I don’t know how to explain this. Maybe it was true that they did not want to start preparatory work so as not to ignore the relevant authority, in this case the commander of the base.
One day I ordered Moja to go to the Upper Base with some men, on the pretext of training them for a march. He did this and the group returned at night, weary, soaked and chilled to the bone. It was a very cold and wet place, with constant mist and persistent rain; the people there said they were making a hut for us, which would take another few days. With patience on both sides, I outlined various arguments why we should go up to the base: we could help build the shelter in a spirit of sacrifice, so that we would not be a burden, etc., etc. and they would then search for new pretexts for delay.
This enforced holiday saw the beginning of enjoyable talks with Compañero Kiwe, the head of information. He is a tireless conversationalist, who speaks French at an almost supersonic speed. Day after day in our conversations he would offer me an analysis of the most important figures in the Congolese revolution. One of the first to receive a lashing from his tongue was Olenga, a general in the Stanleyville area and in Sudan. According to Kiwe, Olenga was little more than an ordinary soldier, maybe a lieutenant in Bidalila’s forces, who had been charged by Bidalila to make some incursions toward Stanleyville and then return. But instead of doing this, Olenga initiated his own operations during those easy moments of revolutionary flux, and raised himself by one rank each time he captured a village. By the time he reached Stanleyville he was a general. The conquests of the Liberation Army ended there—which solved the problem because, if they had continued, there were no further military grades with which to reward Compañero Olenga.
For Kiwe, the real military leader was Colonel Pascasa, who later died in a fight among the Congolese in Cairo; he was the man with genuine military knowledge and a revolutionary attitude, and he represented Mulele.
On another day, Kiwe very subtly raised criticisms of Gbenyé, commenting casually that his attitude had been unclear at the beginning and now, although he was the president and a revolutionary, there were more revolutionary leaders, etc. As the days passed and we became better acquainted, Kiwe portrayed Gbenyé as a man more suited to lead a gang of thieves than a revolutionary movement. I cannot vouch for Kiwe’s claims, but some are quite famous: for example, the story of Gbenyé’s role in Gizenga’s imprisonment, when he was minister of the interior in the Adoula government. Others are less well known, but if they are true, they cast a sinister light on Gbenyé, such as plots to assassinate Mitoudidi and connections with the Yankee embassy in Kenya.
On another occasion, the target of Kiwe’s tongue was Gizenga, whom he described as a revolutionary, but a left-wing opportunist, who wanted to do everything by the political road, who thought a revolution could be made with the army, and even that he had been given money to organize the revolutionary forces in Leopoldville,3 but he had used it instead to form a political party.
These chats with Kiwe gave me some idea of what certain figures were like, but above all they very clearly highlighted the lack of cohesion in this group of revolutionaries (or malcontents), who constituted the General Staff of the Congolese revolution.
So the days passed. Messengers crossed the lake with an amazing capacity to distort any news, and others went off to Kigoma on some leave or other.
In my capacity as a doctor (an epidemiologist—which, if this illustrious branch of the Aesculapian fauna forgives me for saying so, entitled me to know nothing about medicine), I worked for a few days with Kumi at the clinic and noticed several alarming facts: the first being the high number of cases of venereal disease, often due to infection picked up in Kigoma. What concerned me at the time was not the state of health of the general population and the prostitutes of Kigoma, in particular, but the fact that the frequent trips across the lake meant many of our combatants could become infected. Other questions also arose. Who paid those women? Where did the money come from? How were the revolution’s funds being spent?
From the first few days of our stay, we also had the opportunity to see some cases of alcohol poisoning caused by the famous pombe. This is a spirit distilled from fermented corn and cassava flour, which is not so high in alcohol content but the distilled liquor has terrible effects. Presumably these arise not so much from the concentration of the alcohol itself as from the amount of impurities contained in the liquor due to the rudimentary method of its production. There were days when the camp was awash with pombe, leaving behind a trail of brawling, drunkenness, indiscipline, etc.
Peasants from the surrounding area began to visit the clinic after hearing on “Radio Bemba” [word of mouth] that there were doctors in the area. Our supply of medicines was poor, but a Soviet medical consignment came to our aid. It had not been selected with a civilian population in mind, but naturally to meet the needs of an army in the field—and even then, it did not contain an adequate range of medicines. Such imbalances were to be a constant feature of our time in the Congo. The shipments of very valuable weapons and equipment were sent in such a way that they always turned out to be incomplete. Shipments inevitably featured cannon and machine guns without ammunition or essential components; rifles arrived with the wrong ammunition, mines without detonators—this was the inevitable character of supplies arriving from Kigoma.
In my opinion, although I have not been able to confirm this in detail, all these failures were due to the disorganized state of the Congolese Liberation Army, and to the shortage of cadres with a minimal capacity to check equipment as it arrived. The same occurred with medical supplies, with the additional factor that they were stored in one gigantic mess in La Playa, where the reserves of food and weapons were piled in total chaos. I tried several times to obtain permission for us to organize the warehouse, and I suggested that some types of ammunition—such as bazooka or mortar shells—should be moved out of there. But nothing happened until much later.
Contradictory news arrived from Kigoma every day. Occasionally an item was repeated so often that at some point it became true, for example, that a group of Cubans was waiting for a boat, an engine or something to get through; or that Mitoudidi would cross the lake tomorrow or the day after, and then—when the day after tomorrow arrived—that he would be crossing the following day, etc.
Around this time, we heard news of the conference in Cairo4 from Emmanuel on one of his frequent trips to Kigoma and back. The result had been a complete triumph for the revolutionary line. Kabila would stay for a while to make sure that the agreement was implemented, then he would go somewhere to have an operation on a cyst—not very serious but bothersome—and this would delay him a little longer.
We had to find something to do to avoid total idleness, so we organized lessons in French and Swahili, as well as general education classes, which were desperately needed by our troop. Given the nature of the classes and the teachers, this could not contribute much to the compañeros’ education, but it did have the important function of passing the time. Our morale remained high although complaints were starting to be heard among the compañeros as they watched the days pass unproductively. Also hovering over us was the specter of malaria and the other tropical fevers that struck nearly everyone in one form or another; these often responded to malaria drugs, but left behind troublesome aftereffects, such as general debility or lack of appetite, which added to the incipient pessimism creeping into the troop’s morale.
As the days went by, the picture of organizational chaos became more evident. I myself took part in the distribution of Soviet medical supplies and this resembled a gypsy marketplace; each representative of the armed groups produced figures, and cited facts and reasons why he should have access to a greater amount of medicine. There were several conflicts as I tried to stop some medicine or special equipment being unnecessarily carried off to the front lines, but everyone wanted everything. They started to claim incredible numbers of combatants in their group: one declared 4,000, another 2,000, etc. These were inventions, which had no objective basis except in the number of peasants living near the army and potentially becoming a source of future combatants.
