The miners’ strike in the Belgian Congo

On 9 December 1941, at the football stadium in Élisabethville, capital of the province of Katanga in the Belgian Congo, soldiers of the Force Publique fired into a crowd of African workers of the mining company Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, who had been on strike for several days demanding higher wages. According to the official toll 48 people were killed, among them two women and a child, and 74 were wounded. Other estimates speak of 60–70 dead, and some accounts of more than a hundred. The strike, which had begun a few days earlier at the works near Jadotville, was the largest protest by African workers in the Congo during the Second World War, and the massacre at the stadium became a lasting part of Katanga’s collective memory.

A colony at war

After the capitulation of Belgium in May 1940, King Leopold III remained in the occupied country as a prisoner in the palace at Laeken, but the government of Hubert Pierlot, which had moved to London, kept control of the colony. For that government the Congo was everything at once: the territory on which Belgium was still a belligerent state, a source of revenue and its chief argument in dealing with the Allies. An agreement with Britain of 21 January 1941 brought the colony into the sterling area, the Congolese franc was devalued by 30 per cent, and the colony’s entire output of raw materials went to meet Allied needs. Loans from the Bank of the Belgian Congo allowed the government-in-exile to finance itself independently, without drawing on the gold reserves taken to London in 1940.

Katanga was the most valuable prize. Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, linked to the Belgian holding company Société Générale, mined and smelted copper, cobalt and tin there. Its Shinkolobwe mine, idle since the 1930s, held deposits of rich uranium ore. As early as 1940 the company’s director, Edgar Sengier, had secretly shipped about half of the stocks of mined ore to New York, in case the colony fell into German hands. In December 1941 no one in Katanga yet knew what this uranium would be used for. The men in the mines, on the other hand, knew very well what it cost to live. Employment at the Union Minière works grew rapidly during the war – according to one tally, from 25,000 workers in 1938 to 49,000 in 1944 – and the colonial administration demanded ever longer and more productive work from the labourers for the “war effort”.

The colony also fought with arms. After the government in London recognised that a state of war existed with Italy, Force Publique columns covered more than two thousand kilometres to Ethiopia, and on 6 July 1941 at Saïo they accepted the surrender of General Pietro Gazzera. The capitulation at Gondar on 27 November ended organised Italian resistance in East Africa. The same colonial army, made up of African soldiers under Belgian officers, was also the colony’s police force. Less than two weeks after the end of the Ethiopian campaign its soldiers were to fire on their own countrymen.

Causes of the strike

The war brought inflation to the Congo. According to a survey carried out by the territorial service in Élisabethville at the beginning of November 1941, the cost of living had risen since May 1940 by about 70 per cent for African workers and by just under 30 per cent for whites. The minimum needed to keep a single worker alive had risen, by the same calculations, from 939 francs a year in May 1940 to 1,503 francs in August 1941. African wages had practically stood still: a beginner earned two francs a day. The colonial administration itself acknowledged that a general rise of the order of 30–40 per cent was needed.

The spur came from the example of the whites. During the war Europeans in the colony were for the first time allowed to form trade unions, and from 13 October 1941 Belgian workers at the works near Jadotville went on strike for about a week. Assessments of that protest in the literature differ: some authors write of a failed attempt at a general strike throughout the colony, while others, such as the Belgian historian Ludo De Witte, stress that the whites quickly won concessions. The African workers, who worked alongside them for a fraction of their pay and lived in separate company camps, drew their own conclusions. To the wage demands was added resentment of segregation and of the daily violence of the overseers.

The strike begins (3–8 December)

During the night of 2–3 December workers at the Shituru and Panda works near Jadotville (today Likasi) decided to stop work, and their spokesman, Léon Mutamba, notified the management. Most chronologies give 3 December as the start of the strike. De Witte, who drew on the archive of the historian Jules Marchal, writes that the workers set the strike for the morning of 4 December. On that day about 1,400 of the 1,800 employees downed tools. The Force Publique brought soldiers to the camps, and Union Minière’s director-general, Léopold Mottoulle, promised a pay rise to those who returned to work before eleven. He was answered with stones.

The sources describe what happened next at Jadotville in different ways. According to De Witte, five people, including a soldier, were wounded in the clashes, and one striker was shot dead by the officer commanding the troops, Commandant Cardoen. Other studies, including those on which encyclopaedias rely, speak of at least fifteen dead. What is certain is that after reinforcements arrived by rail, resistance at Jadotville weakened, and the next day about 85 per cent of the workforce reported for work.

The strike, however, was spreading to other works. On 8 December the miners at Kambove and at the neighbouring Shanguluwe mine stopped work; they demanded a rise of one and a half francs in the daily wage, while the management offered fifty centimes. According to some sources, by 9 December all the company’s works had come to a halt, including those at Kipushi. In Élisabethville the workers’ camp at the Lubumbashi smelter was in ferment. At midnight on 8–9 December the troops dispersed the crowd after a soldier was injured by a thrown brick.

The massacre at the stadium (9 December)

On the morning of 9 December the governor of Katanga, Amour Maron, ordered the strikers from the Lubumbashi camp to assemble at the town’s football stadium. According to an eyewitness, between one and a half and two thousand people came, many with their wives and children. Present were Maron, Mottoulle, the territorial administrator René Marchal and Captain De Milde of the Force Publique with his soldiers. Marchal later wrote that the strikers “had no warlike intentions whatever” and that the matter could easily have been settled had he been given the authority to negotiate. Maron, according to this account, forbade him to promise anything: the workers were simply to return to the camp and to work.

Some studies describe the meeting at the stadium as negotiations in which the authorities offered a rise of about 30 per cent and the workers, distrusting oral promises, demanded written guarantees. According to Marchal’s account, quoted by De Witte, Captain De Milde three times called on the crowd to disperse – in Lingala, a language which, as Marchal noted, “not one striker in a hundred understood”. He then ordered his soldiers to advance with fixed bayonets. One of the strikers tried to wrest a rifle from a soldier, at that very moment a shot rang out, and it was followed by a general volley which lasted, according to Marchal, eight, ten, perhaps fifteen seconds.

A different version has taken root in Congolese collective memory: Governor Maron is said to have personally shot the strike leader Léonard Mpoy (Mpoyi) and only then ordered the soldiers to fire. This is how some studies and encyclopaedias describe the events. Jules Marchal’s research does not confirm it: according to his findings Mpoy survived the massacre and in 1974, as a witness to it, gave an interview to the Katangese periodical Mwango.

The number of victims remains disputed, because the surviving documents are incomplete and contradictory. The official toll gave 45 men, two women and one child killed and 74 wounded; some studies also cite an even lower figure, about thirty dead, attributed to the authorities. The Belgian trade unionist Georges Lievens claimed that about fifty of the wounded died the following day. The most frequently repeated estimates speak of 60–70 dead; one survivor spoke in 1973 of 120 victims, while former workers questioned in the 1970s gave figures of between 20 and 40. During the night of 9–10 December the bodies – about forty-five of them, according to Marchal – were taken by lorry to the town cemetery and buried without ceremony in unmarked graves.

After the massacre

On 10 December work resumed at all the Union Minière centres. The strike had been broken, but the workers achieved their main aim: on 11 December the company announced a general wage rise of 25–50 per cent over the October rates, which for a beginner meant an increase from two to three francs a day. The memory of this survived in Swahili in the phrase “Banafwila mali yabo” – “They died for their wages”. Union Minière paid the families of the dead 300 francs each, whereas the court in Élisabethville awarded a thousand for a fatal accident at work.

Some of the white workers staged a short protest strike against what they called “the murder of our black brothers”. Lievens, who had supported the Africans, was sentenced on 31 December 1941 to eight days in prison and a fine for insulting the authorities, and Union Minière dismissed him. None of those responsible for the shooting was brought to trial. On the contrary, about a year later Governor Maron received high Belgian decorations and Captain De Milde a promotion. In a report of 1946 René Marchal called the repression “reckless, stupid and criminal”, and of the promotions he wrote: “Such is the price of the blood of fifty martyrs.”

The events in Katanga passed unnoticed by the world. Two days earlier Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, and the Allies’ attention was fixed on the Pacific. In occupied Belgium it emerged in those same days that Leopold III had married Lilian Baels (the civil ceremony had taken place on 6 December), which many of his subjects regarded as a scandal.

Place in the war

The Japanese offensive in South-East Asia, which began on 7–8 December, soon cut the Allies off from Malayan tin and rubber, which made the Congo more important still. The colonial authorities responded by lengthening compulsory labour and forced cultivation, which only deepened the tensions. In September 1942 Sengier sold the uranium stored in New York to the US Army, and ore from Shinkolobwe, reopened by American army engineers, became one of the main sources of raw material for the Manhattan Project. In the following years the Force Publique sent troops to Nigeria and the Middle East, and a Congolese medical unit served in Madagascar and Burma.

The strike of December 1941 was not the last. In February 1944 at Luluabourg African NCOs of the Force Publique mutinied under a veteran of the Ethiopian campaign, Staff Sergeant Ngoie Mukalabushi; the mutineers plundered the European quarter and killed a Belgian officer and two civilians, and two of them, Mukalabushi among them, were executed. In the same year strikes spread through Katanga and Kasai, and in 1945 to the port of Matadi. African trade unions were permitted in 1946, although for a long time they had no real power.

The massacre at the stadium in Élisabethville, the city known today as Lubumbashi, became one of the founding myths of the Congolese story of the struggle against colonialism. It returned in oral tradition and in the Congolese popular painting of the 1970s. It showed that the colony from which Belgium drew the means to take part in the war on the Allied side, and whose uranium helped to build the first atomic bomb, also paid for that part in the blood of workers who were fighting no enemy but were demanding a wage they could live on.