Congo Diary. Ernesto Che Guevara

came to the Congo.

      We chatted on in a friendly manner without mentioning the proposal, and I discovered a number of things that I had not known before. Lieutenant-Colonel Lambert explained with a friendly, cheerful spirit that airplanes had no importance for them because they had dawa, a medicine that makes a person invulnerable to bullets.²

      “I’ve been hit a number of times, but the bullets simply fell to the ground.”

      He said this with a smile on his face, and I felt obliged to respond to the joke, which I saw as a sign of how little importance they attached to the enemy’s weapons. But I soon realized it was meant seriously, that the magical protection of dawa was one of the great weapons of triumph of the Congolese army.

      This dawa did a lot of damage to military preparedness. It operates according to the following principle: A liquid in which herbal substances and other magical ingredients have been dissolved is thrown over the combatant, and certain occult markers—nearly always including a coal mark on the forehead—are administered to him. This protects him against all kinds of weapons (although the enemy too relies upon magic), but he must not touch anything not belonging to him, touch a woman or feel fear, or the protection will be ineffective. The reason for any failure was very simple: a dead man is one who became fearful, stole or slept with a woman; and anyone wounded is someone who succumbed to fear. As fear accompanies war, wounds were quite naturally attributed to fear—that is, to a lack of faith. And as the dead cannot speak, all three transgressions can be readily ascribed to them.

      This belief is so strong that no one goes into battle without having the dawa performed on them. I was constantly afraid that this superstition would rebound against us, and that we would be blamed for any military disaster involving a lot of casualties. I tried several times to discuss the dawa with those in leadership positions in an effort to win people away from it—but this was impossible. The dawa is treated as an article of faith. Even the most politically developed argued that it is a natural, material force and that they, as dialectical materialists, recognized the power of the dawa, whose secrets lie with jungle medicine men.

      After the talk with the brigade leaders, I met with “Tremendo Punto” alone and explained who I was. He was devastated. He kept talking of an “international scandal” and insisting that “no one must find out, please, no one must find out.” It had come as a bolt from the blue and I was fearful of the consequences, but my identity could no longer be a secret if we wanted to use the influence I could exert.

      That night, “Tremendo Punto” left to inform Kabila of my presence in the Congo; the Cuban officials who had been with us on the crossing and the naval technician departed with him. The technician had the task of sending two mechanics—by return mail, so to speak—since one of the weaknesses we had noted was the complete lack of maintenance of the boats used for crossing the lake and their engines.

      The next day, I asked that we be sent to the permanent camp, a base five kilometers from the General Staff headquarters, at the top of the mountains that rose (as mentioned previously) from the lake’s shore. The delays began immediately. The commander had gone to Kigoma to sort out some matters, and we had to wait for him to return. Meanwhile, a rather arbitrary training program was discussed, and I made a counterproposal: namely, to divide 100 men into groups no larger than 20, and to give them all an overview of infantry activity, with some specialization in weapons, engineering (especially trench-digging), communications and reconnaissance, in keeping with our capabilities and the means at our disposal. The program would last four to five weeks, and the group would be sent to carry out operations under Mbili’s command. Then it would return to base, where a selection would be made of those who had proved themselves. In the meantime, the second company would be trained, so that it in turn could go to the front when the first one returned. I thought this would allow the necessary selection to be made while the men were being trained. I explained again that, due to the nature of recruitment, only 20 would remain as potential soldiers out of the original 100, and only two or three of them as future leading cadre, in the sense of being capable of leading an armed unit in combat.

      The response was evasive as usual and they asked me to put my proposal in writing. I did this but I never learned what became of that document. We kept insisting that we should go up and start work at the Upper Base. We had counted on losing a week there to get things ready in order to be able to work at a certain pace, and now we were waiting for just the simple problem of the move to be resolved. We couldn’t go up to the base because the commander had not arrived; or we had to wait because they were “in meetings.” Days passed like this. When the matter was raised again, as I did with truly irritating tenacity, a new excuse was always offered. Even today, I don’t know how to explain this. Maybe it was true that they did not want to start preparatory work so as not to ignore the relevant authority, in this case the commander of the base.

      One day I ordered Moja to go to the Upper Base with some men, on the pretext of training them for a march. He did this and the group returned at night, weary, soaked and chilled to the bone. It was a very cold and wet place, with constant mist and persistent rain; the people there said they were making a hut for us, which would take another few days. With patience on both sides, I outlined various arguments why we should go up to the base: we could help build the shelter in a spirit of sacrifice, so that we would not be a burden, etc., etc. and they would then search for new pretexts for delay.

      This enforced holiday saw the beginning of enjoyable talks with Compañero Kiwe, the head of information. He is a tireless conversationalist, who speaks French at an almost supersonic speed. Day after day in our conversations he would offer me an analysis of the most important figures in the Congolese revolution. One of the first to receive a lashing from his tongue was Olenga, a general in the Stanleyville area and in Sudan. According to Kiwe, Olenga was little more than an ordinary soldier, maybe a lieutenant in Bidalila’s forces, who had been charged by Bidalila to make some incursions toward Stanleyville and then return. But instead of doing this, Olenga initiated his own operations during those easy moments of revolutionary flux, and raised himself by one rank each time he captured a village. By the time he reached Stanleyville he was a general. The conquests of the Liberation Army ended there—which solved the problem because, if they had continued, there were no further military grades with which to reward Compañero Olenga.

      For Kiwe, the real military leader was Colonel Pascasa, who later died in a fight among the Congolese in Cairo; he was the man with genuine military knowledge and a revolutionary attitude, and he represented Mulele.

      On another day, Kiwe very subtly raised criticisms of Gbenyé, commenting casually that his attitude had been unclear at the beginning and now, although he was the president and a revolutionary, there were more revolutionary leaders, etc. As the days passed and we became better acquainted, Kiwe portrayed Gbenyé as a man more suited to lead a gang of thieves than a revolutionary movement. I cannot vouch for Kiwe’s claims, but some are quite famous: for example, the story of Gbenyé’s role in Gizenga’s imprisonment, when he was minister of the interior in the Adoula government. Others are less well known, but if they are true, they cast a sinister light on Gbenyé, such as plots to assassinate Mitoudidi and connections with the Yankee embassy in Kenya.

      On another occasion, the target of Kiwe’s tongue was Gizenga, whom he described as a revolutionary, but a left-wing opportunist, who wanted to do everything by the political road, who thought a revolution could be made with the army, and even that he had been given money to organize the revolutionary forces in Leopoldville,³ but he had used it instead to form a political party.

      These chats with Kiwe gave me some idea of what certain figures were like, but above all they very clearly highlighted the lack of cohesion in this group of revolutionaries (or malcontents), who constituted the General Staff of the Congolese revolution.

      So the days passed. Messengers crossed the lake with an amazing capacity to distort any news, and others went off to Kigoma on some leave or other.

      In my capacity as a doctor (an epidemiologist—which, if this illustrious branch of the Aesculapian fauna forgives me for saying so, entitled me to know nothing about medicine), I worked for a few days with Kumi at the clinic and noticed several alarming facts: the first