ABSTRACT
West Africa became independent without anything that could be called aninternational crisis. East Africa was to follow suit in the next few years. But the independence of the Belgian Congo produced not only internal chaos and civil war but also a serious international crisis. African states were divided among themselves, and the United Nations was called upon to play expected and unexpected roles in the course of which it was attacked by some of its principal members and its secretary-general was killed. The sources of this catastrophe were, first, the hurriedness with which the Belgians took their departure from a colony which they had hardly at all prepared for independence; secondly, the very great size of the Congo and its ethnic and tribal diversity; thirdly, the revolt immediately after independence of the Force Publique or army, whose mutinous conduct left the new central government powerless; next, the attempt to detach the rich southern province of Katanga and make it a separate state; and finally, the fact that the United Nations was required to perform a multiplicity of barely consistent tasks and was hampered in them by the inadequacies of its own machinery and by the hostility and independent actions of certain governments, notably the Russian and the British.
