The Congo: Cheers & Beers

THE CONGO

Back to Leopoldville from a week-long tour of his native Katanga flew Premier Moise Tshombe. He had ceaselessly exhorted rural Africans to till the land and urban Africans to keep their hands out of the till, and had been cheered to the echo wherever he went. His most delicate mission, however, was to soothe the 4,000 grumbling ex-gendarmes who once served him admirably in the old secessionist days, and who had waited with forlorn fidelity in Angola during Tshombe’s exile from the Congo. Now the troops were billeted uncomfortably in railroad boxcars at the mining town of Kolwezi, and demonstrated their ugly mood by refusing to let trains enter or leave the station.

Lex Ex, as the Katangese call them, also refused to join the Congolese army until they received the back pay—a billion Congolese francs ($5,555,555) by their computation—they felt was due them. Tshombe brought them 40 million francs as a sweetener, and promised to send them to the military base at Kamina, where they would be forged into a crack fighting unit that would save the day for the Congo.

Lex Ex cheered and cheered—until Tshombe was out of sight. Then, the gendarmes loaded their automatic rifles, cut the main roads into Kolwezi and held up the local branch of the Banque du Congo. From the vault they took an additional 30 million francs, then went out and got drunk. That night, as they slept it off in their boxcars, steam engines hissed up, locked on, and hauled them off to Kamina. Thus ended the long estrangement of Lex Ex.