day after day—in vain.
The first reports of the inspections in Kabimba and Front de Force showed that there were real armed forces there, apparently with a will to fight, although in the case of Kabimba with no training or discipline, and only a certain amount in the case of Front de Force, but all with the same degree of disorganization in keeping track of weapons, observation of the enemy, political work, etc.
In summarizing the situation at the end of May, roughly a month after the first group arrived on April 24, I noted the following in my field diary:
Until Mitoudidi arrived, it was time lost; since then, we have been able to do reconnaissance and have found good receptivity to our suggestions. Perhaps tomorrow, serious training will begin with a group of men that has been promised. It is almost certain that, in the month of June, we will be able to show something by engaging in combat for the first time.
The main defect of the Congolese is that they don’t know how to shoot, so ammunition is wasted; so it’s necessary to begin there. The discipline here is very bad, but one has the impression that things change at the front, where the guys are subject to an accepted discipline although there is always a notable lack of organization.
The most important tasks are: teaching them how to shoot, to fight by laying ambushes (real guerrilla warfare), and establishing certain military norms of organization that will allow us to concentrate our full strength at the point being attacked.
Today we can recognize that the apparently greater discipline at the front was false, and that our three priorities—shooting, ambush technique and the concentration of units for major attacks—were never achieved in the Congo.
The groupings had a tribal character and adopted a positional warfare approach; that is, the combatants occupied what they called barriers. They were generally located in well-chosen places from a tactical point of view, in very high hills to which access was difficult. But camp life for the men meant carrying out no military operations or even undergoing training, confident in the enemy army’s inactivity and relying on the peasants for supplies. The peasants had to bring them food and were frequently humiliated and mistreated. The fundamental character of the People’s Liberation Army was that it was a parasitic army that did not work, did not train, did not fight, and demanded provisions and labor from the local population, sometimes with extreme brutality. The peasants were at the mercy of groups who came on leave from the camps to demand extra food, and who repeatedly consumed their poultry and little luxury food items they kept in reserve.
The revolutionary soldier’s staple food was bukali, which is prepared in the following way: cassava root is peeled and left to dry in the sun for a few days; then it is ground in a mortar exactly like those used for grinding coffee in our mountainous regions; the resulting flour is sifted, boiled in water until it forms a paste, and then eaten. With a good effort, bukali provides the necessary carbohydrates, but what was eaten there was semi-raw, unsalted cassava; this was sometimes complemented with zombe, cassava leaves pounded and boiled, and seasoned with a little palm oil and the meat of some hunted animal. There was plenty of game in that region, but meat was eaten only occasionally. It cannot be said that the combatants were well fed; very little was caught in the lake. But one of their bad habits was their incapacity to march to the base to look for food. On their shoulders they only carried a rifle, a cartridge-belt and their personal effects, which generally was no more than a blanket.
After a while, when we had begun communal living with this unique army, we heard some statements typical of their view of the world. If someone was given something to carry, he would say: “Mimi hapana motocari!” (“I’m not a truck!”). In some cases, when he was with Cubans, this would become: “Mimi hapana Cuban!”(“I’m not a Cuban!”). The food, as well as the weapons and ammunition for the front, therefore, had to be transported by the peasants. It’s clear this type of army can only be justified if, like its enemy counterpart, it actually fights now and again. But as will be seen, this requirement was not met either. And if this state of affairs did not change, the Congolese revolution was inevitably doomed to failure as a result of its own internal weaknesses.
1. Osmany Cienfuegos was the brother of Commander Camilo Cienfuegos. He was minister of public works of the Cuban revolutionary government and president of the foreign relations commission of the first Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, whose members were Foreign Minister Raúl Roa and Commander Manuel Piñeiro Losada. Osmany Cienfuegos was also general secretary of the Organization for the Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL), and, until 2009, vice-president of the Council of Ministers.
2. This painful moment for Che is reflected in the autobiographical short story, The Stone, which shows his great sensibility and literary talent. See: Self-Portrait: A Photographic and Literary Memoir by Ernesto Che Guevara (Ocean Press).
The days that followed were much like the preceding ones. It was a distressing time because we started to hate the angle formed by the two hills that led down to the lake, affording a glimpse only of the stretch of water that they defined as the horizon.
In spite of his goodwill, Mitoudidi did not find the formula that would have allowed us to get down to work. He was most likely restrained by a concrete order from Kabila, whose arrival he anxiously awaited. We all waited, while days passed, one after another, with no change for our expeditionary force.
Moja returned from his tour of inspection to Baraka, Fizi and Lulimba. The impression he brought back was really disastrous. Although he had been received with enthusiasm by the local population, and quite correctly by the leading compañeros, a number of dangerous symptoms were obvious. The first was the open hostility with which people spoke of Kabila and Massengo, as well as Compañero Mitoudidi. All of them were accused, more or less, of not only being outsiders in the region but also of being mere transients who were never where their people needed them.1 There were plenty of armed men in the zone, but they were held back by appalling disorganization, the effects of which, it can be said, were not just similar but even worse than in other cases we had encountered. The big shots spent the day drinking until they got into the most incredible state, without worrying how it might appear to the local people because they considered it the natural behavior of “men.” Considering the facilities at that time for the transport of essential materials across the lake, they had access to enough gasoline to keep traveling back and forth from one end of their extensive sector to the other, although no one could believe these trips served any purpose.
The barrier near Lulimba was seven kilometers from the town, in the highest part of the mountains. It had been a long time since the revolutionary forces had come down to launch an attack, or even to carry out any reconnaissance in the zone; their only activity was to fire off a recoilless 75 mm. cannon. Without knowing the rules of indirect fire (that gun can be used to score a direct hit on a target only up to a distance of 1.5 kilometers), and without knowing the enemy’s exact position, they entertained themselves with massive rocket displays with 75 mm. shells.
I drew all this to Mitoudidi’s attention, and he affirmed the envoys’ impressions, that Moulana, a self-styled major-general in charge of the area, was an anarchist devoid of all revolutionary consciousness who had to be replaced. Mitoudidi had called him in for discussions, but he had refused to come, suspecting that he would be arrested.
As nothing else could be done, we kept insisting on reconnaissance missions and again sent Nane and Nne leading small groups to continue the inspections of the Front de Force and Katenga zones that seemed to offer some possibilities. Aly also set out on a mission to reconnoiter the area around the town of Kabimba and the road from
