Politics and Tribalism in the Katanga

Abstract

HE FOURTEEN MILLION inhabitants of the former Belgian Congo are divided into an estimated 183 culturally distinct tribes and sub-tribes including Pygmies, Nilotics, Sudanese, and Bantu.The 144 Bantu-speaking tribes contain most of the population and inhabit at least two-thirds of the land area. Despite this diversity, the languages and cultures of the Congo are relatively homogeneous, and extend north and south of the political boundaries to include the entire Congo Basin.2 The Katanga is second only to Orientale in size among the six Congo provinces, and is infinitely the richest, providing 65 per cent of all Congo exports. The huge mining company of Union Miniere du Haut-Katanga alone paid one-third of the nation's budget, which in 1954 was 160 million dollars.3 This helps explain why nearly a third of all the non-Africans in the Congo (28,455 out of 94,531 in 1955) lived in the Katanga. In contrast, the Katanga African population of one and one-half million is the smallest of any province, and its population density of 7.56 per square mile is less than half the average throughout the country. Thus while the ratio of Europeans to Africans throughout the Congo was only 1 in 140, in the Katanga it was 1 in 50. Economically the Congo can not hope to become a viable nation without the Katanga, whose President, Moise Tshombe, declared it an independent state and has been reluctant to join any confederation of provinces unless the Katanga controls the revenues and hence the political power. This paper will attempt to analyze political developments in the Katanga immediately before and after Independence (June 30, 1960) in terms of the ethnographic background, and on this basis to predict some likely future developments. The Katanga was first entered by Lacerda in 1798, and traversed by the Portuguese pombeiros in 1806-10 and by David Livingstone in 1853; but it remained virtually unknown until the 1890's when the geologists Cornet and Diederich discovered its tremendous mineral resources. Before this time, the meager game and unproductive soil had attracted only a sparse and scattered population, whose complicated migration patterns are fairly well known through traditional