Clashes for power in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1960s brought about a humanitarian crisis. Yet in the rich and growing scholarship on the tumultuous path from Congolese independence in 1960 to the early years of Mobutu Sese Seko's dictatorship at the end of the decade, the simple fact that hundreds of thousands of Congolese had to flee from violence is rarely deemed worthy of much attention. The intricate manoeuverings of diplomats, policy makers on rival sides of the Cold War, UN officials, and major Congolese politicians such as Patrice Lumumba and Moise Tshombe have taken centre stage in the historical literature. Likewise, scholars of humanitarian agencies and operations in the Cold War have kept silent about the Congo's civil wars after independence. I challenge this long-standing focus on elite political intrigues by exploring how and why North American and European aid programmes intervened in the DRC. This book rectifies the lack of attention on how the wars of the 1960s impacted on the lives of civilians and how the DRC had again become a site of international humanitarian action.

To begin, this study seeks to unravel this silence about suffering and humanitarianism. Haitian historian Michel-Ralph Trouillot has observed, ‘The unearthing of silences, and the historian's subsequent emphasis on the retrospective significance of hitherto neglected events, requires not only extra labor at the archives – but also a project linked to an interpretation.’ Certainly, humanitarian responses to political crises in DRC are very well known in other periods, especially the Congo Reform Association's exposés of the rapacious rule of Leopold II in the late nineteeth century and international humanitarian aid for victims of the great Congo wars from 1998 to 2006. International concern about abuses against civilians in both of these eras often depicted most Congolese as passive victims of European imperialism, elite Congolese politicians, and the demands of international capitalism. By contrast, Congolese suffering and humanitarian action in the 1960s offers a new perspective on well-worn stories of international Cold War struggles, the collapse of Belgian colonialism, the martyrdom of Patrice Lumumba, and Mobutu's seizure of power in November 1965. Starvation, a marked decline in public health, and the mass displacement of civilians did not fit with narratives of heroic nation building or Cold War ideological struggles.