REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO COUNTRY READER TABLE OF CONTENTS Alan W. Lukens 1960-1961 Consul, Brazzaville Shirley Elizabeth Barnes 1961-196 Ford Foundation Administrative Assistant, Congo Harlan Cleveland 1961-1965 Assistant Secretary for International Organizations, Washington, DC Hendrick ,an Oss 1962-196 De.uty Chief of Mission, Brazzaville Charles E. 0ushing 1961-1965 Economics Officer, Brazzaville L. Michael 0ives 1961-1966 De.uty Chief of Mission, Brazzaville 0oy 2. Haverkam. 196 -1965 3olitical Officer, Brazzaville Henry L. 2. 4oren 196 -1965 Ambassador, Congo William E. Schaufele, 5r. 196 -1965 Congo Desk Officer, Washington, DC 5ay 4. 4atzen 1977-978 Charg8 d9Affaires, Brazzaville Constance 5. Freeman 1978-1979 3eace Cor.s Director, Brazzaville Alan W. Lukens 198 -1987 Ambassador, Congo 5ose.h C. Wilson I, 1986-1988 De.uty Chief of Mission, Brazzaville 5ames D. 3hilli.s 1990-1991 Ambassador, Congo ALAN W. LUKENS Consul Brazzav lle (1960-1961) Ambassador Alan W. Lukens was born and raised in Philadelphia. He joined the Foreign Service in 1 51. His career included positions in Turkey, Martinique, France, Morocco, South Africa, Senegal, and Kenya, and an ambassadorship to the Congo. He was interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy in 1 8 . :: Then from Paris--from ,-. you then go to another assignment. LU4ENS: I had always wanted to go to Africa, and requested that every time, particularly French Africa, with 3ersonnel. And it ha..ened that the Consul in Brazzaville, who had o.ened the post after the war, died of a heart attack at the end of '59. So they called me from Washington and asked if I'd like to go there. So I did. It was a little embarrassing, getting out of NA2O, because it was su..osed to be a longer assignment, but I found a friend in the U.S. delegation that took my place. So we went down there at the beginning of '60, and I was Consul in Brazzaville for the whole area of French Equatorial Africa. We had a Consul there during the war because Brazzaville was on the air route through Brazil to su..ly the troo.s in the Middle East. 2here's a very funny book called 2he Body Missed the Boat about the su..osed murder of the American Consul in Brazzaville in 19 5. But Aust to recall for you, when de Baulle set u. his Free French movement in 19 0, French Equatorial Africa was the only area that really stuck with him. 2here were ,ichyites in North Africa and West Africa but in Brazzaville Bovernor Beneral, FeliC Ebou8 from French Buiana, jum.ed on board with de Baulle. So de Baulle always had a warm feeling for this area and so France had ke.t it u.. But there again, it was very much of a French colony with very little outside eC.osure. It consisted of Chad, Central African 0e.ublic, Congo and Babon. 2he ca.ital of the whole region was in Brazzaville and it was a very centralized kind of organization although there was a governor for each of the four areas, the High Commissioner Beneral, was in Brazzaville, and he was very much of a pro-consul for France. :: And, when you were there, the Congo was part of France still/ LU4ENS: It was French Equatorial Africa, it was a colony of France, and you had four different .arts of French Equatorial Africa, as I just eC.lained. 2his was the situation when I got there in early '60. Of course, without belaboring the point, that was the big year of African inde.endence. And de Baulle by that time had had his referendum throughout French Africa as to whether or not they would like to stay in the French commonwealth. 2hey all voted to, gave the Dgrande oui,D eCce.t that Buiana refused and the French backed out of there in a very arrogant way. :: ...ungraciously. LU4ENS: ...so the Inde.endence Ceremonies went on. At the beginning of that year you had the Mali Federation which then broke into Senegal and Mali. Eou had 2ogo and Cameroon, which had been Berman colonies, so they got their inde.endence earlier in the s.ring of that year. 2hen, of course, the big event of the year, later, was the inde.endence of Belgian Congo. :: 0ou were sitting right across the river. LU4ENS: I was right across the river. I was on the delegation to the inde.endence. It was headed by 3aley of CBS, and Bob Mur.hy, and I went over there--and I'll never forget that day. I didn't know that much about internal politics but you had 4asavubu as president and Lumumba as premier. We were all sitting in the stands watching the parade, consisting of goose-ste..ing African soldiers led by Belgian--mostly Flemish non-coms, who were screaming at them as they went by in the parade. I said to my wife at that point, D2his is not going to last. 2hey won't acce.t this.D And, true enough, about one week later the DForce 3ubliqueD rose in mutiny and threw out the Belgian officers and non-coms. 2hat's the beginning of that whole scenario. :: What was the situation in Bra22aville itself while you were there, the political situation, how did you deal with it/ LU4ENS: 2he political situation there, as France foresaw, the French in 3aris, was that they were eventually going to have to give inde.endence to all of their colonies. 2hey stalled as much as they could. 2here was a difference of o.inion between 3aris and de Baulle, who wanted to move quickly, and the colonial administrators who thought that these colonies weren't ready for inde.endence. At the last minute France engaged in a rather useless eCercise which was to try to make French Equatorial Africa into one inde.endent country. It had the name of U0AC., Union de la 0e.ublique de l'Afrique Centrale. 2his trial balloon never got off the ground, mostly for a very good African reasonF that all four African leaders in their res.ective countries wanted to be head of it. And they all wanted the ca.ital. So it Aust didn't work. 2here was too much difference among the areas. 2he Babonese, being the smallest and richest, didn't want to s.end their future su..orting the poorer elements like Chad and Central Africa. So then you had the inde.endence of Gaire and about the beginning of August with very, very short notice... :: 1 -.. LU4ENS: 1960, and I'll get into what we did in Gaire earlier. But, at the beginning of August, de Baulle announced that inde.endence would be given very quickly to the four countries of the Entente, in West Africa (Ivory Coast, Dahomey, U..er ,olta--now Burkina Faso, and NigerI. And my colleague, sitting there as Consul in AbidAan, Don Norland, had a very similar eC.erience to mine, because he also covered four countries. Well, what ha..ened was that at the beginning of August de Baulle sent Henri MalrauC, who was Minister of Culture, down as the re.resentative to their inde.endence celebrations. But the French attitude was very much that they were not really getting inde.endence, but only reaching their maturity. And in each s.eech, both in West Africa and in Central Africa, MalrauC went through his routine that Dyou're now twenty-one years old and you've come into your own, and you can have your bank account, but ma and pa are still there, and they're in 3aris, and you shouldn't usur. the eC.erience that you gained from your motherland, so to s.eak.D And the French decided that they would kee. this a very closed ceremony. It turned out to be in my area, after they'd already been to West Africa, an inde.endence every 8 hours, starting with Chad, Bangui, Brazzaville, and then Libreville. So I cabled all this to Washington, and said, DWhat are you going to doJ We need messages, we need a re.resentative to the inde.endence.D Well Washington, being very cautious in those days about offending the French before the 4ennedy era, went to the :uai d'Orsay and said, DWhat do you want us to doJD And they said, DNothing.D 2hen the British did the same thing, and they told the British, DNothing, we don't need any foreign re.resentatives, you've got consuls, they're good enough. We don't even care if the consuls come,D they said in 3aris. So this all went back and forth with cables, and I was getting nowhere about getting anybody from Washington to make a fuss over the inde.endence celebrations because we only had about ten days notice. So finally it became clear that I would be the re.resentative, and I tried very hard to get a message. I couldn't get very far. 2hat was, of course, during the cam.aign in August of '60 between NiCon and 4ennedy, and nobody was terribly interested in this area. So I drafted a message from 3resident Eisenhower to each future president in the area, cabling them to Washington. 2hey finally came back and said, DOkay.D 2hey didn't change anything, and then I translated the message into French so that I could hand each 3resident his at the time of each inde.endence. :: I think it,s very interesting because it shows where things ranked at the time.