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These binding ties were underscored last week as heads of state and other delegates from some 20 African nations converged in Paris for the fifth annual Franco-African summit. To make sure nobody missed the point, Zaïre's President Mobutu flew into Paris dressed in camouflage combat fatigues and boots, explaining to reporters that he had just "come back from the front." By that time the front had slipped back across the Angolan border, but no matter. The hero of the hour was President Giscard, who was broadly cheered when he declared, "Africa for the Africans. Everything must be done to withdraw the continent from the rivalries of political blocs." Gabon's President Albert-Bernard (Omar) Bongo, currently head of the Organization of African Unity, declared that Giscard deserved the Nobel Prize for his Africa policy. Bongo also proposed the creation of an all-Africa security organization to preserve the continent from the evils of "assassination, genocide and massacre." The delegates liked the idea and, despite the enormous logistical problems, there were indications at week's end that such a force might be in the making.
Throughout Africa, reaction to the rescue operation was relatively restrained. The French-speaking countries were, as a whole, delighted. White South Africans argued that apart from demonstrating the "savagery" of Africa, the Shaba invasion and the Kolwezi massacre had awakened the West to the threat of Marxist involvement in Africa. Many black leaders seemed far less outraged than they had been in late 1964, when the West mounted a similar rescue mission to save 1,300 whites stranded in Stanleyville (now Kisangani) during the Congo's Simba rebellion. But they were still acutely aware that the enduring problem was that of a continent unable to govern its own affairs. As the Zambia Daily Mail observed, "The almost casual ease with which European powers can fly into an African country and airlift its nationals or occupy whole towns is making the very concept of African independence meaningless."
The African reality was, as always, blurred by alien notions. The real alignments are tribal or regional, not ideological; Africa remains a continent of warring nationalisms, some of them struggling on behalf of nations that have never existed as separate entities and may never do so.
Zaïre is a classic example. Almost from the day of its birth in 1960, the country was plunged into a nightmare of mutiny, rebellion and bloodshed. The most dangerous incident was the attempted secession of Katanga, homeland of more than 1.5 million Lunda tribesmen, who also live in northwestern Zambia and eastern Angola. The rebellion was led by Mo'ise Tshombe, whose followers were seeking to preserve their mineral wealth from their enemies, the government in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) and the Bak-ongo tribes of the lower Congo. In those days the secessionists were thought to be rightists in the hire of the Belgian and French mineowners. Although their successors in the Congolese National Liberation Front (F.N.L.C.), who just attacked Kolwezi, talk vaguely of installing a radical regime in Kinshasa, they are probably more accurately described as misguided nationalists than leftists.