The night of his return, Lumumba called an emergency cabinet meeting. By the time it ended the next morning, two major decisions had been made. The first was to declare a nationwide state of emergency. “The army will arrest anyone, be he white or African, who tries to stir up trouble in the Congo,” Lumumba promised at a press conference. “It will show no mercy.”
Under the state of emergency, the government introduced new rules for political associations: henceforth, all such groups had to apply for government authorization. Attending the meeting of an unlicensed group would be punishable by two months in prison. Not long after the announcement, MNC partisans sacked the headquarters of Abako, Kasavubu’s party. Police raided the offices of the Belga News Agency and ordered its staff to stop transmitting reports to Brussels. The editor of the conservative newspaper Le Courrier d’Afrique was thrown in jail. Lumumba, who had built his national profile with large public addresses and once spent three months in jail for holding a political rally, was now himself curtailing freedoms of speech, assembly, and the press.
It was a remarkable authoritarian turn for a man who had once written about Belgian colonial rule, “You do not win the confidence, respect or obedience of a subject people by wickedness, cruelty or harshness, but by good administration, respect for the rights of citizens, and just and humane treatment.” Unable to offer good administration, however, Lumumba opted for harshness. Squelching the free press, in his view, was a matter of survival. His opponents were attacking him mercilessly in the Leopoldville papers, and from across the river, Radio Brazzaville was doing the same. Unknown critics were handing out tracts that warned, “Lumumba is going to sell your women to Russia.”
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