© Natalie Bennett (Gel plate print)
You might have expected a report on the fabulous Green Party election results from England, Wales and Scotland, but for that you can visit my website, or hear me pointing out to the media that a narrative constructed on Friday morning with only about one-fifth of the results in is now wildly out of date.
On Wednesday I’m speaking on Nature’s Rights at the British Ecological Society. And on May 20th I’ll be at Swansea University for a public talk on Green Thinking and How to Change Everything.
And a little reminder that if after all those Green successes you want to find out more about our thinking Change Everything provides an accessible introduction to Green political philosophy, while Green Thinking delves deeper into how we need to unlearn so much in science, history, economics and politics to set the foundations for a stable future.
Yes, you might sense in this a slightly academic tone, the purpose for which this was originally written. But I think it is a fascinating case study in which echoes of which current debates, clashes and pressures are very obvious.
On Thursday, August 18 1960, in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Douglas Dillon, the Undersecretary of State, and the only man in the room who had met the prime minister of the then Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, suggested that if the UN mission that had been hastily scrambled into the country was forced out, the newly independent African state might fall into sphere of the Moscow, a prospect “altogether too ghastly to contemplate”. The formal notes of the meeting failed to note it, but an informal contemporaneous record has the name Lumumba, with an X beside it: a record of what those present took to be an order from President Eisenhower to assassinate the first Congolese democratically elected president. Many writers have contested this account, but the most recent, widely applauded and comprehensive study of the death of Lumumba - The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination (podcast with the author here) — concludes this is accurate. (And that reflected what a British Foreign Office official had also suggested as a “solution”.) Lest this should be thought an outlier among Western states, it has recently emerged that British Prime Minister Anthony Eden wanted Colonel Nasser of Egypt killed during the Suez Crisis.
“Too ghastly to contemplate” were words of the moment, but might be applied to the entire modern history of the Congo, from the direct reign of Belgium’s King Leopold from 1885 to 1908, when some 10 million people, half the population, were killed on a “crusade” to open the nation to “civilisation” to the state of the country today, suffering a severe food crisis and the internal displacement of 5.8 million people, driven often by “ massacres, abductions, rape and sexual violence, recruitment of children, and other attacks on civilians with near total impunity”.
It is not possible, of course, to hold the strategic positions of the US and the UK in the 1960s responsible for what came before, and only an alternative history machine could tell us how different the Democratic Republic of Congo could have been without the US and UK’s choices in the Sixties. Certainly the new state had been set up to fail by Belgium’s actions, and there is a case to be made that however fumbling and halting the actions of the United Nations were in 1960-63, they did create something of a workable frame out of a shattered land.
But the continuing consequences of Western nations actions cannot, in moral or practical terms, be ignored. Bad strategy can have extremely long-term consequences, and the US and UK actions were driven by short-term interests in their nations (particularly those of a few rich men in those nations), grounded in ignorance and reflexive, unthinking fear, based in part on pure, unadulterated racism. (Lumumba was described as a “witch-doctor” by the British Prime Minister, and before 1960 the US didn’t send Black American staffer to Congo because it feared they might sow ideas about independence.) While after World War Two “inevitability of decolonization was an accepted fact in nearly every corner”, the long-term benefit to all, in the US and the UK, as well as the rest of the world, of stable democratic states meeting the needs of their populations rather than being exploited for the continuing benefit of Western states was not within the strategic vision of either the US or the UK.
Underlying influences and balance of strategic interests
There is a voluminous literature around the forced reintegration by United Nations forces of the rebel province of Katanga and the “ill-tempered” Nassau Conference of December 1962, much of which concludes this “was a decisive defeat for the British government… a clear failure for [Prime Minister] Macmillan’s efforts to coordinate British and American policies”. This, however, can be fairly said to reflect an academic fashion of the early 21st-century. As authors in an authoritative volume published in 2018 said “a revisionist tone has emerged suggesting limits to the extent that Kennedy and Macmillan’s personal diplomacy could deliver positive outcomes, reconcile underlying Anglo-American differences and mask consequences flowing from the growing asymmetry of the special relationship”. Yes, the more things change, the more they stay the same when it comes to US-UK relations.
A desire to run “compare and contrast” questions in commentary on US/UK relations from 1960-63 has too often failed to acknowledge how well aligned the aims of the unchallenged great power and the fast-fading one were: they both were determined to protect their financial interests and existing and potential geopolitical relationships and balances, and had no interest at all in the fate of the people or state of the Congo except insofar as that impacted on their own concerns. As one writer noted, the “sandwiching” of Lumumba between President Joseph Kasavubu and Katanga leader Moïse Tshombe was meant to guarantee the continuing Western European domination, and the US and UK had no objections.
“Realist” analysts might say that is inevitable, but those with a deeper vision will see how that approach, writ large across the world, guaranteed the impossibility of the emergence of a stable, secure community of nations. That became particularly evident once the “frozen” state of Cold War boundaries ended, but could, or should, have been predictable from the start. The US (and Belgians) were deliberately killing a democracy (no matter how vulnerable and fledgling it was) at birth. That the UK’s fingerprints were not directly on this killing does not absolve them from broader desire to protect their commercial and geopolitical interests at almost any cost.
The two key frames in which both the US and the UK viewed their strategic interests were their financial, commercial and resource-supply interests, and determination to keep the USSR from making gains in support from former colonial states in the context of the Cold War. Traditional analyses have sought to portray conflict, but while there was a different balance of interests, more united than separated the Western powers. That led to more of a spat than a serious conflict in the period leading to Katanga’s reintegration in the Congolese state in 1963.
It is true to say the Cold War perspective predominated for Washington, while as one author concluded, “for Europeans, achieving stability through ensuring that ‘moderate’ Africans assumed power was not mainly about containing the Soviets, or even communism (which never had significant appeal in Black Africa); it was about preserving British, French or Belgian interests”. One key factor, that had built a division between the two sides, was that the US was now no longer dependent, as it had been, on the Congolese uranium that had been used to make the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs. The focus was on what Washington saw as the existential Cold War struggle. In 1960, presidential candidate Richard Nixon argued “in the struggle with the Russians, Africa is the most critical area in the world”. Soon after, then President-elect Kennedy claimed that Africa was the objective “of a gigantic communist offensive”. That was despite the fact there was essential no Soviet, or communist, threat in Congo. It might be said that Washington didn’t know any better in 1960, the Belgians until independence having denied access to foreign correspondents and most intelligence sharing, but they could have found out: the US had after all without much apparent difficulty inserted two spies into Katanga in the early 1950s, focused on the uranium mining. And the reality was that “Moscow was still unable to name any properly communist Congolese” and based on other events around the globe, they surely would have if they could have.
The US was also thinking about its relationship with Belgium, particularly in the Cold War context. At the time, the US administration was unaware that the Belgian cabinet had decided that any outside intervention in the breakaway region of Katanga would meet at least the threat of military resistance. (Yes, you might think of Trump and Greenland)
Also, Washington was acutely aware that following the recent example of France with Vietnam in 1954, the entire problem might be dumped in its lap. And even under the seemingly more anti-colonialist President Kennedy, Africa was still seen primarily as Britain and France’s responsibility. “The U.S. has quite enough commitments in the world, and there is no compulsion in the American Government to extend those commitments where our allies, much strengthened by their remarkable growth in the 1950’s can deal with the situation,” an internal administration memorandum said on 13 May 1961. As a later commentator noted: “The one constant thread … was Washington’s deference to the primacy of West European interests in its imperial and post-imperial playgrounds.”
That was a contributor to, and reflection of, US ignorance of Congo. As with much of the world, a situation that was to continue for many decades, the US suffered from a profound and deliberate ignorance about nations different to its own. A key element of American strategic culture, one which was to continue for decades is “insensitivity to local conditions”.
Britain’s interests were more obviously commercial, both directly and in terms of ensuring stability in the region. Congo, while it had never been in British hands, was economically closely enmeshed with the Tanganyika, Uganda and the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Assets held in the colonies, valued at £1.45 billion in 1958, underpinned the UK’s global financial position, even though 75% of foreign investment in the colony was from Belgium. The British firm Tanganyika Concessions had a 15% share in UHMK (the successor of the enormous company created by King Leopold II), which produced 60% of the world’s cobalt (much of which went to the US) and 10% of global copper. The British owned the Benguela railway, which took UHMK goods from Elizabethville (now Lubumbashi) to Lobito port in Angola for export. During the Second World War, only 15 years past, the Belgian government in exile, and the Belgian governor in the Congo, had worked hard to maximise palm oil exports for the Allied war effort.
But the commercial interests extended beyond Congo’s boundaries. Britain was the overriding power responsible for the federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which awkwardly backed the breakaway province of Katanga, and had concerns about instability potentially spreading to the other Anglophone states surrounding Congo. She had some sympathy for Belgium as a fellow colonial power, while “being anxious above almost all else” to keep good relations with Washington. (Yep, history sure does rhyme.)
Balancing the commercial interests, with an eye to the Cold War, both states could not ignore the impacts of their policy on the emerging African and Asian nations, for, as one UN official put it, “to other African states their new found independence seemed at stake in the fate of the Congo”. This was a pressure that the UK might have been expected to feel more keenly, given the enthusiasm for turning Empire into Commonwealth. At least that is what the Commonwealth Relations Office kept saying, even though an expert commentator finds little sign of their lobbying have an influence, and some sign of irritation from the Foreign Secretary of being reminded of the perspective.
Fear of the Soviets influencing them also ran deep in London as in Washington, but also key was a desire to build a (false) narrative that the UK had always planned to set its colonies free. British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan in 1960 said: “The great issue in this second half of the twentieth century is whether the uncommitted peoples of Asia and Africa will swing to the East or to the West.” He continued by saying of the British Empire that “rather than conquest, the end goal had always been to lift the peoples of the world from poverty and ignorance to British levels of civilisation, and then to release them into happy independence.” London knew it would be judged on its actions in Congo against those words.
The reality, which was also reflected in Congo, was rather different. Metropole interests always came first. In its own colonies, Britain sought to employ what has been described as the “imperialism of decolonisation”, orchestrating a peaceful transfer of power to whatever local actors best suited the metropole’s continuing economic and political influence.
Relations between the US and UK would have been thought to have been scarred by the Suez Crisis, but the victorious Conservative Party in the UK, in its highly successful 1959 general election manifesto “betrayed few twinges of self-doubt and featured a foreign policy programme designed to [maintain] Britain’s influence in the world unimpaired. And maybe they were right, for perhaps there was less division between the US and UK than had appeared on the surface, in Suez as in Congo. The British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, later reported on his meeting with US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles:
“’Dulles said at once … “Selwyn, why did you stop? Why didn’t you go through with it and get Nasser down?” If ever there was an occasion when one could have been knocked down by the proverbial feather, this was it. Dulles was the man who had led the pack against us.” Dulles “said that the only difference between the Americans and the British and the French ‘had been over method’.”
Where were the differences?
Both nations at least theoretically supported the sovereign-state model of political organisation, as did African leaders, and the Soviet Union, as opposed to what might have been possible, more pan-African, regional or semi-imperial integration approaches, “that had many advocates and good prospects up to at least the late 1950s”. One of the many ironies of this period in Congo is that Lumumba’s aim broadly matched that of the Western powers, a highly centralised State.
Then, on 11 July, barely a month after independence, Tshombe, prime minister of the mineral-rich, financially vital state of Katanga, made a unilateral declaration of independence, declaring his former police force the “army”. He asked for military help from Britain and Rhodesia. The following day, ministers in the Congolese capital asked the United States to send 3,000 troops to restore its control, which President Eisenhower refused, but only on the grounds that African troops would be a more appropriate force. All of this was not nearly so clearcut as that outline suggests, however. It was never clear whether the Katangese regime “was trying to achieve… complete sovereign independence, a federal Congolese state with significant Katangese autonomy, or a Katanga-dominated, unitary Congo”. And it is worth noting where other support for Tshombe came from: Union Miniere paid its 1960 taxes, 1.25 billion Belgian francs, direct to the breakaway leader, when they should legally have gone to Leopoldville.
The obvious US/UK division began with UN Security Council resolution 143 on 14 July, which called on Belgium to withdraw its troops from the Congo, and authorised UN military assistance. The US (and USSR) voted for; Britain abstained, with France and China. The formal explanation was that the Belgians should not withdraw until the UN forces were in place, the general interpretation was London displaying solidarity with the Belgians. This was not a rejection, however, of the idea of sending peacekeepers. In the Commons, Prime Minister Macmillan said: “We feel that by far the best way of helping the situation is the United Nations method.”
Authors supporting the “conflicting stances” approach often describe the UN vote split as a “a portent of differences to come”. Still, by September 14, Macmillan and Kennedy were discussing the Congo by telephone, and agreeing that this was not the time for UN military action to force reunificiation, rather that the UN should secure a ceasefire. (It was during action on this that Secretary Hammarskjold was killed in a plane crash.) Yet simultaneously, at the “siege of Jadotville”, Irish UN peacekeepers, ordered in by the senior UN man on the ground, were forced to surrender due to lack of supplies, and that official, would soon write in an angry book “all the high officials of the United Nations knew of, and strongly resented, the help and encouragement given by Mr Macmillan’s Government to Mr Tshombe”.
Apparently, the US was lined up with the UN and the central Congo government. The UK was on the opposition side. However, the politics within the two Western states should not be forgotten, and was surely understood by both capitals. Many actions, announcements and choices were directed as much to domestic audiences as far-off Congo. Politics often forced particularly Britain’s hand, and the US administration understood this. The US under-secretary of state for economic affairs, George Ball, in a memorandum for President Kennedy wrote: ‘the Macmillan Government should be able to free itself from the pressures of City and Conservative groups in the UK and the Rhodesias and join with us in trying to bring about a peaceful reunification of the Congo”. But Kennedy was surely sophisticated enough to understand this was easier said than done. He could hardly have avoided seeing that 80 Tory MPs had put forward a motion condemning the government over its “fecklessness” in the face of UN aggression in Katanga.
In the US, Congo was frequently prominent in the news, regularly on the cover of Time magazine. Pressing in the US in favour of Katanga, a source responsible to a considerable degree of what knowledge there was of the African, were evangelical missionaries. They saw and presented it as staunchly anti-communist. By contrast, for President Kennedy, by backing the UN and the Congo state there was the opportunity to politically get “cheap credit” with American liberals and blacks, with far less price than advancing civil rights in the southern states. “It was easier to find a sop for the liberals on the race issue internationally than it was domestically.” That was clearly a stronger force than the evangelicals.
Soon, in New York, the new acting UN leader, U Thant, was having a stagey collegiate meal with President Kennedy in US ambassador to the UN Adlai Stevenson’s official residence on the top floor of the Waldorf Astoria hotel, which led to a swapping of cigars and recipes. This while in London, Macmillan was under rightwing pressure, with the Sunday Telegraph reporting the UN Secretariat had “tasted blood” in attacking Katanga and Viscount Hinchingbrooke, in the tabloid Sunday Express, described it as a “charging rhinoceros, tearing up the earth,” and a “monster of iniquity”. But ultimately, the UK, having dodged and weaved through the domestic politics, had no alternative policy but to back the UN forced restoration of Congolese unity. As one commentator astutely notes, “there was never any real prospect of Home following through on what was apparently his only alternative policy, namely to ter- minate British support for the United Nations – not least because of the uproar it would cause in Britain”. While a rightwing government was more immediately vulnerable to pressure from its own people – and in the Foreign Secretary, Earl Home, with close links to the Marquess of Salisbury, a member of the Katanga lobby they were right inside Macmillan’s government, there were strong forces within Britain supporting the United Nations, not least the hugely over-representative number of Britons serving within it.[49]
Conclusion
One traditional narrative about all these events is that it as an important “step along the road from the dominant and special position of genuine consultation on policy, to one dominated by receiving information and being ‘classed with the French’.” Butas two commentators said, and I concur, “looking beyond December 1962… [there was] continuing close Anglo-American cooperation in the Congo, which in turn suggests that the long-term effects of the crisis on the special relationship were less harmful than sometimes suggested”. Both Western states were subject to considerable internal pressures, which sometimes made their surface actions appear – and be – in conflict. But there was no rupture, no essential disagreement. And both the US and UK soon settled comfortably into supporting the unashamedly authoritarian and exploitative dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko.
Photo by Danielle Barnes on Unsplash
I’ve been in Norway and Sweden in the past week - one of the reasons, with the elections, why I’ve had a little Substack hiatus - and expect more about the region soon. But in the meantime, a taster of its fascinating history in a Gone Medieval podcast on the rise and fall of Greenland’s medieval walrus ivory trade. Okay, sounds obscure, if fascinating, but it is one early, if classic, tale of an extractive industry that killed, or at least greatly depleted it’s “golden goose”, and also saw its trade dry up when a different extractive source - African elephants - opened up as a new source for slaughter. (Their ivory being, unfortunately for the elephants, far whiter and brighter.)
What did you think?
You can also find me on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok and X.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.