America, the UN and Decolonisation: Cold War Conflict in the Congo by John Kent (review)

This compact, dense monograph provides remarkably thorough coverage of U.S. policy in the Congo (Kinshasa) from the achievement of independence in 1960 until mid-1964. The United Nations (UN) operation, at the time unprecedented in scope and cost, is a secondary focus; its time frame of July 1960 until June 1964 apparently sets the temporal parameters of the volume. Congo decolonization and the turbulent politics of the immediate independence period provide the stage and background scenery for the detailed diplomatic narrative.

Some previous authors, notably Madeleine Kalb (The Congo Cables: The Cold War in Africa—from Eisenhower to Kennedy, 1982), Richard Mahoney (JFK: Ordeal in Africa, 1983), and Sean Kelly (America's Tyrant: The CIA and Mobutu of Zaire, 1993) had earlier covered this ground, both through interviews with principals and declassification of some documents. The station chief of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during these eventful years, Larry Devlin, recently produced a frank if self-serving account (Chief of Station, Congo: A Memoir of 1960-67, 2007). Add to these well-documented works the very large academic literature devoted to the early years of Congo independence, and little latitude exists for major new discoveries.

Nonetheless, Kent has consulted a wider range of official documents, now mostly in the public domain, than any previous scholar. He has thoroughly explored the U.S. National Archives, as well as the Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson presidential libraries, in addition to the British National Archives at Kew. These materials enable him to go further than any previous account in the richness of detail. More important, he gives fuller coverage than any previous study to the debates and conflicts within the U.S. foreign policy establishment, as well as critical insights into their contradictions and occasional incoherence. These are valuable contributions and assure the volume a permanent place in the roster of works devoted to the diplomatic history of a crucial episode in African decolonization, when an inadequately prepared power transfer was instantly unhinged by an army mutiny, the panicked flight of many senior administrative officials, and the secession of the richest province, Katanga. Overnight the Congo became a global crisis and key Cold War battleground.

Within a fortnight, the newly independent Congo government had lost control of the instruments that defined its statehood: its security force, its top bureaucratic instrument, and its main revenue source. This produced a degree of international involvement unique in the annals of decolonization, a UN peacekeeping force and accompanying civil operation that served as a virtual trusteeship without the legal authority provided by full sovereignty, and an extraordinary level of external diplomatic action, especially U.S. and Belgian. With the controversial ouster of the first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, in early September 1960, and the impossibility of securing parliamentary approval of a replacement, the Congo was in a constitutional vacuum until August 1961. The Katanga secession, a critical pivot to the crisis, was not reversed by UN military action until January 1963.

The Kent study well captures the distortions injected into U.S. policy by the Cold War template superposed on Congolese events. The Soviet Union undoubtedly applied its own ideological frame onto reading the dramatic uncertainties of the early weeks of Congo independence and perceived unanticipated opportunities to expand its influence and apply a counterimperial logic. We await access to Soviet archives of the period to have a fuller picture. Nonetheless, on the ground Moscow's limited capacity to affect outcomes or find "reliable" Congolese allies soon became apparent to many. But the preoccupation with possible Soviet exploitation of the Congo crisis remained alive in the Washington official mind, fed by fears of the aggressive left nationalist discourse of the Lumumbist forces.

If one may judge from the references, the book is primarily based on the U.S. diplomatic archives. The bibliography includes most though not all the important works covering this period, but only a small handful of footnotes cite...