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.
Contents
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.
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.
In early 1964, the Simba rebellion broke out and the Congolese government rapidly lost control of the entire eastern half of the Congo. At the same time, Tshombe started to correspond with several of his former enemies such as the justice minister, Justin-Marie Bomboko; the police chief, Victor Nendaka; and most importantly, Mobutu.
As the Armée Nationale Congolaise could not handle the Simbas, Mobutu argued that the Congo needed Western help. Mobutu had been the king-maker of Congolese politics ever since he staged his first coup in 1960. He pressured Kasa-Vubu to appoint Tshombe premier on the grounds that he was the Congolese politician most likely to secure Western support.
Most of the economic concessions in the Belgian Congo were para-statal, as the Belgian state had invested its own funds alongside those of European capitalists in developing the concessions. When Belgium granted independence to the Congo in 1960, the Belgians refused to transfer their shares in the concessions to the Congolese state under the grounds that the Congo refused to assume the debts that the Belgians had incurred when developing the concessions, which deprived the Congolese state of much needed revenue.
In March 1964, the Belgian Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak visited Leopoldville and agreed to transfer the Belgian shares of the concessions. During the same visit, Spaak seems to have made appointing Tshombe premier the precondition of the share transfer. Finally, the administration of John F. Kennedy was very hostile towards Tshombe, but on 22 November 1963 Kennedy was assassinated. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson was more supportive of Tshombe, viewing him as a firmly pro-Western politician.
In July 1964, he returned to the Congo to serve as prime minister in a new coalition government. His cabinet was sworn in on 10 July. Tshombe's national support was derived from the backing of provincial political bosses, customary chiefs, and foreign financial interests. Among his first acts in office were the lifting of a curfew in Léopoldville, the release of 600 political prisoners—including Antoine Gizenga, and the ordering of Katangese gendarmes to return from their exile in Angola to the Congo and join the national army.
Later life
In 1965, Tshombe's brother, Daniel, became the Mwaant Yav, which greatly added to his appeal in Katanga. Traditionally, the title of Mwaant Yav alternated between different Lunda royal families, but since 1965 the office of Mwaant Yav has been held by members of the Tshombe family. In 1967, Tshombe was sentenced to death in absentia.
On 30 June 1967, Tshombe was in a Hawker Siddeley jet aircraft that was hijacked by Francis Bodenan, an agent of the French SDECE. According to the Congolese government, Tshombe was travelling to Africa. He was taken to Algeria, jailed, and placed under house arrest. At his trial, he was represented by French lawyer René Floriot. The pilots of the plane, Britons Trevor Copleston and David Taylor, were released and returned to the United Kingdom. The Congolese government demanded his extradition to Congo and his Western supporters agitated for his release.
The Algerians resisted both demands. A part of his supporters gathered to form the Tshombe Emergency Committee in the U.S., including Marvin Liebman and William F. Buckley, to press for his release and move to Spain. The Tshombe Emergency Committee filed a number of legal challenges to force the Algerians to release Tshombe to no avail. Long-time aide Michel Struelens travelled to different European cities to lobby for Tshombe, eventually to no avail.
Death and legacy
Tshombe died in Algeria in 1969. The Algerian government called in eight Algerian doctors and three French doctors, who concluded that he died in his sleep. Later, a postmortem concluded a natural death. Tshombe's nephew Joseph Kayomb Tshombe reported that no doctor chosen by the Tshombe family was admitted at the postmortem.
Further doubts were raised regarding Tshombe's death by former governor of Katanga and political exile Daniel Monguya Mbenge, who accused French lawyer Jacques Vergès of poisoning Tshombe by order of Mobutu. In the context of a series of interviews regarding a conspiracy theory about the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy, Belgian mercenary Joseph Smal told author Stephen J. Rivele that Tshombe was killed by two injections with two different substances, prepared by the CIA.
Tshombe was buried in a Methodist service at Etterbeek Cemetery, near Brussels, Belgium. Owing to his role in the death of Lumumba and his association with Western interests, Tshombe's name became synonymous with "sellout" to Black African nationalists.
Tshombe's nephew, Jean Nguza Karl-i-Bond, later became a politician and was prime minister from 1980 to 1981.
Portrayals
The plot of the 1978 war film The Wild Geese is based in part on speculation that Tshombe's plane had initially been diverted to Rhodesia before being sent to Algeria. The film's characters Colonel Allen Faulkner and President Julius Limbani were largely based on Tshombe and his military ally Mad Mike Hoare.
Tshombe has been played twice by the French actor Pascal N'Zonzi, first in the 2000 film Lumumba and again in the 2011 film Mister Bob. He was portrayed by Danny Sapani in the 2016 film The Siege of Jadotville.
Honours
Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Crown.
