1. What was Africa before the Europeans arrived?
Less than 90 million people (including Arabs and Berbers north of the Sahara) lived in the second largest continent, which comprises 20% of all the land area of the Earth. The population density was lower than most modern-day deserts. What was these inhabitants' way of life?
Our example will be the Great Kingdom of Dahomey.
Less than 90 million people (including Arabs and Berbers north of the Sahara) lived in the second largest continent, which comprises 20% of all the land area of the Earth. The population density was lower than most modern-day deserts. What was these inhabitants' way of life?
Our example will be the Great Kingdom of Dahomey.
The African kingdom of Dahomey had traditional "Customs" of two kinds: the grand Customs performed on the death of a king; and the minor Customs, held twice a year.
Upon the death of a king human victims were sacrificed at his grave to supply him with wives, attendants, &c. in the spirit world. The grand Customs surpassed the annual rites in splendour and bloodshed. At those held in 1791 during January, February and March, it is stated that no fewer than 500 men, women and children were put to death.
The minor formed continuations of the grand Customs, and "periodically supplied the departed monarch with fresh attendants in the shadowy world." The actual slaughter was preluded by dancing, feasting, speechmaking and elaborate ceremonial. The victims, chiefly prisoners of war, were dressed in calico shirts decorated round the neck and down the sleeves with red bindings, and with a crimson patch on the left breast, and wore long white night-caps with spirals of blue ribbon sewn on. Some of them, tied in baskets, were at one stage of the proceedings taken to the top of a high platform, together with an alligator, a cat and a hawk in similar baskets, and paraded.
The king then made a speech explaining that the victims were sent to testify to his greatness in spirit-land, the men and the animals each to their kind. They were then hurled down into the middle of a surging crowd of natives, and butchered. At another stage of the festival human sacrifices were offered at the shrine of the king's ancestors, and the blood was sprinkled on their graves. This was known as Zan Nyanyana or "evil night," the king going in procession with his wives and officials and himself executing the doomed.
These semi-public massacres formed only a part of the slaughter, for many women, eunuchs and others within the palace were done to death privately. The skulls were used to adorn the palace walls, and the king's sleeping-chamber was paved with the heads of his enemies.
It seems that cannibalism was a sequel of the Customs, the bodies of the slaughtered being roasted and devoured smoking hot. On the death of the king the wives, after the most extravagant demonstrations of grief, broke and destroyed everything within their reach, and attacked and murdered each other, the uproar continuing until order was restored by the new sovereign.
In 1863 Commander Wilmot, R.N., and in 1864 Sir Richard Burton were sent on missions to the king, but their efforts to induce the Dahomeyans to give up human sacrifices, slave-trading, &c. met with no success.
Upon the death of a king human victims were sacrificed at his grave to supply him with wives, attendants, &c. in the spirit world. The grand Customs surpassed the annual rites in splendour and bloodshed. At those held in 1791 during January, February and March, it is stated that no fewer than 500 men, women and children were put to death.
The minor formed continuations of the grand Customs, and "periodically supplied the departed monarch with fresh attendants in the shadowy world." The actual slaughter was preluded by dancing, feasting, speechmaking and elaborate ceremonial. The victims, chiefly prisoners of war, were dressed in calico shirts decorated round the neck and down the sleeves with red bindings, and with a crimson patch on the left breast, and wore long white night-caps with spirals of blue ribbon sewn on. Some of them, tied in baskets, were at one stage of the proceedings taken to the top of a high platform, together with an alligator, a cat and a hawk in similar baskets, and paraded.
The king then made a speech explaining that the victims were sent to testify to his greatness in spirit-land, the men and the animals each to their kind. They were then hurled down into the middle of a surging crowd of natives, and butchered. At another stage of the festival human sacrifices were offered at the shrine of the king's ancestors, and the blood was sprinkled on their graves. This was known as Zan Nyanyana or "evil night," the king going in procession with his wives and officials and himself executing the doomed.
These semi-public massacres formed only a part of the slaughter, for many women, eunuchs and others within the palace were done to death privately. The skulls were used to adorn the palace walls, and the king's sleeping-chamber was paved with the heads of his enemies.
It seems that cannibalism was a sequel of the Customs, the bodies of the slaughtered being roasted and devoured smoking hot. On the death of the king the wives, after the most extravagant demonstrations of grief, broke and destroyed everything within their reach, and attacked and murdered each other, the uproar continuing until order was restored by the new sovereign.
In 1863 Commander Wilmot, R.N., and in 1864 Sir Richard Burton were sent on missions to the king, but their efforts to induce the Dahomeyans to give up human sacrifices, slave-trading, &c. met with no success.
2. What did the Europeans do in Africa?
This time our example will be the Belgian Congo! Oh, I know what you've heard, dear reader: between Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Adam Hochschild’s critically-praised book King Leopold’s Ghost, Congo’s colonial past has become synonymous with racial genocide by white devils. According to Hochschild’s account, King Leopold II, who created the Congo Free State as a “personal union” (essentially, all of the Congo was Leopold’s private property), turned the largest African nation into a giant sweatshop. Here, capitalist enterprise and the cultivation of rubber forced millions of native Congolese to toil for little to no wages at all. If they rebelled or shirked their duties, King Leopold’s representatives would apparently cut off their hands. Worse still, Hochschild argues that Leopold oversaw a massive campaign of genocide that killed ten million people.
The only problem with this number is that it is more or less fabricated. Ryan Faulk has pointed out with great clarity that the best estimates of the Congolese population in 1885 was only 9,801,150 people. That population rose by 1900. Furthermore, the European council that ultimately removed King Leopold from power in the Congo could find no conclusive documentation that official policy dictated amputations as punishment. Faulk notes that even outraged Europeans who considered Leopold a butcher concluded that most of these amputations were done by poorly disciplined members of the Force Publique, the local army made up of black troops and white officers. Historian Barbara Emerson and others have called out Hochschild for his lazy research and broad assumptions. Hochschild’s personal history as a Boomer veteran of the anti-war movement and various left-wing publications (Mother Jones, Ramparts) makes it fairly obvious that his depiction of King Leopold II is based on political expediency: Another bad European male is good for business, you see.
In 1908, the government of Belgium officially took control of the Congo. The small, half-French, half-Dutch nation found itself as the ruler of the richest prize in all of Africa. However, Roger Anstey argues in his 1966 book King Leopold’s Legacy that Brussels looked on its good fortune with trepidation. Anstey, no apologist for Belgian colonialism, notes that “Belgium’s position in 1908, in regard to the Congo, was akin to that of an heir who inherits an estate with a predominating sense of duty, rather than fulfillment of a long-felt wish”. Still, despite misgivings, Brussels turned the Congo into a powerful colony. The Force Publique was one of the best-trained armies in all of colonial Africa, and even scored victories in World War I over the brilliant German general Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. Belgian technicians helped to build beautiful cities like Leopoldville, Stanleyville, and Elizabethville. Mike Hoare, a proud citizen of Her Majesty’s realm, admitted that Belgium surpassed all other European powers in terms of construction and investment in their colony.
The only problem with this number is that it is more or less fabricated. Ryan Faulk has pointed out with great clarity that the best estimates of the Congolese population in 1885 was only 9,801,150 people. That population rose by 1900. Furthermore, the European council that ultimately removed King Leopold from power in the Congo could find no conclusive documentation that official policy dictated amputations as punishment. Faulk notes that even outraged Europeans who considered Leopold a butcher concluded that most of these amputations were done by poorly disciplined members of the Force Publique, the local army made up of black troops and white officers. Historian Barbara Emerson and others have called out Hochschild for his lazy research and broad assumptions. Hochschild’s personal history as a Boomer veteran of the anti-war movement and various left-wing publications (Mother Jones, Ramparts) makes it fairly obvious that his depiction of King Leopold II is based on political expediency: Another bad European male is good for business, you see.
In 1908, the government of Belgium officially took control of the Congo. The small, half-French, half-Dutch nation found itself as the ruler of the richest prize in all of Africa. However, Roger Anstey argues in his 1966 book King Leopold’s Legacy that Brussels looked on its good fortune with trepidation. Anstey, no apologist for Belgian colonialism, notes that “Belgium’s position in 1908, in regard to the Congo, was akin to that of an heir who inherits an estate with a predominating sense of duty, rather than fulfillment of a long-felt wish”. Still, despite misgivings, Brussels turned the Congo into a powerful colony. The Force Publique was one of the best-trained armies in all of colonial Africa, and even scored victories in World War I over the brilliant German general Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. Belgian technicians helped to build beautiful cities like Leopoldville, Stanleyville, and Elizabethville. Mike Hoare, a proud citizen of Her Majesty’s realm, admitted that Belgium surpassed all other European powers in terms of construction and investment in their colony.
…in my journeying around the Congo I had seen with my own eyes ample evidence of an enormous Belgian investment in the country, both in money and labour. Beautiful towns and cities with prosperous and thriving industries had been won from the suffocating equatorial jungle. Magnificent schools and missions had arisen, where once there had been nothing but disease and pestilence. Every village now boasted its own clinic. No village was so humble but it possessed its own water pump…
Raw economic statistics reveal the truth behind Hoare’s words. According to Howard Epstein’s thoroughly detailed history of Congo’s first years of independence, “In the years just before independence the Belgian Congo had become the most developed country in tropical Africa".
Between the years of 1950 and 1957, the Belgian Congo enjoyed an impressive annual growth rate of 6.7%. By 1959, the Belgian Congo had a commercial surplus of $192 million. The country enjoyed the highest wages and literacy rates in all of sub-Saharan Africa. These are not indicators of a country in decline or in need of a massive socio-political revolution.
Between the years of 1950 and 1957, the Belgian Congo enjoyed an impressive annual growth rate of 6.7%. By 1959, the Belgian Congo had a commercial surplus of $192 million. The country enjoyed the highest wages and literacy rates in all of sub-Saharan Africa. These are not indicators of a country in decline or in need of a massive socio-political revolution.
3. What was "decolonization"?
Socio-political revolution happened anyway in 1960. On May 22nd, the Congolese National Movement became the largest and most powerful party in the Congo. The party’s leader, Patrice Lumumba, came from the educated middle class of the country. He sought guidance from the liberal Enlightenment, with Rousseau and Voltaire as his chief heroes. The Belgian state considered him a secret “red” and a criminal (the latter charge was true—Lumumba was arrested in Belgium for embezzlement in 1956). During his short reign in 1960, Lumumba positioned himself as a radical black nationalist and potential friend of the communists in Moscow and Beijing. Although he paid lip service to the idea that whites had helped to bring about Congolese independence, Lumumba’s followers were often motivated by fanatical race hatred and superstition.
Congolese independence became something of a sham almost immediately. In Leopoldville, Lumumba tried to establish a centralized state against the wishes of more federalist-minded Congolese politicians. Chief among this latter group was Moise Tshombe. Tshombe and his CONAKAT (roughly, the Confederation of Associated Tribes of Katanga) party declared the southern state of Katanga independent. Lumumba and his supporters could not stomach this secession, for Katanga was the economic dynamo of the entire country. In particular, Katanga was well-known for its copper mines, abundant plantations, and large cobalt and diamond reserves. Even worse for Lumumba, Tshombe, a Christian and a member of the Lunda tribe, sought to keep close relations with Belgium and the West in order to present a united anti-communist front in Africa.
The United Nations and the United States gave their support to Lumumba. In large part that support was due to America’s anti-colonial policy. On the other hand, Lumumba was undeniably popular with black people across the globe. He even popularized the notion that America’s prestige and wealth came only because of black labor. “Africans built America and developed America”, Lumumba told a crowd in Stanleyville in 1960, “They are the reason that America has become a great world power”. For an American in the midst of a Civil Rights revolution, officially condemning Lumumba might be seen as a furtherance of “white supremacist” politics. Even in 1960, the fear of being branded as “racist” trumped the fact that the U.S. knew full well that Lumumba’s government had formerly requested Soviet and Chinese aid, even including a July 14, 1960, letter that asked for a military intervention from Moscow in case of a Belgian “conspiracy” against Congolese independence.
In 1960, UN troops were sent to the Congo in order to prop up the weak central state. Even this move proved controversial, as several Afro-Marxist states, including Ghana and Uganda, felt that the UN should only send black African troops to the Congo, rather than the Indian, Moroccan, Irish, and Swedish troops that they actually sent. The whites of the Congo supported Tshombe to the point where they occasionally took up arms against UN “peacekeepers”. The famous Siege of Jadotville (1961) should be rightly remembered as a story of Irish heroism, but it should not be overlooked that those Irish troops were fighting on behalf of a Congolese government that not only tried to force Katanga into an unwanted union, but also sought to further Lumumba’s legacy—a legacy that Tshombe, Congo’s white citizens, and several tribes found toxic.
Lumumba’s arrest and execution in 1961 put some of the thornier issues to rest. An international commission created in 1961 found that Lumumba’s execution had been ordered by Tshombe and carried out by members of Katanga’s gendarmerie. Many left-wing academics still want to believe that Lumumba was actually executed by the CIA, Britain’s MI6, or other Western spooks. Lumumba became a martyr!
This martyrdom would help to foment a second revolution in 1964. Called the Simba Rebellion, this violent outbreak bore many disturbing similarities to the military mutinies that initiated Congolese independence four years prior. In 1960, members of the military and rival tribes began rampaging through the cities of Leopoldville and Luluabourg. Not too long afterwards, their public displays of violence took on a racial character, with Congolese troops abducting, raping, and murdering white citizens. Thousands of white citizens fled the country or to Katanga, where President Tshombe promised protection. The riots of 1960 proved so bad that 800 Belgian paratroopers, at the request of President Tshombe, returned to Elizabethville in order to put down a mutiny that had already killed six whites. Belgian troops would stay in the country until African protests grew too loud, and the UN forced them to leave.
By 1964, the Belgian presence in the Congo had dwindled considerably. Belgian military officers still served as advisers to the Congolese army, but that was about it. Unfortunately, despite the presence of Belgian officers, the Congolese army proved totally incapable of putting down a small, pro-communist rebellion that erupted in Kwilu Province. Because of this inefficiency, and because the rebels received unchecked aid from Uganda and the Sudan, the rebellion conquered two-thirds of the nation in just five months.
Despite this civil war, UN troops continued to leave the country because of an early security agreement with Leopoldville. Knowing full well that the Congo hung precariously close to dissolution, President Joseph Kasavubu named Tshombe as the country’s new prime minister. Tshombe received nearly unlimited powers, and he used these powers to immediately order the creation of mercenary units to augment the failing Congolese army. This move immediately earned Tshombe the ire of both the African communists and international organizations such as the UN and the OAU (an organization of Francophone countries in Africa).
The most infamous moment of the entire Simba Rebellion occurred when the city of Stanleyville fell on August 4, 1964. Thanks to sixty trucks containing rebel soldiers and witch-doctors, the entire Congolese army garrison in the city gave up and ran away without a fight. A day later, the rebels controlled Stanleyville Airport. With the city on lockdown, the large white population was fair game.
Socio-political revolution happened anyway in 1960. On May 22nd, the Congolese National Movement became the largest and most powerful party in the Congo. The party’s leader, Patrice Lumumba, came from the educated middle class of the country. He sought guidance from the liberal Enlightenment, with Rousseau and Voltaire as his chief heroes. The Belgian state considered him a secret “red” and a criminal (the latter charge was true—Lumumba was arrested in Belgium for embezzlement in 1956). During his short reign in 1960, Lumumba positioned himself as a radical black nationalist and potential friend of the communists in Moscow and Beijing. Although he paid lip service to the idea that whites had helped to bring about Congolese independence, Lumumba’s followers were often motivated by fanatical race hatred and superstition.
Congolese independence became something of a sham almost immediately. In Leopoldville, Lumumba tried to establish a centralized state against the wishes of more federalist-minded Congolese politicians. Chief among this latter group was Moise Tshombe. Tshombe and his CONAKAT (roughly, the Confederation of Associated Tribes of Katanga) party declared the southern state of Katanga independent. Lumumba and his supporters could not stomach this secession, for Katanga was the economic dynamo of the entire country. In particular, Katanga was well-known for its copper mines, abundant plantations, and large cobalt and diamond reserves. Even worse for Lumumba, Tshombe, a Christian and a member of the Lunda tribe, sought to keep close relations with Belgium and the West in order to present a united anti-communist front in Africa.
The United Nations and the United States gave their support to Lumumba. In large part that support was due to America’s anti-colonial policy. On the other hand, Lumumba was undeniably popular with black people across the globe. He even popularized the notion that America’s prestige and wealth came only because of black labor. “Africans built America and developed America”, Lumumba told a crowd in Stanleyville in 1960, “They are the reason that America has become a great world power”. For an American in the midst of a Civil Rights revolution, officially condemning Lumumba might be seen as a furtherance of “white supremacist” politics. Even in 1960, the fear of being branded as “racist” trumped the fact that the U.S. knew full well that Lumumba’s government had formerly requested Soviet and Chinese aid, even including a July 14, 1960, letter that asked for a military intervention from Moscow in case of a Belgian “conspiracy” against Congolese independence.
In 1960, UN troops were sent to the Congo in order to prop up the weak central state. Even this move proved controversial, as several Afro-Marxist states, including Ghana and Uganda, felt that the UN should only send black African troops to the Congo, rather than the Indian, Moroccan, Irish, and Swedish troops that they actually sent. The whites of the Congo supported Tshombe to the point where they occasionally took up arms against UN “peacekeepers”. The famous Siege of Jadotville (1961) should be rightly remembered as a story of Irish heroism, but it should not be overlooked that those Irish troops were fighting on behalf of a Congolese government that not only tried to force Katanga into an unwanted union, but also sought to further Lumumba’s legacy—a legacy that Tshombe, Congo’s white citizens, and several tribes found toxic.
Lumumba’s arrest and execution in 1961 put some of the thornier issues to rest. An international commission created in 1961 found that Lumumba’s execution had been ordered by Tshombe and carried out by members of Katanga’s gendarmerie. Many left-wing academics still want to believe that Lumumba was actually executed by the CIA, Britain’s MI6, or other Western spooks. Lumumba became a martyr!
This martyrdom would help to foment a second revolution in 1964. Called the Simba Rebellion, this violent outbreak bore many disturbing similarities to the military mutinies that initiated Congolese independence four years prior. In 1960, members of the military and rival tribes began rampaging through the cities of Leopoldville and Luluabourg. Not too long afterwards, their public displays of violence took on a racial character, with Congolese troops abducting, raping, and murdering white citizens. Thousands of white citizens fled the country or to Katanga, where President Tshombe promised protection. The riots of 1960 proved so bad that 800 Belgian paratroopers, at the request of President Tshombe, returned to Elizabethville in order to put down a mutiny that had already killed six whites. Belgian troops would stay in the country until African protests grew too loud, and the UN forced them to leave.
By 1964, the Belgian presence in the Congo had dwindled considerably. Belgian military officers still served as advisers to the Congolese army, but that was about it. Unfortunately, despite the presence of Belgian officers, the Congolese army proved totally incapable of putting down a small, pro-communist rebellion that erupted in Kwilu Province. Because of this inefficiency, and because the rebels received unchecked aid from Uganda and the Sudan, the rebellion conquered two-thirds of the nation in just five months.
Despite this civil war, UN troops continued to leave the country because of an early security agreement with Leopoldville. Knowing full well that the Congo hung precariously close to dissolution, President Joseph Kasavubu named Tshombe as the country’s new prime minister. Tshombe received nearly unlimited powers, and he used these powers to immediately order the creation of mercenary units to augment the failing Congolese army. This move immediately earned Tshombe the ire of both the African communists and international organizations such as the UN and the OAU (an organization of Francophone countries in Africa).
The most infamous moment of the entire Simba Rebellion occurred when the city of Stanleyville fell on August 4, 1964. Thanks to sixty trucks containing rebel soldiers and witch-doctors, the entire Congolese army garrison in the city gave up and ran away without a fight. A day later, the rebels controlled Stanleyville Airport. With the city on lockdown, the large white population was fair game.
A young boy of about 14 had installed himself as the chief executioner, and took fiendish delight in running up and down the line hacking his panga [a machete-like tool] at a defenseless man here, or savagely attacking a woman there, lopping off a hand or a foot as it took his fancy. The crowd would encourage him in his excesses, until maddened with his own power he would give the order to fire, when a dozen or more Simbas would open up at point-blank range, sometimes killing, sometimes wounding the men and women selected for death that day. The bodies of the prisoners were then flung into the Lualaba, dead or alive.
European and American nuns and priests were favorite targets of the rebels. Even professional airmen were not exempt from slaughter. Three years earlier, in 1961, mutinous soldiers had captured nineteen Italian air-force pilots. These men were tortured, murdered, and partially eaten by their captors. These rest of their body parts wound up as meat in small markets in rebel territory.
Most of these outrages would occur in front of shrines or monuments to Lumumba, who became a kind of anti-white fetish for the rebels. Germani summed up their relationship to Lumumba and his ideals as “It was a fanatic movement against the white man, an appeal to wild dreams of a coloured dominion of the world.”
Germani and Hoare both agreed that the rebellion of 1964 represented an atavistic revolt with just a patina of orthodox communism at the very top.
The rebels of 1964 also proved that death can sometimes be preferable. Both Hoare and Germani recount stories of European and American nuns who were raped every day for months by rebels. Some of these victims became pregnant, and upon being liberated by the mercenaries, had to deal with the issue of getting an abortion—a cardinal sin in the Catholic Church.
Others, including both men and women, were forced to eat the excrement of rebels, while local villagers watched and laughed. More than a few white civilians had to witness the murder of their husbands, wives, and children. Congo Mercenary shows that rebel warlords often tried to make young white girls their concubines. When they resisted, they were often killed outright. As the war dragged on and the rebels increasingly lost ground, revolutionary officers gave orders to kill every white person within striking distance. Such an order was carried out in the small town of Likati, where Simbas killed an entire Greek family, including two infants.
At Stanleyville, between November 24th and 27th, approximately seventeen white hostages faced the threat of death at the hands of rebels under the command of Christopher Gbenye, a protégé of Lumumba. Gbenye refused to let the International Red Cross into the city, and he refused to let anyone leave. This forced Brussels to intervene with Operation Dragon Rogue, a multi-national operation featuring Belgian paratroopers descending on the city after jumping out of American planes. 5 Commando stood outside of the city until given the go-ahead by Belgian military advisors. Hoare’s men would eventually enter the city, but were too late to stop the murder of those white civilians who had been held prisoner at Stanleyville’s formerly posh Hotel Victoria.
On the morning when 5 Commando raced towards the city, Gbenye’s official newspaper and radio station belched out: “Ciyuga, Ciyuga! Kill, kill! Kill all the white people. Kill all the men, women and children. Kill them all. Have no scruples. Use your knives and your pangas!”
When the mostly Belgian and American hostages were eviscerated, Belgian paratroopers were just two miles away and 5 Commando’s jeeps and trucks were racing towards the heart of the city. The European owner of the once prestigious Stanleyville Hotel summed up the terrible trauma of the city’s white population when he told marauding soldiers to drink up everything in the hotel bar. As for him, he was going back to Belgium and leaving the “God-forsaken” Congo.
Despite the well-documented cruelties of Stanleyville and other unknown villages throughout the Congo, the Western press continued to write gushing articles in favor of the rebels. One West German periodical even wrote with a straight face that “The Rebels kept order; they always swept the streets clean”. Another German journalist, Uwe Siemon-Netto, would write decades later that “Media celebrities of a new kind and their youthful wannabe acolytes” went to cover Vietnam and other [prototypical "anticolonial struggles"] as the “products of increasingly ideological liberal arts colleges and universities".
Most of these outrages would occur in front of shrines or monuments to Lumumba, who became a kind of anti-white fetish for the rebels. Germani summed up their relationship to Lumumba and his ideals as “It was a fanatic movement against the white man, an appeal to wild dreams of a coloured dominion of the world.”
Germani and Hoare both agreed that the rebellion of 1964 represented an atavistic revolt with just a patina of orthodox communism at the very top.
The rebels of 1964 also proved that death can sometimes be preferable. Both Hoare and Germani recount stories of European and American nuns who were raped every day for months by rebels. Some of these victims became pregnant, and upon being liberated by the mercenaries, had to deal with the issue of getting an abortion—a cardinal sin in the Catholic Church.
Others, including both men and women, were forced to eat the excrement of rebels, while local villagers watched and laughed. More than a few white civilians had to witness the murder of their husbands, wives, and children. Congo Mercenary shows that rebel warlords often tried to make young white girls their concubines. When they resisted, they were often killed outright. As the war dragged on and the rebels increasingly lost ground, revolutionary officers gave orders to kill every white person within striking distance. Such an order was carried out in the small town of Likati, where Simbas killed an entire Greek family, including two infants.
At Stanleyville, between November 24th and 27th, approximately seventeen white hostages faced the threat of death at the hands of rebels under the command of Christopher Gbenye, a protégé of Lumumba. Gbenye refused to let the International Red Cross into the city, and he refused to let anyone leave. This forced Brussels to intervene with Operation Dragon Rogue, a multi-national operation featuring Belgian paratroopers descending on the city after jumping out of American planes. 5 Commando stood outside of the city until given the go-ahead by Belgian military advisors. Hoare’s men would eventually enter the city, but were too late to stop the murder of those white civilians who had been held prisoner at Stanleyville’s formerly posh Hotel Victoria.
On the morning when 5 Commando raced towards the city, Gbenye’s official newspaper and radio station belched out: “Ciyuga, Ciyuga! Kill, kill! Kill all the white people. Kill all the men, women and children. Kill them all. Have no scruples. Use your knives and your pangas!”
When the mostly Belgian and American hostages were eviscerated, Belgian paratroopers were just two miles away and 5 Commando’s jeeps and trucks were racing towards the heart of the city. The European owner of the once prestigious Stanleyville Hotel summed up the terrible trauma of the city’s white population when he told marauding soldiers to drink up everything in the hotel bar. As for him, he was going back to Belgium and leaving the “God-forsaken” Congo.
Despite the well-documented cruelties of Stanleyville and other unknown villages throughout the Congo, the Western press continued to write gushing articles in favor of the rebels. One West German periodical even wrote with a straight face that “The Rebels kept order; they always swept the streets clean”. Another German journalist, Uwe Siemon-Netto, would write decades later that “Media celebrities of a new kind and their youthful wannabe acolytes” went to cover Vietnam and other [prototypical "anticolonial struggles"] as the “products of increasingly ideological liberal arts colleges and universities".
