AHC + PC: Lumumba Lives

Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to have Patrice Lumumba Survive the Congo Crisis of 1960. I want to see as many, if any, possibilities there are so I'm not prescribing any prerequisites (also hence the PC label).

Bonus points if you somehow manage to have Lumumba successfully deal with the threats presented by Tchombe, Mobutu, the Belgians and the CIA.
+Bonus points of he can successfully serve his capacity as Prime Minister of the Congo.
++Bonus points if the Congo doesn't turn into the disaster it was in OTL.
 
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Let's give it a try.

The crisis might have been avoided altogether: Two possible points of departure from the OTL: (i) King Baudoin gave a godawful speech praising Leopold II at the independence ceremony. If he hadn't done that, maybe Lumumba wouldn't have felt the need to retaliate with an offensive speech of his own. That speech really alienated the Belgians, who turned out to be a much more dangerous enemy than Lumumba thought. (ii) The Belgian general commanding the Congolese forces followed that a few days later with a stupid speech of his own that provoked an army mutiny.

Once the crisis began, the clear point of departure that lets Lumumba live is that his attempt to escape from house arrest to Stanleyville succeeds. That could have happened quite easily --- Lumumba wasted some precious time along the way. If he does, he's fairly safe because forces loyal to him are in control there. That means that the situation in early 1961 is that (i) Kasavubu and Mobutu hold Leopoldville and the lower Congo; (ii) Lumumba holds the middle Congo and the East; (iii) Tshombe's separatists hold Katanga in the far southeast and (iv) Kalonji's (different) separatist government holds South Kasai in the South.

Lumumba couldn't ally with any of the others, they all hated him too much. Therefore, his best chance at returning to power would be for (i) the other three factions to reconcile, but be unable to make major headway against the Stanleyville forces (reinforced, if necessary, by third world allies); (ii) the coalition really makes a mess of ruling the Congo [altogether plausible]; so that (iii) after a couple of years, there's a sufficiently strong mass movement to bring Lumumba back.

In the meantime, Lumumba would have had to work on the outside powers to show that they needn't be quite as afraid of him as they had been. Also in the meantime, many other African countries had gained their own independence and both east and west were trying to win them over. Consequently, by about 1964 or 65, it would have been much harder for the US or Europeans to have interfered the way they did in 1960.
 
The "dueling speeches" bit attracted a lot of attention, but Congo had problems that went much a lot deeper than that.

-- We all know about the "less than 30 college graduates in a country of 20 million" bit. Less well known, but arguably more disastrous, is that there were less than 5,000 /high school/ graduates in the whole country. The Belgians had quite deliberately set out to educate most of the population to around a sixth grade level; they wanted people who had basic literacy and numeracy, so they could be good workers. But higher education (beyond 10th grade) was firmly discouraged.

The Congo thus reached independence without a single Congolese doctor, lawyer, accountant, or engineer.

-- No Congolese had any experience with running a government, or indeed with running much of anything. Up to 1960, no Congolese had been allowed to run for political office, be an officer in the military, organize a trade union, or own a business larger than a middling big shop. Neither Lumumba nor anyone in his cabinet had ever been allowed to run anything bigger than a local post office.

-- There had been no nationwide elections in the Congo until the eve of independence. In fact, no blacks had ever voted for anything at all until 1957, when a handful were allowed to vote in carefully controlled municipal elections. (This was actually an experiment about giving a little power to the small white settler community; a few blacks were included if they passed property qualifications, which of course most didn't. Note that the Belgian Congo had no tradition of election even for whites.)

-- The new government was riven by ethnic and ideological divisions that pretty much ensured it would be unworkable even if everyone involved had been Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton and Adams.

-- The new country also had some fairly vicious ethnic divisions, which had been papered over rather than resolved by the Belgians, and which in a couple of cases were quite deliberately exacerbated by the Belgians.

-- The Belgians had quietly removed the colony's gold reserves from Leopoldville as soon as independence talks got under way, thereby ensuring that an independent Congo would have nothing to back its currency with. And then -- true story! -- as soon as independence was declared, they declared the Congolese franc inconvertible with the Belgian franc... because, you know, the Congolese franc wasn't backed by anything.

The Belgian system was designed to fail catastrophically if Belgian rule was ever removed. This was a feature, not a bug.

If you want to have a better independent Congo, you have to either make dramatic changes to the nature of Belgian colonialism, or -- more likely -- go back before 1908 and give the colony to someone else.


Doug M.
 
As for Lumumba: Lumumba himself was brave, charismatic, passionate and (AFAWCT) sincere in his patriotism and idealism. All of those have fed his legend.



But he was also a guy in his early thirties with a limited education and no executive experience whatsoever. And he was quick-tempered, high-handed, arrogant and stubborn. George Washington, Lee Kuan Yew and Nelson Mandela combined could not have governed the Congo of 1960-61, but Lumumba's particular personality traits helped contribute to his swift downfall and horrible fate. Again, this is not meant to exculpate, just to clarify. A different man would still have failed, and probably been destroyed as well -- just perhaps in a different manner.


In the cold hindsight of history, what happened in Congo -- the rapid collapse of civilian government, a military coup, and then 30+ years of brutal and utterly corrupt dictatorship under Mobutu -- looks not only likely, but almost inevitable. Also, given what utter selfish, stupid fucktards the Belgians were, it looks like around the 50th percentile of possible allohistorical Congos. It's possible to imagine alternative Congos that might have gone better -- say as well as Gabon or, if you really want to be optimistic, Tanzania. On the other hand, it's also possible to imagine Congos even worse than what we got; Mobutu was evil and corrupt, but he wasn't insane or genocidal in the style of, say, Idi Amin or Mengistu.




Doug M.
 
The "dueling speeches" bit attracted a lot of attention, but Congo had problems that went much a lot deeper than that.

-- We all know about the "less than 30 college graduates in a country of 20 million" bit. Less well known, but arguably more disastrous, is that there were less than 5,000 /high school/ graduates in the whole country. The Belgians had quite deliberately set out to educate most of the population to around a sixth grade level; they wanted people who had basic literacy and numeracy, so they could be good workers. But higher education (beyond 10th grade) was firmly discouraged.

The Congo thus reached independence without a single Congolese doctor, lawyer, accountant, or engineer.

-- No Congolese had any experience with running a government, or indeed with running much of anything. Up to 1960, no Congolese had been allowed to run for political office, be an officer in the military, organize a trade union, or own a business larger than a middling big shop. Neither Lumumba nor anyone in his cabinet had ever been allowed to run anything bigger than a local post office.

-- There had been no nationwide elections in the Congo until the eve of independence. In fact, no blacks had ever voted for anything at all until 1957, when a handful were allowed to vote in carefully controlled municipal elections. (This was actually an experiment about giving a little power to the small white settler community; a few blacks were included if they passed property qualifications, which of course most didn't. Note that the Belgian Congo had no tradition of election even for whites.)

-- The new government was riven by ethnic and ideological divisions that pretty much ensured it would be unworkable even if everyone involved had been Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton and Adams.

-- The new country also had some fairly vicious ethnic divisions, which had been papered over rather than resolved by the Belgians, and which in a couple of cases were quite deliberately exacerbated by the Belgians.

-- The Belgians had quietly removed the colony's gold reserves from Leopoldville as soon as independence talks got under way, thereby ensuring that an independent Congo would have nothing to back its currency with. And then -- true story! -- as soon as independence was declared, they declared the Congolese franc inconvertible with the Belgian franc... because, you know, the Congolese franc wasn't backed by anything.

The Belgian system was designed to fail catastrophically if Belgian rule was ever removed. This was a feature, not a bug.

If you want to have a better independent Congo, you have to either make dramatic changes to the nature of Belgian colonialism, or -- more likely -- go back before 1908 and give the colony to someone else.


Doug M.

Doug makes good points in this and his next post. Still, the challenge was to keep Lumumba alive; I've done my best.

The duelling speeches did set a dangerous tone (for Lumumba). First, Belgium was Lumumba's sworn enemy from that point on; some of the actions it took were post-independence, and are actually listed in the quoted discussion. Lumumba's speech was also one of the reasons that the US was so hostile. Admittedly, Lumumba managed to alienate the US even further when he proposed bringing in Russian forces to fight in Katanga, but the situation was probably past retrieval by then.

It would, of course, have been a lot better for the Congo if Leopold II had found himself a different hobby.
 
The speech certainly didn't help! But Lumumba's fall was overdetermined; he could have been conciliatory and statesmanlike and it still would have come out much the same.

The US was suspicious, but didn't move to open hostility until a little bit later, after the Katanga rebellion and Lumumba's response. Worth reading in this context is Larry Devlin's fascinating memoir, "Station Chief Congo". (Devlin was exactly that -- the CIA's station chief in Leopoldville / Kinshasa during the first years of independence.) Should be taken with a BIG grain of salt -- it had to be vetted by the CIA, and of course Devlin has his own axes to grind -- but it's well worth a look anyway.

-- Note that, even if Lumumba is a statesman and a genius, he's still going to be very vulnerable to a coup. He's got a bunch of rivals who hate his guts. And the military... well, keep the white officers in charge and you get a rebellion; remove the white officers, and fairly soon some bright young officer realizes that there's really nothing preventing him from surrounding the Presidential Palace with soldiers one fine evening and taking over. Which is OTL exactly what happened, in Congo and lots of other places.

There are a few African countries that avoided being overthrown by military coups in the first generation after independence. But they generally did this either by having a small military and a civilian government generally recognized as competent and/or legitimate (Senegal), or by putting in place a very strong ideology (usually some sort of socialism) and indoctrinating the military with it (Tanzania, Zambia).

I don't see either of these working in a post-independence Congo. So even if Lumumba magically manages to do everything right, he still probably ends up against a wall within a few years.


Doug M.
 
The military rebellion would have been quite hard to avoid, BTW. Even if nobody makes a speech, and the white officers are quickly and smoothly replaced with blacks, the Force Publique was ethnically distinct and had a pretty good head of built-up grievances. The Belgians -- you will be shocked to hear -- were not particularly liberal or enlightened in their approach to colonial military service; they treated their black soldiers as brutes, with harsh discipline and severe punishments. So the FP was a bad accident waiting to happen.

The Katanga rebellion was also more or less inevitable; Tshombe seems to have been planning it, with active Belgian support, well before independence. Katanga was by far the richest province; it had its own, well developed infrastructure, including rail access to the sea; and the Belgians and others had massive investment in the mines. There were a lot of interests that actively wanted Katangan independence, and no reason for Tshombe not to try it.

So even a super-Lumumba would still be faced with

(1) a major military rebellion;
(2) rebellion of the country's richest province;
(3) a Belgian government that, even if friendly, is still quietly supporting Katangan independence;
(4) yet another rebellion in the diamond provinces;
(5) a couple of sudden ethnic civil wars in the provinces;
(6) sudden inability to purchase imports, since nobody would accept the Congolese franc as currency, and the copper and diamonds had just disappeared into the hands of rebels;
(7) an imploding economy as the white _colonate_ fled, leaving factories and businesses and government administration to collapse behind them;
(8) trying to run a new government with an ethnically and ideologically divided cabinet of rivals, several of whom would cheerfully see him and/or each other dead;
(9) trying to administer a geographically immense country of 20 million people without any college graduates or anyone skilled in administration; and
(10) the medium to long-term threat of military coup and takeover.

So, with a POD any time after independence, Congo is screwed.

Incidentally, I'd argue that it was equally screwed with any plausible POD going back to at least WWII, and probably earlier. (A better Belgian colonial system could have given a better outcome, sure! The problem is, the Belgians liked the system that had OTL just fine, and it's really hard to see why they'd have changed it.)

The only plausible POD I've been able to think of that /might/ give a better outcome is, the Belgians standing fast and insisting on a four-year transition period to independence. The problem there is, that would be totally uncharacteristic of them. So it would require US arm-twisting, which in turn would require someone in the late Eisenhower administration to be paying attention. Very very unlikely IMO, but perhaps not quite ASB territory.


Doug M.
 
The only way for Patrice Lumumba to survive the Congo Crisis was to make a leaf and the get the fuck out of there. Maybe come back all triumphant like David Dacko or whathisname in Uganda after Idi Amin died. But that's a maybe.

As said, it's damn near impossible to change the Congo's fate without radically changing the basis of Belgian colonialism. Which can be done, but it would assuredly make decolonisation a much, much longer process.
 
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