During the early 1960s, the World Peace Brigade worked to transform nationalist movements into peaceful, anticommunist, democratic postcolonial states. In this process, the Brigade was just one of many advocacy organizations in a sphere of unofficial international politics, a sphere in which corporations also paired with nongovernmental organizations to provide assistance, funding, and de facto recognition to nationalist claims across the political spectrum. The political turmoil and international attention surrounding the United Nations intervention in Congo and the breakup of its neighboring Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (1960–1965) made Sub-Saharan Africa the epicenter for this dynamic of unofficial, transnational advocacy.

Personal connections between nationalists and their advocates fueled this informal politics. In his 2013 memoir, the Africanist historian Terence Ranger described a 1958 New Year’s Eve dinner party at Rhodesian nationalist Paul Mushonga’s house in the suburb of Highfield in Salisbury, Rhodesia, capturing in freeze-frame this world of individual advocates and how their roles changed with decolonization. Mushonga’s guests included George and Eleanor Loft of the Friends Service Committee in Salisbury, as well as the Observer journalist Cyril Dunn, who would later attempt but leave incomplete a biography of Brigade leader Reverend Michael Scott. Since the Quakers were there en famille, Ranger wrote, “the room seemed to be overflowing with white babies. … It was a jovial scene – everyone except the Quakers drinking beer or spirits out of bottles.”Footnote ¹ Within five years, Ranger had been deported to Dar es Salaam (1963), where he joined the liberationist intelligentsia in the city; Dunn was reporting on the lackadaisical judicial standards in Dallas following the assassination of John F. Kennedy (1963);Footnote ² Mushonga had died in an alleged car accident (1962).Footnote ³ George Loft had become vice president of the African-American Institute in New York City (1963), a nongovernmental organization that aimed to link the United States with “the students and leaders of emerging Black African states.”Footnote ⁴

The African-American Institute had been founded in 1953 by two American academics from Historically Black Universities: William Leo Hansberry of Howard University, and Horace Mann Bond of Lincoln University, which was the alma mater of both Kwame Nkrumah (first president of Ghana) and Mburumba Kerina (a Namibian nationalist). The following year, Allen Dulles, director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, asked Harold K. Hochschild, head of the American Metal Climax mining company (AMAX), to chair the board of the Institute. At its helm for most of the subsequent decade, Hochschild shepherded chosen African anticolonial nationalist leaders on their trips to Washington, DC, and steered funds to their projects. AMAX had mining interests and shares in operations stretching from the province of Katanga in the southeastern end of Congo-Leopoldville, through the Rhodesias, to the northern portion of South West Africa. Hochschild had personal connections with US politicians and with African leaders. He was active in international Africa advocacy organizations and belonged to a group of informed and interested individuals who stood at the intersection of global economic and political investment on the decolonizing African continent.Footnote ⁵

Hochschild and the organizations in which he played leadership roles – AMAX and the African-American Institute – could serve as character references for, and implicit or even explicit supporters of, particular anticolonial nationalists, especially Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia and the Namibian nationalists who made up the South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO), among others. Nationalists petitioned AMAX and the Institute for financial support at the same time, often on the same trip to New York, that they petitioned the United Nations for political recognition; Hochschild and Adlai Stevenson, the US ambassador to the UN, compared notes.Footnote ⁶ Individuals such as Hochschild and organizations such as the African-American Institute and the World Peace Brigade operated in a sphere of politics whose inhabitants did not officially represent a government but who dealt with the business of government – that is, with issues of representation, sovereignty, and independence – for regions of the world that were struggling for independence, that is, for states-in-waiting.

It may seem counterintuitive for a mining company with operations in regions controlled by colonial or settler-colonial regimes to choose to support anticolonial nationalist aspirations. However, in 1962 AMAX chose to back certain anticolonial nationalists in Southern Africa.Footnote ⁷ It did so in direct response to the international blowback that its competitor, Union Minière, received for backing the secessionist Congolese province of Katanga. Katanga hovered over the imagination of advocates and nationalists as the ultimate example of illegitimate nationalism – the potential of failed national liberation – in which Western imperial interests had co-opted a state-in-waiting and violated postcolonial state sovereignty, in this case, that of Congo-Leopoldville, newly independent from Belgium.

Katanga’s Secession from Congo

On July 30, 1960, Belgium acceded to the demands for independence made by nationalists in its colony of Belgian Congo, and the State of Congo-Leopoldville was born.Footnote ⁸ Belgium came to this decision, in the words of Michel Struelens of Belgium’s Bureau of Tourism in Congo (and eventual representative in New York of the breakaway Congolese Republic of Katanga), because of “sheer funk – obsession with the Algerian war – and a rather Machiavellian calculation” that it could better maintain its Congolese investments in an independent Congo.Footnote ⁹ Thirteen days later, the mineral-rich Katanga province in southeastern Congo seceded from newly independent Congo, launching the events known as “the Congo Crisis.” In response, Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected leader of Congo-Leopoldville, asked the United Nations to intervene militarily to prevent Katanga’s secession. Katanga’s secession was eventually suppressed during a five-year period of warfare and UN intervention.Footnote ¹⁰ During this period, the spectre of Katanga – that is, of anticolonial nationalism allegedly hijacked by a nationalist regime defined by its connections to the West and its anticommunist credentials – hung over nationalist aspirants and their advocates. Some, such as the Brigade community, opposed Katanga as neocolonialist. Others, who also backed white-settler rule in South Africa and Rhodesia, supported it and blamed the US and its European allies for failing to adequately sustain one of their anticommunist, postcolonial nationalist allies in the decolonizing world.Footnote ¹¹

Katanga’s secession and its failure seemed to impose a Cold War dichotomy on the process of decolonization: a dichotomy between communist- and anticommunist-sympathizing organizations, movements, and governments. While this binary shaped how nationalists made and mobilized their claims, it often did not reflect the political aims, orientations, or experiences of many people and organizations operating outside and around spheres of government. For instance, a corporation such as AMAX, working in tandem with the African-American Institute, was connected to circles of international civil society activism as well as to national governments. Positioned to navigate between these shifting political categories, it negotiated with and funded education and training programs for new postcolonial elites as well as anticolonial nationalist exiles – who, they wagered, might be the new national elite once their territories became independent. The company had up-to-date information about the decolonizing world, including peoples and places far outside the knowledge of most in the West (including in governments), and access to power. It chose to work behind the scenes, through personal connections and affiliated organizations, supporting certain anticolonial nationalists.

In the early 1960s, the United Nations sought to be the global arbitrator for issues of national sovereignty and independence. The Congo Crisis, and the UN’s attempt to prevent Katanga’s secession, was to be its test run.Footnote ¹² Both the leadership of the UN, which included Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld and his brain trust of the “Congo Toilers” – Ralph Bunche, Andrew Cordier, Indar Jit Rikhye, Alexander MacFarquhar, and Francis Nwokedi, among othersFootnote ¹³ – and their critics were highly conscious of how the UN’s legacy would be shaped by the organization’s intervention.Footnote ¹⁴

Ralph Bunche arrived in Congo for its independence festivities and stayed through late August 1960. By the end, he was drained and sleep deprived, fearing that his presence portrayed the Congo intervention as a US Cold War endeavor rather than a UN intervention.Footnote ¹⁵ Bunche fell out with Lumumba, who asked the Soviets for material support when UN forces would not take up arms to prevent the secession of Katanga. For Bunche, assisting Congo was “like trying to give first aid to a wounded rattlesnake.”Footnote ¹⁶ Andrew Cordier was interim UN representative to Congo when Lumumba’s government split apart in September 1960 and Lumumba was murdered in January 1961. Cordier had allowed Lumumba to leave UN protection, and closed airports and the radio to calm violence – or to prevent Lumumba from mustering political support, or both, depending upon interpretation.Footnote ¹⁷ Lumumba’s death and Cordier’s perceived role catalyzed the February 1961 UN Security Council Resolution that changed its use of force doctrine from “no-initiative on the use of force” to “self-defense” of UN forces, galvanizing the institution to actively prevent Katanga’s secession.

Katanga – led by Moise Tshombe, a missionary-educated businessman from the Lunda people, an ethnic group in Katanga and Northern Rhodesia – had the financial backing of the Belgian multinational mining company Union Minière and the support of the Belgian government, while the UN supported a united Congo. Although the January 1961 assassination of Congolese president Lumumba in Katanga gave the United Nations the political will to use military force to halt the secession, it was still tough political and military terrain for the organization. The settler-colonial government of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland allied with Tshombe’s regime and provided a haven for Tshombe’s mercenaries (who returned to Katanga through an unregulated border after UN forces expelled them).Footnote ¹⁸ Faced with UN occupation, Tshombe called the UN forces “Communist troops” assisted by foreign powersFootnote ¹⁹ and launched an international publicity campaign in the Belgian, British, and US newspapers, designed to present Katanga as a “prosperous, peaceful, pro-western state in the process of being destroyed by a communist-oriented United Nations.”Footnote ²⁰

Tshombe sent Michel Streulens (a graduate student at American University in Washington, DC, and formerly of the Belgian Congo Bureau of Tourism) as his designated ambassador to the United Nations in New York. UN leadership denied him an audience – which they could easily do, since he did not represent a UN member-state.Footnote ²¹ Streulens teamed up with the American Committee for Aid to Katangese Freedom Fighters (hereafter, Americans for Katangese Freedom) to stir up US support for Tshombe. Americans for Katangese Freedom – run by US congressman Walter Judd (R-MN) and African American political activist Max Yergan (former missionaries to China and South Africa, respectively), along with the public relations specialist Marvin Liebman – was one of many American advocacy organizations that supported anticommunist movements in China, Tibet, Katanga, the Rhodesias, and elsewhere, as well as apartheid rule in South Africa.Footnote ²² There was a slew of such organizations, with rotating names but the same anticommunist political platform and the same set of individuals involved. The Americans for Katangese Freedom explicitly linked the Congo Crisis to the Cold War – as shown in a typical comment from an organizational pamphlet: “Do not let the people of Katanga go the same way as the gallant people of Hungary, China, and Tibet who were betrayed into Communist slavery by the fault of free nations and their peoples.”Footnote ²³ They worked with sympathetic US politicians, placing Katanga in the context of other nationalist insurgent movements.

The United Nations also considered Katanga part of a global network – of counterrevolutionary forces with wider ambitions on the decolonizing African continent. UN leadership believed that Tshombe’s Katangese mercenaries had “links with the OAS [Organisation de l’armée secrète, a pro-French Algeria terrorist organization] … if they help Tshombe to a victory at Elisabethville [Katanga’s capital], they might find extreme European interests in these areas which would support them and bring an industrial [i.e., supported by mining companies] potential in behind them.”Footnote ²⁴ The UN special representative to Katanga, Conor Cruise O’Brien, was an outspoken champion of anticolonial nationalism, as well as a close friend and colleague of World Peace Brigade members. O’Brien arrived in Katanga and attempted to expel Tshombe’s European mercenaries as the embodiment of outside interference in Congolese affairs. This was a difficult task since the settler-colonial government of the Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, allied with Tshombe’s regime, provided a haven for expelled mercenaries who would then return through the unregulated border. Tshombe himself was involved “pretty heavily in Rhodesian party politics, and not in support to the African majority parties,” such as Kenneth Kaunda’s United National Independence Party in Northern Rhodesia.Footnote ²⁵

Kaunda, a Northern Rhodesian nationalist, presented himself in international media as a Westernized, Christian, neo-Gandhian leader of a state-in-waiting. Similarly, Tshombe’s credentials as Western-educated and Christian were a repeated refrain for Americans for Katangese Freedom. They used Union Minière’s support of Tshombe to demonstrate that he was pro-business and anticommunist, simultaneously complaining that other Western corporations – namely, AMAX – were aligning with African anticolonial nationalists, “licking the boots of Kaunda.”Footnote ²⁶ Americans for Katangese Freedom also made an illuminating slippage in its materials, using “arms” instead of “aid” to Katanga in a fundraising letter.Footnote ²⁷

In some ways, Katanga served as Northern Rhodesia/Zambia’s distorted mirror. The two countries shared geography, geology, and some degree of ethnicity. Both Kaunda and Tshombe were missionary-educated and they were expert at the portrayal of respectable nationalist leadership for international audiences. They each chose and were chosen by a different mining company and a different advocacy network: Kaunda, AMAX, and the World Peace Brigade; Tshombe, Union Minière, and Americans for Katangese Freedom. Yet Kaunda was able to make his advocates depend on him, while Tshombe remained dependent on his advocates.

The United Nations justified its opposition to Tshombe’s regime because the institution feared the territorial unraveling of new postcolonial states.Footnote ²⁸ Postcolonial state sovereignty was a delicate entity whose fragility threatened to undermine the UN’s legitimacy as the guarantor of that sovereignty. From the international institutional perspective, decolonization could go only so far, and no further, before it dissolved into chaos. Ralph Bunche, a much-respected UN mediator, worried that “sub”-national sovereign claims would destroy the tenuous stability of postcolonial nation-states.Footnote ²⁹ In addition, the UN did not consider that Katanga’s government represented a legitimately nationalist African movement but, rather, saw it as a front for Western and settler-colonial interests. There was significant evidence for this perception, beyond the efforts of Americans for Katangese Freedom: the French military initially acquiesced to the recruitment of some of its officers to Tshombe’s mercenary forces;Footnote ³⁰ Tshombe and Roy Welensky (prime minister of the Central African Federation) supported each other; Union Minière and other regional multinational mining companies, such as Tanganyika Concessions (in which AMAX also invested), shared shareholders.Footnote ³¹ O’Brien noted that Katanga’s Declaration of Independence (July 1960) had explicitly “ask[ed] Belgium to join with Katanga in a close economic community. It ask[ed] Belgium to continue its technical, financial and military aid. It ask[ed] Belgium to re-establish order and security.”Footnote ³²

This “declaration of dependence” deserves further interrogation. In the 1960s, the United Nations saw a rapid expansion of its membership. It recognized many new postcolonial states and signified their sovereignty by granting them seats in the UN General Assembly. In the process, the UN came to have a vested interest in the importance of international-legal sovereignty as a defining feature of national sovereignty since it prioritized the importance of the UN institution as its source.Footnote ³³

Tshombe’s Katanga proposed an alternative model – one of possible confederation – and this threatened the UN’s conception of postcolonial statehood. According to Bunche, Tshombe showed an “unhealthy interest” in the United States’ Articles of Confederation as a possible model for a prospective Congolese federation: Tshombe “seemed only to be encouraged when [informed] that the [Articles] had failed to work” – eluding to the Katangese leader’s lack of interest in supporting a unified, independent Congo.Footnote ³⁴ The colonial boundaries of Congo, like most colonial boundaries, did not consider cross-border or regional affiliations. Katanga’s minister of finance told the New York Times that Katanga shared more commonalities with Northern Rhodesia than with the rest of Congo.Footnote ³⁵ At issue were questions of national or ethnic authenticity, regional autonomy, and international backing that could either support or undermine perceived national legitimacy. Tshombe claimed a “tribal” affiliation for Katanga, to counter the idea of a Congolese nation.Footnote ³⁶ This affiliation evoked the colonial “empowerment” of the tribe as a political unit in order to undermine the potential of national independence. At the same time, it attempted to demonstrate regional and ethnic precolonial authenticity in contrast to a national, Léopoldville-based government that had inherited colonial territorial boundaries.Footnote ³⁷

To prevent Katanga’s secession, UN military forces occupied key positions in the region, at Elizabethville and Jadotville, taking and receiving casualties.Footnote ³⁸ UN secretary general Hammarskjöld flew in to handle the peace talks with a disempowered Tshombe, but he died in a September 1961 plane crash before negotiating a ceasefire agreement.Footnote ³⁹ Hammarskjöld’s death and the end of Katanga’s secession concluded the first phase of the UN intervention in Congo. Its official intervention in Congo ended in 1965, after the subsequent suppression of Congolese liberationist militias that led to a coup by (and consolidation of power under) Joseph Mobutu Sese Seko.Footnote ⁴⁰ In the decades since, intermittent war and violence (and subsequent UN interventions) have continued. For anticolonial nationalists and their international advocates, the “spectre of Katanga” remained as a warning of what could happen if decolonization “went wrong.”

The Kennedy Team and Decolonization

The Congo Crisis and the secession of Katanga from Congo drew Western attention to Central and Southern Africa, a region previously considered peripheral to Great Power politics, even when it had been central to imperialism and global war. The US government did not have a State Department office on African issues until 1958; instead, it “worked directly with the colonials.”Footnote ⁴¹ Sensing a political opportunity in this vacuum of information and strategic thinking, then Senator John F. Kennedy, chair of the newly formed US Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on African Affairs, sought out Americans with recent experience and expertise on matters pertaining to that continent. As part of this exploration, in 1958 JFK’s team hired Winifred Armstrong as an unofficial consultant for their staff.

Armstrong graduated from Swarthmore College in 1951 and traveled to the African continent five years later. After meeting with and receiving briefings and contacts from Western advocates in Paris, Brussels, and London, Armstrong purchased a round-trip plane ticket to Cape Town that allowed her to stop along the way up and down each coast. Over a period of two years, she traveled to an array of countries/colonies: Ghana, Togo(land), Dahomey (now Benin), Nigeria, (Belgian) Congo, South Africa, the Rhodesias (now Zambia and Zimbabwe), Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, and Egypt. She “visited and stayed with African and European families, at universities, schools, hospitals, and missions; and met political and educational leaders, [and those] concerned with community development, business and industry, religion, and labor.”Footnote ⁴² By the time Armstrong returned to the United States in 1958, she had established friendships and connections with particular nationalist leaders in much of Southern Africa. She also had more recent experience on the continent than almost anyone else in the United States. Kennedy recruited Armstrong to work unofficially for his Senate office – and then to his presidential campaign – for her African connections, knowledge, and experience. An initial six-week job turned into nearly two years of work.Footnote ⁴³

While working for Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign and transition team, Armstrong pushed the US to take a more nuanced and serious approach to national liberation in Africa. She argued that US foreign relations strategy needed to disaggregate binaries of “African versus European and colonial versus anticolonial interests” to find a “meaningful balance” in the formulation of policy. Most importantly, she believed that the US needed to “down-grade the importance of scoring Cold War points” in order to take “the initiative in formulating or at least actively supporting political, economic, and social proposals” for new nations on the decolonizing African continent.Footnote ⁴⁴ In 1960, when seventeen African countries became independent, Armstrong sent telegrams of congratulations from Kennedy to many new nationalist leaders. Nobody else in Washington was reaching out in this manner; and for their recipients, these “telegrams of recognition” strongly signaled Kennedy’s interest in and support of African liberation.Footnote ⁴⁵

Armstrong shared a degree of friendship with particular African anticolonial nationalists. She was part of a sphere of international support on behalf of anticolonial nationalists; a sphere that included the World Peace Brigade community as well as individuals associated with A. J. Muste’s Fellowship of Reconciliation and Reverend Michael Scott’s Africa Bureau.Footnote ⁴⁶ Subsequently, she tried to assist these advocates when they traveled to the US to give testimony to the UN on behalf of African nationalists. She closed a position paper to president-elect Kennedy’s presumptive UN delegation with an extended plea to ease visa restrictions for Reverend Scott, “head of the Africa Bureau in London, [who] has been permitted over the past ten years [of petitioning the UN on behalf of South West Africa] free movement only in a 50-block area of Manhattan.”Footnote ⁴⁷

The Africanist and Angola expert John Marcum also worked with the Kennedy team on decolonization questions. Together, Armstrong and Marcum advised Kennedy’s presidential campaign on African issues. Armstrong briefed Averell Harriman (a long-time Democratic politician as well as a foreign policy advisor) before his August 1960 fact-finding trip to Congo and West Africa, and set up his meetings with local politicians and dignitaries in those places, while Marcum traveled along as an escort. Armstrong also briefed Edward M. Kennedy, the president-elect’s brother, before his 1960 trip with a group of Democratic senators to Leopoldville and Elizabethville (Katanga’s capital), during Katanga’s secession.Footnote ⁴⁸ Both Harriman’s and Edward Kennedy’s trips served as recognition of decolonization’s regime changes but were not meant to bind the United States to a particular policy direction. John F. Kennedy was running for the presidency; he was not yet the president. Indeed, the foreign policy of the Kennedy campaign and transition team could be compared to that of a state-in-waiting – or, more accurately, a regime-in-waiting. Harriman traveled as a private citizen, and Edward Kennedy, though sent as a proxy for his brother, was viewed as a political lightweight in Washington, DC, and was under instructions not to say anything that could be construed as outright support from the president-elect, just to listen.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, for African anticolonial nationalists, these unofficial visits sent strong signals of future US support, and their optimism about this possibility was particularly strengthened after John F. Kennedy was elected president in November 1960.

Armstrong and Marcum always worked for Kennedy in unofficial capacities and on short-term contracts. When Kennedy became president, with an Africa office having been established at the US Department of State, their political orientation and methods were perceived as less necessary and potentially too complicating for US interests; their African connections, for which they were originally hired, were too potentially polarizing for a president. Marcum moved to Lincoln University and continued to work with the Kennedy administration to create a training program for African refugees – including leaders of nationalist movements, some of whom were graduates of Lincoln University.

Armstrong shifted to the National Planning Association, an American civil society research institute. She continued her field research in Sub-Saharan Africa and co-wrote a report on African private enterprise that included biographical sketches of African entrepreneurs, highlighting the importance she placed on individual agency in understanding structural political and economic questions.Footnote ⁵⁰ Following her stint at the National Planning Association, AMAX hired Armstrong in 1965 for the same reasons that Kennedy had hired her in 1958: her knowledge of and connections to Africa’s new nationalist leaders before they had become heads of state, and her understanding of the political, social, and economic circumstances of both new postcolonial states and states-in-waiting. These skills were of great value for a corporation that sought to successfully navigate the forces of decolonization and, thereby, continue to reap profits from the territories involved.

The Declaration on the Granting of Independence

In December 1960, at the instigation of the Soviet Union and with the support of the United States, the UN General Assembly made a “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.”Footnote ⁵¹ This declaration on the granting of independence illuminated the idea of the UN as the organ of international recognition for new postcolonial states, as well as the limits inherent to that proposed role. By articulating an international norm concerning independence for “colonial countries and peoples,” the declaration was a foundational cornerstone for nationalist claimants and their international advocates worldwide, though it did not refer to peoples within postcolonial (or indeed metropolitan) states. In addition, because the UN set up a committee to monitor the declaration, “it became a year-round source of critique of imperial rule” as well as a portal for advocates and nationalists to access international politics.Footnote ⁵² And yet, by affirming the postcolonial unitary state as the end goal of the decolonization process, the declaration only supported nationalisms that did not revise the international boundaries of UN member-states – particularly of postcolonial ones, which were becoming the majority of the UN General Assembly.

Two years later, in 1962 – during the gathering clouds of Cold War conflict over Cuba and the continuing UN intervention in Congo – the UN committee to monitor the declaration, titled the “Special Committee of 17,” held its annual hearings in Dar es Salaam to assess the declaration’s impact, and the World Peace Brigade submitted a report to them. The Brigade argued that Western support for Katanga’s secession, motivated by a desire to continue to extract mineral wealth from that territory, “made Western democracy look like a giant runaway circus calliope”: while “pleasant music came from the top” of the carnival steam organ, its wheels crushed “the people down below.”Footnote ⁵³

Kenneth Kaunda also personally testified in front of the UN Special Committee of 17 in Dar es Salaam in 1962. There, the Soviet member, happy to draw international attention to Western malfeasance in Southern Africa, asked him which “foreign companies control the copper mines in Northern Rhodesia and what links there might be between these companies and the companies which were engaged in similar activities in neighboring Katanga.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Kaunda did not answer the question directly. Instead, he cited an article that Michael Scott of the World Peace Brigade used later that year (in his own testimony to the same committee) to describe the interlocking directorships of mining companies in the Southern African Copperbelt, drawing upon the scholarship of anthropologist Alvin Wolfe.Footnote ⁵⁵

A few months after Kaunda testified, Michael Scott did so as well to the same UN Special Committee of 17, in September 1962. He attacked mining companies in Southern Africa as obstacles to Western support for national self-determination because of their continuing efforts to exploit mineral resources in that region. He alleged that (1) Britain refused to intervene on the issue of white-settler colonial rule in Southern Rhodesia because of the “powerful vested interest” of mining companies; (2) the structure of mining interests relied on cheap African labor and white domination; and (3) the British South Africa Company, Anglo American, Union Minière, the Rhodesian Selection Trust, Tanganyika Concessions, and AMAX – all involved with various African postcolonial states and states-in-waiting – shared interlocking and overlapping boards of directors and shareholders.Footnote ⁵⁶

Scott attacked the “autonomous industrial system in Southern Africa that is beyond the control of African nations,” relying, as Kaunda did, on Wolfe’s research. AMAX took careful, anxious notice, tracking Scott’s allegations through UN, US government, and newspaper sources as it put together a private report to counter Scott’s testimony.Footnote ⁵⁷ While Kaunda – wanting to avoid the perception of too close an alignment with the Soviets – had reassured AMAX as well as the Rhodesian Selection Trust mining company privately about his future amenability, AMAX was horrified by the charges made by Scott.Footnote ⁵⁸ It worried about looking like the Union Minière of Southern Africa: “[O]nly I.G. Farben during and after the [Second World] war would compete with Union Minière’s new public image” as a Western corporation continuing imperial policy in blackface.Footnote ⁵⁹ AMAX could not dispute the composition of its board, so it began a multiyear campaign to demonstrate support for anticolonial nationalist African elites who were becoming the leaders of new postcolonial states with mines – while it continued to mine in South African-ruled South West Africa. AMAX wanted to escape being branded “the I. G. Farben of decolonization,” but without altering its mining operations.

Scott’s financial backers – that is, the board of his advocacy organization, the Africa Bureau – did not find his “interlocking directorship” comments amusing, just as they had initially been upset by Kaunda’s testimony. Sir Ronald Prain of the Rhodesian Selection Trust, a long-time donor and member of the Africa Bureau’s board of directors (as well as a friend and colleague of the Hochschilds of AMAX), was furious and demanded an apology from Scott.Footnote ⁶⁰ Scott wriggled out, claiming that he respected Sir Ronald’s “sincere conviction” but that his (Scott’s) UN testimony had provided the Rhodesian Selection Trust with the “opportunity of stating its case” and countering the “myths and smears” that had been “promulgated in the UN” because Western mining companies’ continued interests in “Katanga seemed to support the allegations.”Footnote ⁶¹ Kaunda, as noted, had sought to placate those who would be among independent Zambia’s largest foreign investors, apologizing to top officials from AMAX and the Rhodesian Selection Trust for submitting Wolfe’s piece. When Kaunda justified his use of the piece because there was no other reputable reporting on the mining question, AMAX promised to provide him with a written brief outlining the “international financial relationships of the Copperbelt mining companies.”Footnote ⁶²

Eventually, Scott was able to facilitate a rapprochement with Prain, and also between Prain, the Rhodesian Selection Trust, and Kaunda. Scott, Kaunda, and Prain had private meetings on the future of Northern Rhodesian/Zambian development; when Kaunda visited London in 1963, he had at least four meetings with Prain, who offered to act as “an intermediary” between Kaunda and “the Rockefeller Foundation’s offer” to give development assistance to soon-to-be independent Zambia.Footnote ⁶³ The Kaunda-Scott-Prain-Rockefeller Foundation linkage shows the significant influence and benefits of advocacy in action. Scott and Prain played crucial roles connecting Kaunda to US developmental assistance when Zambia was still a state-in-waiting; Scott vouched for Kaunda to Prain, Prain vouched for Kaunda to the Rockefeller Foundation, and doors that might otherwise have been closed to an anticolonial nationalist leader were opened. Strategically, Kaunda and Scott publicly distanced themselves from Western mining companies while working closely with them in private.

Scott’s “interlocking directorates” comment became a repeated phrase for Southern African nationalists and their advocates at the UN. The big mining multinationals in the Copperbelt in the early 1960s were Union Minière, AMAX, Prain’s Rhodesian Selection Trust (eventually a subsidiary of AMAX), and Anglo-American. They had a number of subsidiaries that they did not operate but in which they held shares; shareholders from each mining multinational sat on the others’ boards, lending credence to Scott’s allegations.

In Northern Rhodesia, Prain’s Rhodesian Selection Trust (of which AMAX held controlling shares) had implemented a developmentalist approach toward its Black African workforce since the Second World War. Rhodesian Selection Trust had loaned millions of pounds to the Northern Rhodesian and Nyasaland colonial governments with the stipulation that the funds be spent in regions where they recruited their Black African labor.Footnote ⁶⁴ The company also broke the color bar, working to desegregate high-skilled jobs previously monopolized by white workers, an effort that those workers strongly opposed.Footnote ⁶⁵ Prain’s early adoption of antiracist policies deserves recognition, but it was also linked to the profit motive. He believed that opening high-skilled positions to Black Africans would lower wages for all workers.Footnote ⁶⁶

The Hochschilds of AMAX supported Prain’s education and training programs, which they thought would improve the quality and efficiency of their Black African labor force and simultaneously undercut the potential of nationalist agitation.Footnote ⁶⁷ By the early 1960s, both Prain and the Hochschilds had a decade-long commitment to liberal, antiracist development in their Copperbelt mines, a commitment that also served their own economic interests. Black African technicians could be paid less than white ones, and peaceful regime change from colony to independent state allowed for continuity of mining operations. For these reasons, in their view, Kaunda’s platform of nonviolence and multiracialism made him an attractive leader of a postcolonial state. His embrace of a decolonization process that worked with, rather than against, Western economic interests was even more valuable to his international backers when contrasted to the violence and expense of the UN’s military intervention in Katanga. The decimation of Union Minière’s reputation due to that company’s backing of Katanga’s secession from Congo led AMAX to take strong measures to distinguish itself from the other Copperbelt corporations.

While AMAX attempted to differentiate itself from various other Southern African mining operations in order to minimize international perception of its involvement in contentious global hot spots, the World Peace Brigade worked to knit together its advocacy against Katanga’s secession, South African rule of South West Africa, apartheid in South Africa, and colonialism across southern Africa. The Brigade’s protest at the South African consulate in New York City in October 1962, headlined by Bayard Rustin, Scott, and other members of the Brigade community, explicitly combined these issues.Footnote ⁶⁸ This “bundling” was tactical: to gather as many supporters as possible to its cause by expanding its scope.

In his 1962 testimony to the UN Special Committee of 17, Michael Scott warned about greater looming issues instigated by the spectre of Katanga, which illustrated “what waste, destruction and suffering could be caused by political breakdowns and the failure to find adequate constitutional means of solving problems of conflicting interests and national ambitions. … Resistance to injustice, tyranny and deprivation of rights was part of the struggle for peace,” since violence in Central and Southern Africa would lead to “the power struggle between the so-called East and West.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Scott used the threat of violence and Cold War conflict to try to get the UN to act. His motto: Violence will take over where law founded on justice ends. He blamed extra-legal violence against Kenneth Kaunda’s United National Independence Party (in Zambia) on “criminals from Katanga” allied with the settler-colonial government of the Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.Footnote ⁷⁰ In Scott’s formulation, Kaunda’s nonviolent resistance to oppression would lead to a racially representative government, peacefully achieved; whereas, the counterrevolutionary nationalism of Moise Tshombe in Katanga and of the white-settler colony of Rhodesia would undermine Kaunda’s political ascendency and the challenge that ascendency would pose to their power in the region.

Federation Thinking and the Cold War Trap

Regional dynamics engulfed the Congo Crisis.Footnote ⁷¹ Katanga bordered the Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (1953–1963), whose breakup seemed imminent in the early 1960s. The Central African Federation was a British effort to find a halfway solution between empire and national independence in Southern Africa.Footnote ⁷² This attempted compromise faltered between the competing demands of African nationalists and of settler-colonials for self-rule. Kenneth Kaunda of Northern Rhodesia was a leader in the nationalist effort, supported by the World Peace Brigade, for an independent Zambia; simultaneously, Moise Tshombe of Katanga, and Roy Welensky of Southern Rhodesia were in talks to forge a Copperbelt state on the bones of the Federation.Footnote ⁷³ While sharing geographic contiguity, a degree of overlapping ethnic groups, and copper mines, Northern Rhodesia/Zambia was considered the site of a legitimate nationalist movement while Katanga was a neocolonial front for a Western mining company.

The UN’s Declaration on the Granting of Independence, which sought to establish an international norm of national self-determination, coincided in time with proposals for regional federations throughout the decolonizing world – and might seem to be in opposition to such proposals.Footnote ⁷⁴ At first glance, some of these proposals for federation (including that which became the Organization of African Unity) appeared as if they might challenge the unitary sovereignty of states. However, in political practice the federations that came into existence were institutional frameworks that focused on protecting the sovereignty of their members rather than expanding their own federated power structures.Footnote ⁷⁵ Rather than offering an alternative to the postcolonial state, the federations that came into existence ended up as vehicles for those states to project greater international influence. Perhaps, instead of providing an expansive political vision beyond the shape (and limits) of the state, proposed federations – even the short-lived postcolonial ones such as the United Arab Republic (1958–1961) or the West Indian Federation (1958–1962) – were demonstrations of affinity between separate polities rather than structures of overarching unity surrounding them.

The Central African Federation, a colonial rather than postcolonial political structure, rarely features in these conversations about federations. It proposed a political possibility – of allegedly multiracial, shared government as a halfway measure between empire and independence – and then reversed its initial mission by dissolving into territorially bound, racially determined states. Discussing the probable demise of the Central African Federation, the Soviet representative on the UN Special Committee of 17 brought up the alleged secret talks between Tshombe of Katanga and Roy Welensky (prime minister of the Central African Federation) on “the union of Katanga with Northern Rhodesia.” According to the Soviets, António de Oliveira Salazar, prime minister and de facto dictator of Portugal, was also in talks with Welensky about “the establishment of a confederation between the CAF and the Portuguese colonies in Africa. It was their hope that that confederation, [with the] close cooperation of the Republic of South Africa … would make it possible to maintain white domination” in Central and Southern Africa.”Footnote ⁷⁶ This white confederacy would be “backed by enormous economic and political forces,” since Northern Rhodesia’s copper production was in the hands of Anglo-American Corporation and of AMAX, who, according to the Soviets, wanted easier access to Katanga’s copper.Footnote ⁷⁷

In November 1962, Jacob Kuhangua, a Namibian nationalist and member of the South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO), had just returned from Congo-Léopoldville, where he had met with Angolan nationalists. In testimony before the UN’s Special Committee of 17, Kuhangua said that SWAPO and the National Liberation Front of Angola “intended to announce to the international community their intention of forming in the future a Federation of the Independent States of Angola, Bechuanaland [which became independent Botswana in 1966] and South West Africa.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Their “intention to announce” a proposed federation to an international audience was more important than any actual plans for a federation. Similarly, whether or not Welensky and Tshombe had any realistic plans to federate a Copperbelt state was less important than their announced plans to do so – because such plans indicated their rejection of the colonial geopolitical and territorial definitions of Congo-Léopoldville and Northern Rhodesia (independent Zambia in 1964). In the same way, from the other end of the political spectrum, Kuhangua’s intent to form a Namibian-Angolan federation indicated a similar rejection of colonial borders and state structures.Footnote ⁷⁹ These announced plans for federations remained deliberately vague. They were tools for demonstrating alliance and affinity rather than sustained attempts to redraw political units.

The Congo Crisis showed leaders of new postcolonial states the threat to their own fragile sovereignty posed by competing nationalist movements with powerful international backers (such as Katanga). As demonstrated throughout the crisis, decolonization struggles could easily take on a Cold War character in a manner that had little to do with the Cold War or the global-political stance of particular nationalist organizations. In addition, nationalist claimants were not simply acted upon by the Great Powers; they also played “the Cold War game.” In that “game,” for instance, Michel Streulens (Tshombe’s Belgian press agent in New York City), playing off residual McCarthyism,Footnote ⁸⁰ lobbied US legislators to label both the UN and Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected leader of Congo, as communist fronts. As noted, Kaunda made nice with all. While conciliating the Soviets by calling out the activities of Western corporations, he also made private agreements with the same corporations. In the words of a contemporary commentator, African nationalists “were attempting to do something more or less in this time frame the Indian government was failing at – and that is[,] not to be either partisan or an agent of one or the other of the major power blocs. And if the Indians could not do it, it’s no surprise that [they] did not do it either.”Footnote ⁸¹ Avoiding the “Cold War trap” confounded not just Indians or Africans; it confounded the UN institution as well.

Advocates of nationalist claimants were also not immune from Cold War thinking. Michael Scott’s strategic formulation during the 1962 UN hearings before the Special Committee of 17 relied on the threat of Cold War intervention: If the UN did not handle the problems of political injustice in the decolonizing world, then nationalist movements would become violent; if they became violent, then they would invite First World–Second World proxy wars in the Third World. This relationship between the Cold War, decolonization, and the role of the United Nations underscored how the Cold War endangered the United Nations’ ability to function as it was intended to and, thereby, to justify its own role in handing questions of international war and peace.

After the Second World War, UN intervention in Congo as well as wider patterns of decolonization took place within the possibilities of action prescribed by the Cold War framework – whether the parties involved liked it or not, tried to break away from it or not, or were aware of it or not. While the Cold War political straitjacket provided the opportunity for the UN to take the leadership role in Congo, UN officials understood how it also limited what the UN could do. As early as July 23, 1960 – twelve days after Katanga declared independence from just-liberated Congo-Léopoldville – UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld cabled, “If the Cold War settles on the Congo, our whole effort is lost.”Footnote ⁸²

How, then, do we conceptualize decolonization outside a Cold War frame? A better way to “frame” the question might be: How were the people actively involved in the process of decolonization thinking about it at the time? Nationalists and their advocates had their own interests and goals even as they were enmeshed in Cold War politics. While the US foreign policy establishment and its intelligence operatives knew very little about politics in Congo before 1960, they knew a lot about the international webs of missionaries and business interests in the region.Footnote ⁸³ The UN special envoy to Katanga Conor Cruise O’Brien, amusingly detailed how the US would lobby Ireland within the General Assembly on “colonial” issues by “produc[ing] a sensible, relevant missionary (Roman Catholic) if available and if vote of sufficient importance.”Footnote ⁸⁴ O’Brien’s remark hints at the interplay of multiple international networks – of missionaries, activists, and scholars; but also of business interests, of diaspora populations (sometimes created by decolonization), and eventually of development assistance experts. These were networks that the nationalists themselves mobilized to access power; networks that shaped and often constrained nationalist movements because they – the networks themselves – served multiple interests.

Conclusion

Networks of nationalist claimants and their advocates operated behind the scenes through personal connections even as they performed in public on the floor of the United Nations. As noted, Michael Scott introduced Kenneth Kaunda to Ronald Prain of the Rhodesian Selection Trust, who in turn brought Kaunda to the attention of the Rockefeller Foundation, a process that reinforced Kaunda’s transition from nationalist to national leader. In this way, Kaunda used advocates to develop and enhance his status with global powers and business interests before he became independent Zambia’s first president. In another example, Winifred Armstrong lobbied on behalf of Mburumba Kerina of South West Africa when she worked for then US senator John F. Kennedy. She helped regularize Kerina’s visa status in the US so that he could attend the Second Afro-Asian People’s Conference in Tunis in January 1960, aiding the development of his international profile as a Namibian nationalist claimant.Footnote ⁸⁵ Networks of nationalists and their advocates were multiple, multidirectional, and overlapping: when Kerina asked Armstrong to urge Kennedy “to meet privately with the Union Government [of South Africa]” about the possibility of making South West Africa a UN Trust Territory, he reminded her to send written corroboration of his international petitioning to other Namibian nationalist claimants.Footnote ⁸⁶ Kerina’s petitioning worked in two different directions: from Armstrong to Kennedy to Christian Herter (US secretary of state, 1959–1961),Footnote ⁸⁷ and through Armstrong to leaders of rival Namibian nationalist formations.

As connectors between spheres of Great Power politics, multinational corporations, and international institutions, advocates formed bridges of continuity between empire and independence during the moments when decolonization promised to reorder international relations. Both Tshombe’s and Kaunda’s international advocates worked to legitimize these nationalists (and thus their claims) in international politics by stressing their “civilizational” similarities with Western norms of respectable leadership.Footnote ⁸⁸ Nationalist leaders made use of the prestige and connections of advocates who worked behind the scenes, maneuvering within the international-legal interstices of the United Nations institution. These interested individuals and organizations disaggregated Cold War binaries at the same time that they served Cold War projects, forming the strands of informal communication during moments of possible rupture. When formal modes of continuity – of capital, development, and state-to-state diplomacy – reasserted themselves in new, postcolonial states, these advocates, these unofficial politicians, dropped away. They were useful gatekeepers for advancing nationalist leaders in the realm of international politics and support, but their activities were incompatible with the sovereignty of the national leaders who came to lead independent states.

Nationalist movements generally condensed their state-making aspirations to align with colonial boundaries. With important exceptions, such as Bangladesh, secessionist insurgent movements that would have revised colonial borders tended to fail. Kwame Nkrumah (president of Ghana and a founding member of the Organization of African Unity) and Julius Nyerere (prime minister of Tanganyika and president of Tanzania, its successor state) looked to a United States of Africa rather than to a United States of Ghana or Tanzania.Footnote ⁸⁹ They – as well as Moise Tshombe of Katanga and Roy Welensky of the Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, with their imagined federated Copperbelt state; or Jacob Kuhangua of SWAPO with his proposed Namibia-Botswana-Angola amalgamation – called for forms of African federation, not federated power structures within their respective states and states-in-waiting.

Katanga’s secession raised a three-headed spectre: of illegitimate nationalism, of decolonization’s potential failure, and of the challenge of “sub”-nationalisms to the emergent postcolonial international order of the expanding membership of the UN General Assembly. At a practical level, from the perspective of the UN, Katanga’s secession sabotaged the hope of a functional, democratic, independent Congo – and of the UN’s playing a key role in midwifing that creation.Footnote ⁹⁰ In addition, Katanga’s secession called newly nationalized state boundaries into question, therefor raising the prospect of international intervention – by the UN, multinational corporations, and Cold War actors – to police those boundaries. These interventions operated beyond Congo’s geographic limits and had an immediate impact on the wider financial concerns and political spheres in which Katanga was embedded: on the arcs of international investment, resource extraction, and controlled labor mobility surrounding mining in contiguous regions of Southern and Central Africa.Footnote ⁹¹

For the United Nations – attempting to position itself as the arbitrator of legitimate national self-determination – Katanga represented the tarnishing of decolonization’s promise at the moment of the process’s seeming greatest possibility. For that reason, anticolonial nationalist claimants and their advocates would not have wanted their efforts labeled under any title that included the name “Katanga.”Footnote ⁹² The spectre of Katanga created a sense of revulsion and fear for proponents of anticolonial nationalist liberation because it rendered alternative postcolonial political possibilities both less feasible and less desirable – potentially the thin end of the wedge of neocolonialism.