck with fear that the Congolese, who were known to be unruly when aroused, might turn on their benefactors and harm them.

So I sent the news, instead, to the office of the president, Dr Kwame Nkrumah. I thought his office might not have received the news yet, because we were one of the few institutions that were equipped to receive news direct from Leopoldville.

On receiving the news, Dr Kwame Nkrumah sent for me. I’d never been to his office before – he never dealt with relatively junior people like news editors but the heads of their organisations. So I was nearly thrown into a near-panic. But I remained outwardly calm, as I was convinced I’d done the right thing.

‘Why did you send this news to this place?’ Dr Nkrumah asked me.

I calmly explained to him that because of the lack of good communications between Ghana and the Congo, I thought that maybe the charge d‘affaires had not been able yet to contact him with the news himself.

Dr Nkrumah expressed his disbelief at the news about Welbeck. He said he had been receiving letters from Welbeck assuring him that everything was going on all right! He dismissed me with an impatient wave of the hand and told me, ‘Don’t send such news to this office again. This is not a news agency!’

I did not feel sorry for myself. I had done my patriotic duty by alerting our president to the fact that trouble was brewing in Ghana-Congo relations. If he was treating my effort with contempt, that was his business. I mean, to tell a news editor that your office was not ‘a news agency’! I ask you…

Some days later, after the incident had been driven out of my mind, I was thrilled to bits to hear the BBC and other news sources report that Congolese soldiers had surrounded the Ghana embassy in Leopoldville, and were threatening a shootout with the Tunisian troops guarding the embassy. Against diplomatic practice, they were trying to implement their government’s decision to expel Welbeck! They wanted to arrest him and put him on a plane to Ghana straight away.

For three days, Welbeck refused to come out of the embassy. The Congolese troops opened fire at one stage, whereupon Welbeck went to hide inside a freezer to avoid being killed. During the shooting between the Congolese troops and the Tunisians guarding the Ghana embassy, a Congolese colonel was killed by the Tunisians. This turned the affair into a major international fracas.

When I heard of the bloodshed, my respect for Dr Kwame Nkrumah diminished considerably. If he had been on the same wavelength as myself – an idealistic young patriot who wanted to safeguard Ghana’s interests – he would have acted on the information I had sent to him and he could have withdrawn Welbeck discreetly. But he had disregarded the news because it showed that his policy in the Congo was in tatters. And it was politically inconvenient for him to acknowledge that.

Welbeck was eventually taken out of the embassy and put on a plane back home, personally by the Briton who was then chief of Ghana’s defence staff, Major-General H T Alexander. It was done in the full glare of publicity (Time Magazine made a meal of it.) Yet this was a humiliation which Ghana could easily have avoided.

From then on, Ghana could not influence events in the Congo, and stood helplessly by, as Lumumba was imprisoned and later murdered.

The Congo itself never regained its balance after that first year of independence. Its bad beginning foretold years of endless trouble, most of it caused by Mobutu (who later renamed himself as ‘Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga’). He stole most of the Congo’s wealth and established a corrupt and inefficient kleptocracy that was to last for nearly 40 years.

Mobutu died in 1997 after being driven out of the Congo by forces led by Laurent Kabila. Kabila was himself killed after ruling for a few years, and was succeeded by his son, Joseph Kabila in January 2001.The optimism and excitement with which we had received news of the Congo’s independence in June 1960, and Ghana's attempt to assist a sister African state harried by the imperialists, have, meanwhile, become a very distant memory. But we know one thing for sure: In those days, some African states did not want to stand by, helplessly, as their people read constantly about strife, rape and economic pillage, in other African states. The African Union (AU) would do well to rediscover the spirit of those days, when Africans knew what was good for their continent, and what was not so good.

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* Cameron Duodu is a writer and commentator.
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