The lorry stopped outside an African school in Kansimba and Captain Jean Schramme climbed out. Teenage boys abandoned their lessons and clustered around, prodding at his uniform, his gun, the badges on his beret. Schramme unlocked the lorry tailgate and waved the boys on board. Concerned teachers watched but said nothing. Laughing, the boys climbed in. Schramme closed the tailgate and got into the cab. The lorry drove off.
‘It was a little curious as a recruiting method,’ said Schramme. ‘But I had no choice. War is war.’1
Schramme had arrived in Kansimba, a town near Lake Tanganyika in north-eastern Katanga, back in January with a group of eight white and twenty black soldiers, the remains of his unit from the December fighting. He began to recruit from the local schools.
‘Sticking to the principle to which I had stayed true, I chose the very young as my soldiers, generally fifteen or sixteen years old,’ said Schramme. ‘Among the blacks this is the best age to make a warrior.’2
The boys only found out they had volunteered when the lorry pulled up outside Schramme’s camp and a doctor told them to undress for a medical exam. He thickened his schoolboy army with white officers, like an emotional 22-year-old former paracommando from Brussels called Norman, and sad-faced former Louvain student René, who listened to classical music and cooked dishes with complex sauces. The commando grew into a battalion. Schramme had a cloth shoulder patch made of a leopard leaping over a map of Katanga.
‘The natives had always called me Léopard since I lived in the Congo,’ said Schramme, who looked more like a lemur than a leopard, ‘so the commando naturally took the name of this animal and became Batallion Léopard.’3
The Belgian planter turned warlord had been reading Quotations from Chairman Mao. He put lessons from communist China’s little red book into practice. The batallion moved through the Kansimba population like fish in the sea, patrolling the bush, helping locals, paying for what they took, repulsing ANC incursions. Morale was high. Schramme held court in crisp combat fatigues at a sprawling plantation house, the radio hissing static and garbled messages in the next room, the terraced lawns outside as manicured as a cricket pitch.
The Belgian was determined to keep Katanga breathing.
In the spring of 1962, anyone not sharing Schramme’s optimism about the future could get good odds on Katanga not surviving the year. The value of the Katangese franc (KF) had plunged: in March 1961 $1 could buy 63 KF. A year later, anyone who still wanted Katangese currency could get 130 for their buck.4
The Unokat fighting had scared Tshombe’s financial backers. The UMHK board in Brussels were holding discreet talks about reunification with the Congolese government. A group of London investors went further with a plan to forcibly divert UMHK’s tax revenues to Léopoldville. The plan failed but had the covert support of the British government while it lasted.
Brussels also wanted to melt Katanga back into the Congo. Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak even recommended the US deport Michel Struelens, the secession’s man in Washington. The 33-year-old Struelens (‘a charming chap’ according to Time magazine) had been inflating Tshombe’s ego with exaggerated accounts of American support.5 Legal issues held up the expulsion and Struelens continued to unleash his lecture The Basic Rights of Man Examined through the Tragedy in Katanga on universities and rotary clubs.6
Spaak was experienced enough a politician to allow a little hypocrisy. He targeted Struelens but did nothing to stop the Marissal clan’s mercenary recruitment.
That was little comfort to Colonel Adelin Marissal. His operation had been running smoothly until April 1962, sending Tshombe around 600 mercenaries, when disillusioned former helper Jean Charlier spilled his guts to newspapers and left-wing politicians. Marissal, terminal cancer chewing his bones, lived in fear of the clan being compromised. Some leftists were already trying to link him with Jean Thiriart, who had just been arrested supplying fake documents and safe houses to French OAS terrorists. It was a smear. Thiriart did not know Marissal and had given up on the secession over a year ago.
‘When all these settlers returned from the Congo, surly, vindictive, speaking their minds,’ said Thiriart, ‘I thought they were sick, like me, at having lost an empire. I was very naive. The cause of their anger was much more mediocre: they were angry about losing the sun and no longer having a boy to do the dishes.’7
Others shared his disenchantment. Thiriart’s former friend Count Arnold de Looz-Coswarem retreated to his family chateau to brood on the shortcomings of parliamentary democracy. Jean Gérard left the Katangese mission in Brussels. Only Colonel Cassart remained involved, fronting a German company that sold aeroplanes to Elisabethville at a healthy mark up.
Even Rhodesia and France were putting on pressure. On 8 January, police from Salisbury stopped a planeload of mercenaries heading for the border. They carried French passports. Toulouse police had already traced their recruiter to a hotel and were on their way to pay him a visit.
‘Central Africa. Immediate work, good money, former soldiers (specialised or not), youths, free to serve, preferably have knowledge of Africa or the Tropics (drivers, radio operators, mechanics). Passport necessary.’
The advert was placed by a Monsieur Philippe, who occupied room seven of Toulouse’s Hôtel Terminus.8 He paid his bills on time and management pretended not to see the crewcut men queueing in the corridor. ‘Philippe’ was Paul Ropagnol, wounded in the leg at the end of the September fighting and preferring the south of France to saluting Faulques every day. Marissal’s men had recruited him to restart French mercenary recruitment.
Tshombe needed all the soldiers he could get. UN troops occupied Elisabethville and other major towns throughout the country. ANC troops controlled many towns in the north and had retaken Manono, won by the Compagnie Internationale in spring 1961. Balubakat Jeunesse burnt villages out in the bush. Tshombe begged for international help and pretended all his mercenaries had left the country with Faulques.
‘The affair of the mercenaries’, he said, ‘is like the tales about sea serpents or the abominable snowman’.9
He did not mention that hundreds of white mercenaries remained in Katanga, most in civilian clothes; that at least 600 Lunda from Northern Rhodesia were serving in the gendarmes; or that Elisabethville had budgeted 1,977.8 million Katangese francs for foreign help this year.10
Sixty of Ropagnol’s recruits had already left for Katanga, with another 300 signed up, when the police kicked in his door. Ropagnol confessed everything about the operation, listing names and adding that of Faulques, unconnected to the operation, as revenge for some argument back in Elisabethville. Faulques cleared himself but Ropagnol got six months for illegal recruitment. The only happy ex-mercenary in France was Trinquier, who sued Tshombe for breach of contract in a Paris court and won 2 million KF. His critics muttered that he was lucky to get the money after his prediction of terrorism in Elisabethville had proved inaccurate.
Despite Ropagnol’s arrest, there was no shortage of new mercenaries, some fresh faces, some returning veterans. Motives varied.
‘I was somebody; all those people looked up to me,’ said one. ‘Even a Katangese major always tried to salute me.’11
‘Plenty of lolly and plenty of fun,’ said a South African masseur.12
‘The Katangese didn’t try to rape our wives,’ said a bitter Belgian.13
The new arrivals joined one of the Groupe Mobiles set up after Unokat. Captain Tavernier, a giraffe-necked young Belgian, ran his ‘Marsupilami’ unit from Kongolo in the north. The son of a settler, Tavernier had joined a mortar platoon for Operation X-Ray, then made second lieutenant in the officer shortage after Morthor. He spent the rest of the year fighting the ANC in northern Katanga. In February 1962, Tavernier’s Marsupilami unit went in with Colonel Kimwanga’s paracommandos to retake Kongolo from the ANC. They found the bodies of 880 executed Katangese rotting around the town.
Captain Maurice Antoine, a Belgian soldier who had been kicked out of Katanga during Rumpunch but sneaked back in time for the December fighting, ran Groupe Mobile Noir in the Kilwa-Pweto-Mitwaba area and kept a low profile. Bob Denard went to Kabondo Diala; his Groupe Bison of twenty-five Europeans and fifty Africans contained long-time friends like Freddy Thielmans and Karl Couke, original Affreux including Charles Masy, and new recruits like Charles Gardien, a bulky Walloon ex-SAS paracommando with a moustache and a bad temper who hated communism, Germans, Frenchmen, the English and Apartheid equally. Denard pacified his sector so efficiently it was soon calm enough for his ex-wife Gisèle and son Philippe to visit. Gardien preferred local girls.
‘White women do not mean anything to me,’ he said to friends.14
While the mercenaries worked like ants trying to rebuild a crumbling hill, Tshombe was in Léopoldville hoping a heavy serving of charm would fool Adoula and the United Nations into believing he was serious about negotiations.
The Katangese President turned up in the Congolese capital on 18 March 1962 to discuss the agreement made at Kitona. The Katangese Assembly had already declared it void. Lunda traditional chiefs backed up that decision at a meeting in Jadotville. They blamed the recent violence on Adoula’s government, the United Nations and US attempts to get hold of Katanga’s copper. Tshombe, grinning ear to ear as always, claimed it was still possible to negotiate.
To everyone’s surprise, Adoula and Tshombe sketched out an agreement that would have allowed substantial autonomy for Katanga in exchange for 50 per cent of the copper revenue. Hopes were raised but Jason Sendwe elbowed his way into the discussions and refused to accept anything short of reunification. Tshombe dropped the agreement, which may have been his idea all along. After that, the two sides remained so far apart that talks continued until the end of June with no result. Tshombe flew home. Adoula officially created a new province in north Katanga, run by Balubakat.
‘There has never been and will never be a Katangese state,’ he said.15
His words angered Tshombe enough to reach out to Lumumba loyalists and other discontents in Léopoldville. He made promises and formed alliances, hoping to bring down Adoula, whom he described as ‘an American dog’ kept in power through US money.16 Katangese cash funded men who thought they could do a better job as prime minister.
‘Without you’, Jean Bolikango told Adoula, ‘Katanga would have come back with no problems and without loss of human life or dispersion of the national inheritance.’17
The United Nations wearily restarted negotiations. Britain, Belgium, France and the USA came up with a plan for reconciliation, with enough options to boycott Katangese copper that UMHK would have an excuse to cease co-operation with Conakat. Washington suggested providing financial support to UMHK in case the Katangese turned nasty.
‘It has perhaps been unrealistic to expect UMHK to stick its head in noose without any assurance of assistance and only slightly less so to ask this of Spaak,’ noted a US State Department official. ‘Although we can do little to protect UMHK personnel except through UN we can offer to share in some ways consistent with availability U.S. funds [to compensate] UMHK losses in destruction of plant and losses of operating revenue that would result from Tshombe’s actions.’18
The plan was passed to U Thant, who smoothed off the rough edges and presented it as his own. Tshombe’s team returned to the dance but made so many objections there seemed no chance of agreement. UMHK offered to put tax receipts in escrow until Tshombe and Adoula could agree on the division. Tshombe refused and made some threats about nationalisation.
‘A bunch of clowns’, U Thant said of Tshombe’s government.19
There was nothing clownish about Tshombe’s tactics: drag out negotiations until the UN gave up and went home. Money was running short in New York. Before 1960, the entire United Nations operation cost $100 million a year. Now the Congo military operations alone cost $500 million a year. The UN was $76 million in debt and only had enough money to remain in the Congo until March 1963.20
The clock was ticking and politicians in Washington wanted the secession settled before the cash ran out. President Kennedy believed Katanga could become the spark for an African civil war: Rhodesia, South Africa, the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, and Congo Brazzaville would support Tshombe; the rest of black Africa would support Adoula. Kennedy saw a continent-wide race war coming unless Tshombe was shut down.
No one believed in Katanga more devoutly than Jean Schramme, but even he could see morale dropping as 1962 rolled on. A joint operation planned with Bob Denard in the summer towards Kikondja, Mwansa and Klambi failed when a supporting Katangese company abandoned their positions rather than fight. Schramme preferred to blame the Frenchman.
‘[Denard] had arrived in the Congo with the two red wool stripes of a corporal. I had been a little scandalised by his rapid promotion. To Sous-Lieutenant then Captain two months later, he burned through all the stages …’21
Denard got some of his promotions by writing gushing tributes to himself and sending the paperwork directly to Tshombe, knowing the president signed most things that crossed his desk without reading them. The former jailbird was on his way to becoming an important man in Katanga, with a salary to match.
For Schramme, Denard’s rise symbolised the rot in Katanga’s foundations. But other factors were at work. The losses and departures of the last year had made a mess of the chain of command. The revolving door of mercenaries with their rivalries and scams did not help. The quality of new Belgian mercenaries in particular had dropped after Colonel Marissal withdrew from the recruitment game in September, when articles in Pourquoi Pas? newspaper finally exposed his operation. Any military gains actually made were quickly undone by government corruption and backstabbing among Tshombe’s entourage. It would be a race to see whether UN finances or Katangese morale collapsed first.
More problems were on the way. Jean Zumbach was in no hurry to take up his new job. And Tshombe’s favourite arms dealer was facing the hangman’s noose.
The main sources for this chapter are Katanga Secession by Jules Gérard-Libois, Schramme’s Battalion Léopard, Denard’s Corsair de la République and Lunel’s Bob Denard: le roi de fortune.
1 Schramme, Le Battalion Léopard, p. 97.
2 Schramme, Le Battalion Léopard, p. 96.
3 Schramme, Le Battalion Léopard, p. 99.
4 Symes, Peter J., Bank Notes of Katanga (privately published, 1998).
5 ‘The Administration: An Abuse of Power’, Time, 28 December 1962.
6 ‘Katanga Controversy’, The Heights, vol. XLIII, no. 18 (6 April 1962).
7 Balace et al., De l’avant à l’après-guerre, p. 139, n. 39.
8 Pasteger, Le visage des affreux, p. 191.
9 Gérard-Libois, Katanga Secession, p. 266.
10 Clarke, S.J.G., The Congo Mercenary: A History and Analysis (The South African Institute of International Affairs, 1968), p. 32.
11 ‘Who are the Mercenaries?’, Time, 22 December 1961.
12 ‘Who are the Mercenaries?’, Time, 22 December 1961.
13 ‘Who are the Mercenaries?’, Time, 22 December 1961.
14 Germani, Hans, White Soldiers in Black Africa (Nasionale Boekhandel Bpk, 1967), p. 12.
15 Gérard-Libois, Katanga Secession, p. 241.
16 US Document (Department of State, Central Files, 770G.00/11–2862).
17 Gérard-Libois, Katanga Secession, p. 267.
18 US Document (Department of State, Central Files, 110.12–McG/9–2962).
19 Gérard-Libois, Katanga Secession, p. 265.
20 US Document (Department of State, Central Files, 770G.00/6–2562).
21 Schramme, Le Battalion Léopard, p. 119.