Many Congolese youths were forced to fight for their colonial ruler Belgium during the war, writes Stephanie McCrummenin Walikale, Congo
WHILE BOOKS and films have lionised the last surviving second World War veterans in recent years in Britain and the US, a small, handpainted sign along a dirt road in this remote village is just about all that points to a nearly forgotten group of them.
“Camp of Old Soldiers, 1940-1945,” the sign reads in French.
Passing the late afternoon under the pink blooms of a sprawling pear tree, one of those veterans, Louis Ngumbi, recalls his brutal induction in 1940 into the army of Congo’s colonial ruler, Belgium. “I was getting ready to go to the farm,” he says, estimating his age at the time at 16. “And then I saw the local leader – he was Belgian – coming with the police. He pointed and said: ‘Arrest that young boy!’ I didn’t know where I was going.”
It was not until after he was beaten, hauled off to the local prison, stripped of his clothes and outfitted in a crisp uniform of khaki shorts, shirt and white socks that Ngumbi finally realised, “Ah, I’m going into the army”.
African battlefields figure prominently in the history of the second World War. But the story of the hundreds of thousands of African soldiers who served in campaigns mostly for British and French colonial rulers is only beginning to be told fully. Much like African-American soldiers who served in a mostly segregated US army during the war, African soldiers served under racist colonial structures that were at times challenged by the urgencies of war.
When the war ended, though, African soldiers often received little compensation for lost hands, legs, eyes and other war-related disabilities. Some did not receive pensions. As waves of nationalism gave way to Africa’s independence movements in the 1950s, the soldiers often turned on their colonial officers. In other cases, revolutionaries branded the old colonial forces as traitors.
References to Congo’s involvement in the second World War are usually limited to Shinkolobwe, the mine that supplied uranium for the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Mentions of Congolese soldiers appear here and there: in academic articles; in a bombastic account published in a 1941 pamphlet by the Belgian Information Society of New York; in an apology in Time magazine after it omitted the role of Congolese “recruited” by the Belgians for the war.
“These days, nobody thinks about us much,” says Ngumbi, who now lives at a dilapidated camp for veterans, a stretch of mudwalled buildings populated mostly these days by their descendants.
As he begins his story, Jean Tami, a former sergeant major who still carries a tarnished medal and his Belgian identity card in the pocket of tattered trousers, walks over to the pear tree and salutes Ngumbi, before sitting down in a bent metal chair. Ngumbi offers a more lacklustre wave.
Their service began, they recall, in 1940. At the time, Adolf Hitler’s forces occupied Belgium and the government was exiled in London, where officials were trying to curry favour with the allies. To that end, Belgium offered up to the British several detachments of Congolese soldiers from the Force Publique, as the colonial army was known.
Congo was still under Belgian rule, having suffered perhaps the most brutal exploitation of any African colony during the reign of King Leopold II, who essentially enslaved the population to build his personal fiefdom. Though reforms were introduced by 1908, the old culture of brutality lingered. “When the Belgians were here, it was like living in a kind of prison,” says Ngumbi, recalling how he saw things as a child.
“You couldn’t shake hands with a white. You couldn’t sit with a white. We were thinking maybe white people were not human.”
When the local Belgian authorities, acting with Congolese police, captured Ngumbi in 1940, they used one of Leopold’s old tricks to subdue him. “They said if you escape, we will arrest your mother, your father, and we’ll mistreat them until you show up.”
Tami’s experience was similar. The local police, led by a Belgian, captured him as he was walking home from school. They beat him and sent him to prison, where he was examined and weighed. Tami is unsure of his age at the time, but he weighed 99 pounds (seven stone) and was apparently deemed fit for soldiering. “We didn’t know exactly what we were doing at first, but we were fighting for our country,” he says. “In front of a white, you couldn’t say no.”
The men were sent to training camps and taught how to march and shoot guns. Eventually, they joined thousands of other Congolese soldiers on the long trek by foot, rail and boat through the jungles of Congo, the searing desert of south Sudan and finally to the front lines in Ethiopia.
Though they were initially terrified by guns spewing dozens of bullets at once, the men got their footing and often had the enemy “running like cows”, says Tami.
Tami and Ngumbi say they were always under the command of a Belgian officer. Still, they were treated relatively well as soldiers, eating and getting paid regularly, even if the global dynamics of the war were not made clear.
“We were seeing only white people – whether they were Belgians or Italians, we didn’t know. We were only shooting on white people,” Ngumbi says, referring to people he later learned were Germany’s Italian allies.
“During that period, Hitler wanted to colonise the world, and we were trying to stop him.”
According to some accounts, the Congolese soldiers managed some impressive victories in the Ethiopian foothills, capturing several important towns, 15,000 Italian prisoners and nine generals, despite being outnumbered.
Despite the circumstances of their enlistment, both men say they felt a certain pride by the time they returned home and were received by cheering crowds in the capital, Kinshasa. Their wartime experience had an effect, however, on how the men perceived their colonial rulers – less like scary gods and more like faulty human beings. At war, they saw officers eating and using the toilet, sweating and dying by bullets.
“Before, we didn’t know,” says Tami, who eventually joined the movement for Congo’s independence along with Ngumbi.
“We were thinking they were children of God. Then, later, we thought they were people like us.”
These days, the veterans get by on food and help from relatives.
War has swept a few times through Walikale, with a succession of rebel groups and recently the Congolese army looting the veterans’ camp. The soldiers stole the men’s boots, uniforms, Congolese flag, and most of their medals.
“Maybe they want to sell them,” says Ngumbi. “Today, there are no soldiers in Congo. Today, they are jokers.” – (LA Times-Washington Post service)