On 11 July 1960, eleven days after the Belgian Congo became independent, the province of Katanga declared itself a sovereign republic. It had a president, Moïse Tshombe; a flag with three copper crosses; a gendarmerie officered by Belgians; and an anthem. It had no recognition from any state on earth. What it had instead was the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, whose copper, cobalt and uranium supplied roughly sixty percent of the Congo's revenue, and whose payments to the new republic began almost immediately.
The mechanism is worth setting out precisely. A secession requires either a nation that wants a state or a state that wants a nation. Katanga had neither. It had a balance sheet that preferred not to be shared with Léopoldville, and a set of foreign shareholders willing to fund the difference between an accounting preference and a country. The gendarmerie was staffed by contract soldiers — Belgians, French, South Africans, Rhodesians — whom the local press called les affreux, the frightful ones. They were paid in Belgian francs.
The dissolution consumed two men of consequence. Patrice Lumumba, the deposed prime minister, was flown to Élisabethville in January 1961 and shot the same night; his body was dissolved in acid by Belgian police officers, a detail that belongs equally to the chemical category. Dag Hammarskjöld died in September 1961 when his aircraft came down near Ndola, en route to a ceasefire meeting with Tshombe. The inquiry into the crash remains formally open.
UN forces closed the matter in January 1963. Tshombe went into exile, returned as prime minister of the country he had tried to leave, was kidnapped to Algeria in 1967, and died there. His gendarmes crossed into Angola and waited fourteen years before coming back as the Shaba invasions of 1977 and 1978. Secessions rarely end; they cool and are stored.
In Fiction
Wilbur Smith's The Dark of the Sun (1965) follows a mercenary column sent by train to evacuate diamonds and Europeans from a Katangese town. The novel is pulp, and honest for it: the flag is scenery, the cargo is the plot. No political fiction of the period states the arrangement so plainly.
A state is a clock whose spring is consent. Katanga was a clock face nailed to a mineshaft, and it kept excellent time until someone looked behind it.