With the stage set, Reid turns to detailing how quickly the country collapsed. On July 5th, the African rank and file of the Force Publique were growing restless; for one thing, despite independence, no Congolese soldier had been promoted above the level of first sergeant major. Janssens, in response, gathered soldiers under his command, took out a piece of chalk, and wrote on a blackboard, “Before independence = after independence.” This assertion of authority backfired, and large-scale rioting and attacks on white officers followed. In a calculated response, Belgian troops, welcomed by Tshombe, landed in Katanga, ostensibly to protect their countrymen. In short order, Tshombe and his Belgian minders declared Katanga an independent state. Within a month of Congo’s independence, Belgian soldiers advanced on the capital; they controlled airfields across the country, and gave Lumumba orders about where he was allowed to travel. One night, in an incident that could have been straight out of Evelyn Waugh, a Belgian soldier shot at a correspondent for Time, and then apologized, saying, “In the dark I thought you were an African.”
Lumumba requested U.N. assistance in the form of international troops to support the Congolese government and keep the peace, thus paving the way for the Belgians to leave. The U.N. was led by the Swedish diplomat Dag Hammarskjöld, and today, when few people can name the organization’s head, it is hard to comprehend how large a figure he was. The son of a Swedish Prime Minister, he was cool and cerebral and difficult to read, and he commanded international respect. Largely liberal in outlook, he was clearly upset by the Belgian intervention, and saw the importance of newly independent states developing into truly sovereign countries. “I must do this,” Hammarskjöld said upon hearing of Lumumba’s request. “God knows where it will lead this organization and where it will lead me.”
But Hammarskjöld, who held many of the prejudices typical of his background and his era, took an immediate dislike to Lumumba. Conor Cruise O’Brien, the Irish diplomat and writer who led later U.N. operations in Congo—Hammarskjöld picked him for the job after reading a book of his essays on Catholic writers—once wrote that Hammarskjöld shared the “sometimes unconscious European assumptions that order in Africa is primarily a matter of safeguarding European lives and property.”
The U.N. ended up limiting Lumumba’s options. Its forces dithered about entering Katanga, causing Tshombe’s breakaway regime to further establish itself with Belgian help. Hammarskjöld wrote that it was critical to insure that U.N. troops would not be used by Lumumba to subdue Katanga, Reid explains. When Hammarskjöld visited Congo, he passed through the capital without meeting Lumumba, and went directly to see Tshombe. Lumumba was stunned and enraged. We’re accustomed to stories about an ineffectual U.N., of course, but Reid attributes its conduct to the preferences of major Western powers—they didn’t want an aggressive U.N. deployment that would appear directed against Belgium—and of Hammarskjöld himself.