ABSTRACT
The Congo was a country one-third the size of the United States and almost as big as Western Europe. It was the third most populous African state with a population of just under fourteen million people. The latter were divided into well over 200 ethnic groups in six different provinces all at different stages of failing to secure sustained development. Politically the lack of progress towards independent nationhood was far more complex than is often acknowledged. In Belgium the belated realisation that the Congo required some action if Belgian influence was to be retained effectively ended the assumption that Africans were happy with the alleged economic benefits provided by Belgian capitalism even if the harshest form of exploitation was no longer present. Yet political awakening was bound to follow the changes in the surrounding territories that provided new challenges for settlers and Africans alike, which the Belgian authorities could no longer ignore. This not only influenced the nature of the independence process but created the disastrous state of the colony’s finances. The financial requirements of settlers and the employees of foreign companies like the Union Minière de Haut Katanga continued to leave a mark on the colony even if the Belgian government wished to abandon the Congo. The actions of private Belgian citizens, and the reactions to them by a Belgian government whose domestic political circumstances were generally far from propitious and never free from colonial policy constraints, presented an even bigger problem to the economic viability of the newly independent state. In January 1960 the history of Belgian policy was explained to the Americans by the animated Minister of the Congo and Ruanda-Urundi, Auguste de Schrivjer. The US, for essentially Cold War1 reasons, had a desire to discover how things might develop in the Belgian territory. De Schrivjer explained how the Belgian reaction to events in French Africa had produced a decision in June 1958 on future policy which established a Congo Working Party. In the autumn of that year, Wigny, the Belgian foreign minister, may have been surprised to hear that Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State for six years, believed many new states were unprepared for independence. For such countries to have a United Nations vote in the same way as older and greater powers was debasing the concept of newly independent nations capable of exercising responsibilities.2
