Congo's Independence
The Belgian Congo became independent on 30 June 1960, five months after Belgium had decided to grant it. The colony had been King Leopold II's private property from 1885 to 1908, run as an extraction enterprise in which failure to deliver rubber quotas was punished by mutilation and the population is estimated to have fallen by several million. Belgium took it over after an international campaign and governed it paternalistically for fifty years. That paternalism is the fact that shaped independence. Africans were educated to primary and technical level and no further; there were around a dozen Congolese university graduates in a country of thirteen million, no African officers in a 25,000-strong army, and no Congolese in the senior administration. Riots in Léopoldville in January 1959 convinced Brussels that the alternative to a fast exit was a colonial war, and a round table in January 1960 set the date for June. At the ceremony, King Baudouin praised Leopold's civilising genius. Patrice Lumumba, the new prime minister, answered unscheduled with a speech about the humiliations, the mockery, the beatings and the land taken, delivered in front of the king. The army mutinied five days later over pay and its all-Belgian officer corps. Belgium sent troops without permission; Katanga, which held the copper and cobalt, seceded with Belgian corporate and military backing; and the UN sent a force that would not act against the secession. Lumumba was murdered in January 1961. Mobutu took power in 1965 and held it for thirty-two years.
- Year: 1960 CE
- Category: Independence
