Face to face with the Congo

Immokasai, the building in which we were accommodated, was not a ‘hotel’ in the normal sense, but a huge block of self-contained flats, organised in the manner of a hotel, with a reception and maid service. It appeared fairly secluded from normal Luluaborg life, so I was quite surprised when I got a message one day that a Congolese man wanted to see me.

A Congolese? The Congolese spoke French and did not read my magazine, Drum. So how could a Congolese know about me and want to see me? I’d forgotten that ‘walls have ears!’ Gossip about our arrival had already hit the town and someone had bruited it about that the editor of a Ghanaian paper was around. I found the situation funny: I had not insisted on getting a UN uniform which could have helped me to move about Luluaborg more safely, and so had kept my movements largely within the Ghanaian community. But, apparently, if I wouldn’t go to the Congolese, they would come to me.

I said I would see the guy, and he turned up. He was a young man of about twenty-plus. He looked a bit uneasy.

I put him at his ease and offered him a drink.

After taking one sip of the drink, he looked straight into my eyes and announced: ‘I am the son of Joseph Okito!’

Goosepimples broke out all over me when I heard the name ‘Joseph Okito’.

I had been determined not to do any political stories whilst I was in the Congo because I didn’t want to create any problems for the Ghana army. They had sent me to the Congo purely to cover the performances the Heatwaves Dance Troupe were giving to entertain the Ghanaian troops, and if I began to use the opportunity to delve into the aspects of Congolese politics that interested me – how Lumumba had been murdered, what had happened to his family and who had taken over his MNC party after his murder – I would immediately attract the unwelcome attentions of the secret agents of the Leopoldville government.

To Congolese security, a Ghanaian journalist pursuing such enquiries would automatically appear to be a spy, or an agent sent by the ‘interfering’ Dr Kwame Nkrumah, to assist in subverting the Congolese government, which everyone knew he didn’t like, because it had murdered his friend, Patrice Lumumba. If the Ghana army was suspected of bringing such 'undesirables' into the country, while ostensibly operating as a neutral body under the command of the United Nations, all manner of problems could arise.

As a result of my former position as an editor in the newsroom of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, I was fully aware of the delicate relationship between the Ghana Army, the Congolese Government and the UN, and I didn’t want to do anything to upset it.

Yet when I heard the name ‘Joseph Okito’, all my resistance to Congolese politics evaporated. For the name ‘Joseph Okito’ was powerful in Congolese history – he was a staunch supporter of Lumumba and the vice-president of the Congolese Senate. He, together with the Minister of Youth Affairs Maurice Mpolo, had been arrested alongside Lumumba, had been tortured in the same manner as Lumumba and had been in the truck with Lumumba and Mpolo when they were driven from Elisabethville airport in Katanga and murdered in cold blood in the bush by the Belgians and their Katanga allies on 17 January 1961.

There were tears in the eyes of Okito’s son as he told me the sad tale of how he and members of his family had gone into hiding after his father’s arrest, how they had waited for news of his fate and how they had heard, from the Katanga government, the lie that the prisoners had been brought to Katanga under guard but had ‘escaped’ and had been murdered by ‘villagers’ who had recognised them and killed them because they didn’t like their politics.

‘We don’t believe Tshombe’s government’, the young Okito told me. ‘But we still don’t know the full truth of what happened to my father, Mr Lumumba and Mr Mpolo.’

Okito then asked me whether I would please take a letter to President Kwame Nkrumah for him.

I remembered my last encounter with Dr Nkrumah about the Congo (I had sent him news about the Congolese government’s expulsion of his chargé d’affaires in the Congo, Mr Nathaniel Welbeck, and the news had not exactly pleased him!) and I didn’t want any repeat encounter. But obviously the young Okito needed help and if he could get in touch with Dr Nkrumah, he might be able to receive assistance that might enable him to look after his widowed mother and his siblings.

So I asked him to write a letter but not to put Dr Nkrumah’s name on the envelope. He understood what I was saying: if I was ever searched by Congolese security agents and was found with a letter addressed to the president of Ghana on me, it would be read, and that would make matters difficult for the young Okito. I suspected, in fact, that he had tried to communicate with President Nkrumah through other Ghanaians in the Congo, and that they had all turned him down, for reasons similar to what I had deduced about what would happen if the letter was intercepted.

The young Okito went home, wrote the letter, and brought it to me in a plain envelope. When I got back to Accra, I didn’t take the letter directly to Dr Kwame Nkrumah’s office, but to the office of the Bureau of African Affairs, the outfit that had taken over the work that had previously been done by my friend, George Padmore, before his premature death in September 1959.

George Padmore had run the African and black affairs section of the world communist movement, known as the ‘Comintern’, in the 1930s, and knew more about the anti-colonial struggle in Africa than anyone alive. He had broken with the Russians when they tried to get him to tone down his attacks on the Western colonisers, as Russia allied itself to them in their common hostility towards Hitler’s Germany.

Padmore went to live in London after his split with the Comintern, and organised the 5th Pan-African Congress, held in Manchester in 1945. He and Dr Kwame Nkrumah were joint-secretaries to the conference, which brought together such prospective African heads of state as Jomo Kenyatta and Kamuzu Banda, as well as many other politicians who were to feature in the history of Africa’s liberation.

Shortly after Ghana’s independence in March 1957, Dr Nkrumah brought Padmore from London down to Accra to become Nkrumah's advisor on African affairs. Padmore immediately set to work to organise African countries into a body that held a similar objective as regards its own unity and economic cooperation, and was dedicated to the eradication of colonialism from African soil.

The new director of the Bureau of African Affairs was Mr A.K. Barden, who had been secretary to George Padmore. He was pleased to see me and listened with interest when I described my encounter in Luluaborg with the young Okito. He took Okito's letter and said he would pass it to the president. I never went back to ask him what assistance they had been able to give to the young Okito, but I was confident that Okito would receive a scholarship to study abroad, or a monthly stipend, or both. For in those days, Dr Nkrumah awarded scholarships to young people from every corner of the African continent – so long as he was convinced that they were taking part in their countries’ struggle against their colonial oppressors.

President Nkrumah also sent money to exiled students who were in financial difficulties. He was always careful to ask the liberation movement of the country concerned whether they knew of the individual before sending money. In that way, he recruited many students for organisations like the Zimbabwe African People’s Union – led by Mr Joshua Nkomo. One current president of an African country was, to my knowledge, the beneficiary of Nkrumah’s generosity to students of other African countries then under colonial rule.

Once installed in Accra, George Padmore, a Trinidadian, started to assist African politicians all across the continent fighting for their independence. He and Dr Nkrumah had been joint-secretaries of the 5th Pan-African Congress held in Manchester in 1945 and they now organised in Accra a Conference of Independent African States (April 1958) and followed it with one for Africans fighting against colonialism, the All-African People’s Conference (December 1958).

These conferences were in pursuit of the programme which the 5th Pan-African Congress had drawn up for the total liberation of the African continent. The brilliant idea, conceived by Padmore and Nkrumah, was to unite the independent African states, most of which were then Arab countries, with their black brothers, under the slogan ‘The Sahara unites us!’

The two men did not accept the notion that closer contacts with the Arab Africans would not help to dispel any racial prejudice they might harbour against their black brothers, given their own anti-colonial history. And indeed Habib Bourguiba (Tunisia) and Gamel Abdul Nasser (Egypt) in particular – and even the king of Morocco – all contributed a great deal to the training of African freedom fighters, using the experience they had gathered whilst helping to train their Arab brothers in the FLN, fighting for independence in Algeria.

The ‘All-African People’s Conference’ for Africans still living under colonial rule was chaired by Tom Mboya of Kenya, who coined the memorable phrase: ‘The colonialists scrambled for Africa in 1885. We are now telling them to scram from Africa.’

Among the participants of the conference was Patrice Lumumba, and one of its key moments was an address by Frantz Fanon, author of the famous book ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, who made a clinical analysis of why Africans under colonial rule must jettison the illusory idea that their independence could be handed to them on a silver platter, whether they used violence to fight for it or not.

Through the relations forged at the two Accra conferences, some of the independent African countries opened their doors to guerrilla trainees from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau. Ghana itself established guerrilla camps at which freedom fighters received training not only from Ghanaian military experts but also from technicians from Eastern countries. The late President of Mozambique Samora Machel as well as the late commander of the Zimbabwe Liberation Army (ZANLA) Josiah Tongogara both confirmed to me, during personal encounters I had with them in the 1970s, that it was Ghana that offered their movements ‘the first’ training facilities to acquire expertise in guerrilla warfare.

The death of George Padmore in September 1959 could not have come at a worse time in Africa’s history, especially that of the Congo. For by then the Belgians had just begun to bow to the pressure exerted on their horrible colonial system in the Congo, as well as Rwanda–Urundi (as Rwanda and Burundi were then called) and were allowing the African populations to be involved in municipal and local government. Lumumba was using the experience he had acquired in Ghana in 1958 to good use, and was soon imprisoned by the Belgians. By the time the Belgians called a conference in Brussels to write a new constitution for the Congo in the early months of 1960, Lumumba was still in prison and his party, the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC), which had shown itself to be one of the strongest parties in the elections, refused to attend the constitutional conference in Brussels unless its leader was released and allowed to attend. The Belgians had no choice but to release Lumumba and fly him to Brussels.

Had Padmore been alive when the Congo achieved its independence on 30 June 1960, he would have been so excited he would have devoted most of his time trying to tele-guide Lumumba to anticipate and survive the intrigues unleashed on him by the Belgians and their Western allies. Some of the mistakes made by the men sent to the Congo by President Kwame Nkrumah – Mr A.Y.K. Djin and his successor, Mr Nathaniel Welbeck – would most probably not have occurred, for they would have had to pass George Padmore’s personal assessment of their prudence before being unleashed on a Congo infested with international espionage and agent provocateur activities of all sorts.

For George Padmore was himself a master of intrigue: While working for the Comintern (as mentioned earlier) he used, successfully, to make secret trips to British colonial territories such as the Gold Coast (now Ghana), Nigeria and Sierra Leone, using false identities, so he could have set up a network of agents in nearby Brazzaville and even Leopoldville – or probably gone to ground himself somewhere in the region – with his pockets full of cash, and armed with Belgian telephone numbers. And the ex-Comintern ace operator would have played political poker with the Belgians and the Americans, card for loaded card, and agitprop operation for agitprop operation.

Certainly, he would have been able to finger Sergeant Joseph Desiree Mobutu, who had attached himself to Lumumba during the Brussels conference, pried him away from Lumumba early on, and thus pre-empted the treacherous role that Mobutu was to play later in the affairs of the Congo that was to cost Lumumba his very life, and the Congo, its independence and national wealth.

One or two more years on earth and George Padmore would have seen the Congo through. For alas, in 1960, President Kwame Nkrumah was burdened with Ghana’s own internal troubles, and it would have taken a super-human effort for him to be able to devote as much time to the Congo as he desired in order to guide Lumumba to evade successfully the Belgian and American traps laid for him.

So, whoever mourns Lumumba must also mourn George Padmore – and the circumstances that denied Lumumba the benefit of the political skill and diplomatic mastery that would have helped him to detect and overcome the treachery of people like Joseph Kasavubu. The inimitable George Padmore would have made political mincemeat of them all.

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* Cameron Duodu is a writer and commentator.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.