Moïse Kapenda Tshombe (sometimes written Tshombé; 10 November 1919 – 29 June 1969) was a Congolese businessman and politician. He served as the president of the secessionist State of Katanga from 1960 to 1963 and as prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1964 to 1965.
Tshombe was born to an aristocratic Lunda family and ran several businesses in Katanga Province before becoming involved in politics, cofounding the pro-Western, anti-communist CONAKAT party in 1958 and advocating for autonomy for Katanga province. Following the country's accession to independence in June 1960, Tshombe became president of the autonomous province, and soon came into conflict with the central government's leftist prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. Accusing Lumumba of communist sympathies, Tshombe declared Katanga's independence as the breakaway State of Katanga, becoming a major actor of the Congo Crisis. Following Lumumba's overthrow and execution by Tshombe's supporters in 1961, the Katanga rebellion was suppressed in 1963, forcing Tshombe into exile.
The following year, he was made prime minister of the country as part of a new coalition government against the Simba rebellion by Lumumba's supporters. In 1965, he founded the CONACO alliance, which comfortably won the March and April general elections. However, he was dismissed as Prime Minister in October of that year, being replaced by Évariste Kimba. Following the November 1965 coup which ended the Congo Crisis, he was charged with treason and was forced into exile again. He died four years later under disputed circumstances.
Early life A member of the Lunda ethnic group, Tshombe was born near Musumba, Belgian Congo, the son of a successful businessman. The Tshombe family were Lunda royalty and a number of Tshombes had reigned as the Mwaant Yav, the traditional king of the Lunda people. He received his education from an American missionary school and later trained as an accountant. In the 1950s, he took over a chain of stores in Katanga Province, which failed. Tshombe ran a number of businesses, which all failed, requiring his wealthy family to bail him out. Tshombe later became involved in politics.
Unlike the other provinces of the Belgian Congo, Katanga was rich in mineral resources, such as copper, tin and uranium, all of which were exploited by the Union Minière company. Uranium from the Shinkolobwe mine was used in developing nuclear weapons by the United States and Nazi Germany during World War II. By the 1950s, the prospect of wealth derived from the ores had attracted 32,000 Belgian settlers to Katanga, which was the highest number of whites for any province in Belgian Congo. The mining industry provided, by the standards of Africa, well paying jobs, and immigrants arrived from the other provinces of the Belgian Congo.
Tshombe, like many members of the Lunda royalty, was close to the settler elite, and felt threatened by the flood of Kasai Baluba moving into Katanga. In the late 1950s, the Belgians allowed a limited degree of democracy in the Belgian Congo and in the first municipal elections in 1957, the majority of the mayors elected were Baluba, which sparked fears that the Lunda would be a marginalized group in their own province. Tshombe's political involvement started in 1957 in response to the perceived threat of Baluba domination.
Political career Along with Godefroid Munongo, he founded the Confédération des associations tribales du Katanga (CONAKAT) party. CONAKAT promoted a federal Congo independent of the Belgian colonial empire. CONAKAT was founded in October 1958 to address the perceived problems of "immigration" into Katanga from the other provinces of the Belgian Congo, and its platform called for upholding the rights of the "indigenous" peoples of Katanga by ending the "immigration". The majority of the CONAKAT supporters were Lunda, Batabwa, Tshowke and Bayeke, most of whom lived in southern Katanga.
In common with the other members of the Lunda elite, the aristocratic Tshombe looked back nostalgically to the Kingdom of Lunda that once covered much of northern Angola, the southern Belgian Congo and Northern Rhodesia (modern Zambia) in the 17th and 18th centuries. CONAKAT formed an electoral alliance with the Union Katangaise party that represented the white Belgian settlers of Katanga. Both CONAKAT and the Union Katangaise wanted very broad autonomy for Katanga within an independent Congo in order to keep the wealth generated by the mining industry within Katanga. In contrast to CONAKAT with its calls for autonomy and curbs on "immigration", the "immigrants" in Katanga tended to favor the parties that called for a more centralized state.
President of Katanga
CONAKAT won control of the Katanga provincial legislature in the May 1960 general elections. One month later, the Congo became an independent republic. Tshombe became President of the autonomous province of Katanga. Patrice Lumumba was tasked with forming a national government. Members of his party, the Mouvement National Congolais, were given charge of the portfolios of national defence and interior, despite Tshombe's objections. The portfolio for economic affairs was awarded to a CONAKAT member, but this was undercut by the positioning of nationalists in control of the Ministry and Secretariat for Economic Coordination. Mines and land affairs were placed under separate portfolios. Tshombe declared that this diluting of CONAKAT's influence rendered his agreement to support the government "null and void".
On the evening of 11 July, Tshombe, accusing the central government of communist leanings and dictatorial rule, announced that Katanga was seceding from the Congo. Tshombe had the full support of both Belgium and the Union Minière in proclaiming Katanga independent. One American diplomat described Katanga as a sham, reporting to Washington that the State of Katanga was "designed mainly for the protection of European lives and property". Favoring continued ties with Belgium, Tshombe asked the Belgian government to send military officers to recruit and train a Katangese army. Tshombe's Belgian military adviser, Major Guy Weber, on 13 July 1960 appointed Major Jean-Marie Crèvecœur to train an army for Katanga.
To disguise its military nature, the force being raised and trained was called the Katangese gendarmerie, but this was highly misleading as it was in fact an army. The majority of the officers training the gendarmerie were Belgian. The Belgian historian Jules Gérard-Libois wrote: "During the entire month of August, a veritable race against the clock took place with the objective, for Tshombe and his advisers, of building a more or less efficient gendarmery before the eventual withdraw of the Belgian troops". Tshombe engaged in a successful bluff in the summer of 1960 as he maintained that Katanga had the military forces to repel an invasion while an army was being raised.
Tshombe demanded United Nations recognition for independent Katanga, and he announced that any intervention by UN troops would be met with force. Nonetheless, Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and his successor, Cyrille Adoula, successfully requested intervention from UN forces. UN forces were sent under the direction of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld.
The British diplomat Brian Urquhart, who met Tshombe several times, wrote: "Tshombe was not stupid, but he desperately wanted to be liked and recognized. He tended to agree with the last person he had talked to and could be counted on to go back on any agreement as soon as he had seen his next visitor. He was also an accomplished hypochondriac, using feigned ill health to avoid answering awkward questions. “J’ai mal à la gorge, Monsieur Urquhart” ("I have a sore throat, Mr. Urquhart"), he would suddenly whisper. "Je dois prendre immédiatement une piqûre" ("I must immediately get a [medical] shot.") And that would be the end of the conversation. Tshombe was basically a weak person who was always being manipulated by others – the Union Minière, right-wing politicians in Europe and the United States, mercenaries, arms dealers and other adventurers who were after his money."
France, wishing to take advantage of Katangese minerals, sent to Tshombe the reinforcement of the mercenary Bob Denard and his men . It was supported by the networks of Jacques Foccart, the "Mr. Africa" of the French government.
Lumumba's government was dissolved, and Lumumba taken prisoner by commander of the army, General Joseph Mobutu and detained at Camp Hardy in Thysville. Harold Charles d'Aspremont Lynden (Belgian minister for African Affairs) sent a highly confidential telegram on 16 January 1961 to the government in Léopoldville (President Joseph Kasa-Vubu and Mobutu) to send Lumumba to Katanga. That would have stemmed from Lumumba's increasing popularity among soldiers, who might release him. Meanwhile, soldier mutinies and unrest increased by the day, at Prison Camp Hardy in Thysville. The telegram has still not been shown to exist.
Whilst being flown in a Sabena Douglas DC-4 plane to Katanga, Lumumba was beaten by the Congolese soldiers escorting him. In custody in Katanga, Lumumba was visited by Katangese notables and Belgian officers, who included Tshombe, Godefroid Munongo, Kibwe, Kitenge, Grandelet, Son, Gat, Huyghé, Tignée, Verscheure, Segers and Rougefort. Lumumba's execution, on 17 January, was carried out by a firing squad led by a Belgian mercenary, Julien Gat.The Assassination of Lumumba, Ludo De Witte, 2003,
In September 1961, the United Nations launched Operation Morthor with the aim of reintegrating Katanga into the Congo, causing Tshombe to flee into Northern Rhodesia for a time. However, the Katangese gendarmerie proved to be tougher than expected and in the siege of Jadotville, Irish troops serving under the United Nations flag were forced to surrender. Hammarskjöld, flew to meet Tshombe to discuss a ceasefire. After the meeting, Hammarskjöld was killed in an airplane crash.
Tshombe become an iconic figure for American conservatives in the 1960s, who saw him as an acceptable African leader. The American historian Kyle Burke wrote: "To them [American conservatives], Tshombe represented a comfortable kind of decolonization, in which elite Africans would manage the transition from colony to nation without altering the existing racial, political and economic order, thereby ensuring that communists would not gain a foothold in these countries". American conservatives presented the Belgian Congo as a place of racial harmony, which Tshombe had tried to preserve.
The principal lobbying group for Tshombe was the American Committee for Aid to Katangan Freedom Fighters that portrayed the United Nations as a communist-dominated organization that was seeking to crush Katanga to achieve Soviet foreign policy goals in Africa. The support for Tshombe was at least in part related to American domestic politics as the Kennedy administration supported the United Nations against Katanga and the support for Tshombe in the United States came mostly from conservative Republicans and Democrats, who used Kennedy's opposition to Tshombe to argue that he was "soft on communism". By contrast, Afro-Americans loathed Tshombe, seeing him as an "Uncle Tom" figure and a black man who was submissive and docile towards the colonial regime.
Prime Minister of the Congo
In 1963, UN forces succeeded in suppressing Katanga, driving Tshombe into exile in Northern Rhodesia and then Spain. Tshombe took 890 suitcases full of one million gold pieces with him into exile, which he placed into various European banks, allowing him to live in comfort and luxury. At the same time, the UN forces found that the Katangese treasury had been stripped bare. The entire vault contained only £10 British pounds together with one dead rat.