The Luluabourg mutiny

On 20 February 1944 soldiers of a Force Publique battalion stationed at Luluabourg, today’s Kananga, in the central part of the Belgian Congo, refused to obey their Belgian officers. The mutiny was led by African non-commissioned officers, headed by Staff Sergeant Ngoie (in some sources Ngoyi) Mukalabushi, a veteran of the Ethiopian campaign. The soldiers seized the arms and ammunition store, cut communications and dispersed into the surrounding villages. In the following days the unrest spread to the garrisons in Katanga. It was one of the most serious mutinies in the history of the colonial army, and at the same time a sign of how high a price the Congo was paying for Belgium’s participation in the war on the Allied side.

The common statement that the mutineers “killed three people” rests on a version repeated in general works: a Belgian officer and two white civilians are said to have died. The colonial authorities’ documents, cited by a Congolese monograph on the social history of the Force Publique, present events more cautiously and do not confirm an attack on the town’s population. The number of victims is therefore uncertain, and both versions must be treated with caution.

A colonial army in the fifth year of the war

After Belgium’s surrender in May 1940, Hubert Pierlot’s government-in-exile in London based its standing with the Allies on the colony. The Congo supplied copper, tin, cobalt and rubber, and, from the Shinkolobwe mine, uranium too. The price was paid in labour. Employment in the mines of the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga rose from about 25,000 to 49,000 between 1938 and 1944, and in 1944 the upper limit of compulsory labour for the state required of village inhabitants was raised to 120 days a year. Discontent grew, its bloodiest manifestation being the massacre of striking miners in Élisabethville in December 1941. Wartime requisitions also hit the mandated territory of Ruanda-Urundi, where the Ruzagayura famine began in the autumn of 1943.

The Force Publique was both the colony’s army and its police: African soldiers under the command of Belgian officers and NCOs. In 1940–1941 its columns fought in the East African campaign, and in July 1941 at Saïo they accepted the surrender of General Pietro Gazzera. After that the colonial army was expanded. An expeditionary corps of about 13,000 men was sent in 1942–1943 to British Nigeria, from where some of the soldiers went on to Egypt and Palestine. Most of those mobilised, however, remained in the colony, in garrisons strung out along the railway lines, waiting for years for an enemy who never appeared.

The vaccination rumour

The causes of the mutiny lay in the war itself. Soldiers who had been promoted in Ethiopia and received high front-line pay reverted on their return to their former low ranks and modest peacetime pay. They compared their rations and wages with the conditions of the workers of the big mining companies, and came off worse in the comparison. Contact with soldiers of other armies, and with Congolese serving in the forces of the neighbouring British colonies, showed them that elsewhere a soldier was better paid and better clothed. The colonial authorities looked with suspicion on veterans and NCOs who had “seen the world”, and reports from this period also mention the influence of the Kitawala religious movement, which the Belgians regarded as subversive.

From the end of December 1943 a rumour circulated in the military camp at Élisabethville, and then in the garrisons of Jadotville, Kamina and above all Luluabourg, that the Belgians were preparing to massacre their soldiers – by injections of poison or by firing squad. This was supposedly linked to an alleged sale of the Congo to the Americans, whom many Congolese regarded as the real victors of the war. When a vaccination of the soldiers, including those who had returned from the front, was announced at Luluabourg, many of them saw it as confirmation of the rumour. The soldiers refused to be vaccinated. In Western studies this plan is regarded as the immediate trigger of the outbreak, and resentment at humiliating treatment by white officers as its deeper cause.

20 February at Luluabourg

Luluabourg, an administrative centre in what was then Lusambo province (renamed Kasai in 1947), was the headquarters of a Force Publique battalion. On the morning of 20 February 1944 soldiers led by Staff Sergeant Mukalabushi, a Songye from the area of Kongolo, and Staff Sergeant Lubuye broke into the armoury, took up defensive positions in the camp and then dispersed into the surrounding countryside. Telephone lines near the railway station were cut, and rail and telegraph communications with Port-Francqui were severed. Sabena’s air service had to use the old landing strip by the station, because the new airfield, located far from the town, had been cut off from it.

This is where the sources cease to agree. According to the version found in English- and French-language studies, the mutineers looted the European quarter, the residents fled, and a Belgian officer and two white civilians were killed; the soldiers are said to have attacked visible symbols of colonial power and proclaimed the slogan of independence. The reports of Amour Maron, governor of Élisabethville province, from early March, quoted in the Congolese monograph, claim on the contrary that the residents were not harmed and that the mutineers made no organised attack, although panic reigned in the town. Several shops were looted – but, it was believed, by local people rather than soldiers. The NCO Van Marck was killed on the night of 23/24 February by a Congolese sergeant, who afterwards gave himself up to the authorities.

By 21 February the situation in the town itself had calmed down, but the authorities regained the camp and the neighbouring buildings only at the beginning of March. The mutineers, scattered in groups, made for their home villages and, according to some descriptions, plundered along the way. They did not manage to draw the neighbouring garrisons in Kasai into the revolt.

Kamina, Jadotville, Élisabethville

The garrisons along the railway linking Kasai with Katanga were made up largely of soldiers from the same peoples as the battalion at Luluabourg, so news of the mutiny spread quickly. On 23 February a detachment of twenty men mutinied at Kamina; several railway sleepers were torn up and telephone wires cut, but train services were not interrupted, and the situation was brought under control within a few days. At the beginning of March fugitive mutineers from Luluabourg appeared in the area of Kamina and Kabongo.

At Jadotville, a mining centre of the Union Minière, the garrison numbered about 180 men. From 24 February some of the soldiers set up their own guards and barriers in their part of the camp; the younger ones walked about the town armed, insulted the Europeans they met and stopped saluting the district commissioner. When officers tried to take away their ammunition, the soldiers pelted them with stones, but not a shot was fired. The district commissioner ordered the call-up of European men aged 18–40 to protect the town, fearing also that several thousand workers would follow the soldiers’ lead. On 26 February the commander of the Force Publique, General Auguste Gilliaert, the victor of Saïo, arrived; by that day the ammunition had already been taken to Élisabethville, where a battalion was quartered, and the tension subsided. In Élisabethville itself an attempted mutiny was nipped in the bud. In his report the commissioner at Jadotville listed no fewer than nine causes of the unrest: from shortcomings in the officers’ training and low pay, through Kitawala propaganda and the example of four strikes in the town, to the long mobilisation without contact with the enemy, which the African soldier did not understand.

Repression

The authorities’ response was harsh. Mukalabushi was captured on 18 March 1944 in Tshofa territory and brought back to Luluabourg to face a court martial. According to most studies he was hanged together with one other mutineer; the Congolese monograph states that some mutineers were shot or hanged and others flogged and banished. Several local chiefs accused of helping the fugitives were also held to account, such as Chief Mulowayi wa Nzaba of Dibaya territory, who was deposed and sentenced. Fifty soldiers deemed “unreliable” were discharged from the Katanga garrisons and sent back to their home territories under administrative supervision. Some studies speak of hundreds of Congolese killed in the whole wave of unrest, but there is no reliable count of African victims.

Place in the war

The Luluabourg mutiny did not shake Belgian rule, but it laid bare its fragility. The colony, which was meant to prove that Belgium was still fighting, rested on the loyalty of African soldiers, and in the fifth year of the war they saw no benefit in it for themselves. The unrest did not cease: in 1944 strikes spread across Katanga and Kasai, the authorities conducted “police actions” in Équateur province to force the population to gather rubber, and in 1945 the dockers at Matadi rebelled. The Congolese brigade returned from the Middle East at the end of 1944 without having taken part in any fighting, while a Congolese field hospital served in Burma until the end of the war.

A few weeks earlier, at the Brazzaville Conference, the French had promised their colonies reforms, although they rejected even the distant prospect of self-government. Belgium did not bring itself to make even such declarations at the time. Governor-General Pierre Ryckmans, who ran the colony throughout the war, nevertheless acknowledged in 1946 that “the days of colonialism are over”. After the war the authorities eased the heaviest burdens and granted the African évolués somewhat more rights, without, however, changing the principle that the Congo was governed from Brussels by Belgians.

Sixteen years later, on 5 July 1960, less than a week after the Congo’s independence was proclaimed, Force Publique soldiers in Léopoldville, and then in Thysville, mutinied against their Belgian officers. That mutiny set off the Congo Crisis, in which Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was killed. Luluabourg in 1944 was its harbinger: it showed that the colonial army on which Belgium based its power was not immune to the same grievances felt by civilians, and that a war fought in the name of Europe’s freedom had raised in Africa questions about the freedom of Africa itself.