From the Congo to Hiroshima: The colonial propaganda that powered the Manhattan Project

Uranium wasn’t seen to hold very much value before World War II. It was much less important than radium, which sits alongside uranium in ores like pitchblende and carnotite and was widely used in medical settings and to make luminous instrument dials. Yet with the discovery of uranium’s use in nuclear fission, what was once a byproduct became these ores’ most hotly desired component. In fact, of the 1,200 tons of pitchblende packed into drums at Shinkolobwe, then shipped to Matadi and New York, the Manhattan Project only purchased the uranium. The project held onto the sludge left after refining, promising to return it to Union Minière du Haut-Katanga at the war’s end so that it could be used for the company’s main business: radium.

The ore-filled drums had been dispatched by Edgar Sengier, Union Minière’s director. In 1940, Katanga’s uranium deposits were widely believed to be the richest in the world, and Germany, whose scientists were also working on an atomic bomb, wanted to control the ore as desperately as the United States did. When Germany occupied Czechoslovakia’s western border regions in 1938, it acquired the Jáchymov mines, then thought to be Europe’s largest uranium deposit. Germany secured more uranium in May 1940 when it occupied Belgium, capturing 3,500 tons of stockpiled Congolese ore. The Congo itself was surely next, so the United States encouraged Sengier to send over what Union Minière had on hand. Sengier arranged for it to be shipped to his company’s newly founded office in New York, the African Metals Corporation.

As a gargantuan endeavor in physics and chemistry, Manhattan Project was in the business of resources — an early suggestion for the project’s code name had been “Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials” — and by purchasing Sengier’s uranium, Groves confirmed that the project traced the same links between chemistry and empire visible in materials like cotton and rubber. 

In the Belgian Congo, this violence had begun with the ivory and slave trades, and it continued with rubber under the Congo Free State, the deceptively named colony that Leopold II claimed for himself in 1885. The Leopoldian system’s cruelty was widely publicized. In novelist Joseph Conrad’s well-known words, it was “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration,” and the international controversy surrounding the Congo Free State meant that Leopold’s endeavor lasted only until 1908. However, Belgium retained the colony, and the exploitation didn’t stop. 

When the Second World War made copper, gold, diamonds, and tin central to the “slaughter of the war,” in Raymond Dumett’s words, “devoured by the assembly lines that made brass cartridges and cannon shells,” Belgian officials extracted these metals and minerals using Leopoldian methods: forced labor, minimal safety measures, and harsh repression of strikes. The mines sent virtually all their copper to the United Kingdom and most of their tin, cassiterite, cobalt, manganese, zinc, cadmium, silver, gold, and uranium to the United States. The uranium sent to New York had been gathered by hand, exposing the miners, Gabrielle Hecht writes, to “a year’s worth of radiation in about two weeks.” To fulfill additional U.S. orders, miners worked night and day. When their shifts were over, they returned to homes built with radioactive materials and to a tainted water supply.

This was not the picture the Belgian government wanted to paint of the Congo. The Belgian colony had been synonymous with colonial greed since Leopold’s days, and the government remained defensive, paranoid about criticism. During World War II, its propaganda agencies stubbornly repeated the Leopoldian myth: The idea that the king (who never personally visited the colony) was responsible for “pulling the Congo from the shadows of the jungle.” The agencies asserted that the Belgian Congo gave more raw materials to the Allies than anywhere else in Africa, no minor propaganda point in these years when hunger for materials raged. The Belgians hoped it was a point that would guarantee Allied support of their country during the occupation, and that when peace came, they would maintain their colony.

The point was to be made on film, the lingua franca of wartime propaganda. This was easy enough to arrange, because the Belgian Congo was teeming with filmmakers. Some of them worked for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, which was in the Congo to make sure that the United States controlled the colony’s uranium.

At the time, Belgium’s own best-known colonial filmmakers were Gérard de Boe, Ernest Genval, and André Cauvin. De Boe, a government employee, had lived and worked mostly in the Congo since the late 1920s. Genval was a poet and songwriter who traveled back and forth between colony and metropole and made films in the 1920s and 30s. 

Cauvin was the man the Belgian government chose to lead the propaganda effort. A lawyer and filmmaker with a taste for drama, Cauvin had the right credentials and the right contacts. Just before the war, he had made two short films about artists that won him acclaim at the 1939 New York World’s Fair — Hans Memling, peintre de la Vierge (Hans Memling, Painter of the Virgin) and L’agneau mystique (The Sacred Lamb). He had experience filming in the Congo, where he made the 1939 Congo, terre d’eaux vives (Congo, Land of Living Waters) and Nos soldats d’Afrique (Our African Soldiers). He was also a member of the Belgian resistance, and after several members of his network were arrested at a Brussels café in 1942, he fled to London, where he asked his friend Paul-Henri Spaak, Belgium’s exiled foreign minister (and former prime minister), for a job. Spaak had just the one. In the shared jargon of war and diplomacy, it became known as the “Cauvin mission.”

Because the film was intended to convince the Allies, especially the Americans, to support Belgium’s claim to the colony, its crew needed to be British and American as well as Belgian. In London, Cauvin hired British cinematographer Arthur Fisher, Belgian-British secretary Lucienne Harvey Meurisse, and Belgian camera assistant Pierre Navaux. In New York, where he sailed in 1942 to seek money for the project, he made the prize hire: Broadway lyricist John Latouche. 

Latouche’s skills as a writer were ideal, as were his politics, which were farther to the left than Cauvin’s own; he was known best for his lyrics to Earl Robinson’s 1939 cantata “Ballad for Americans,” which was written for the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project and memorably sung by Paul Robeson on CBS radio. In the Belgian Congo, Latouche’s job was to follow the crew as they worked, drafting the film’s voiceover narration with an American audience in mind. This was to underline the diplomatic argument: The Congo produced a wealth of raw materials for the war, and the Congo was Belgium’s alone.

From the very first week of the Cauvin mission, things didn’t go well. The Euro-American crew arrived on October 29, 1942, in Léopoldville (Kinshasa), where they were joined by Congolese assistants. Fisher fell gravely ill soon after their arrival and had to return to London, dying days later. The filmmakers’ heavy equipment was difficult to load and unload from the trucks, car, and motorcycle that made up their entourage. The RCA sound discs that they recorded — intending to leave them with the Belgian colonial government as ethnographic documentation — were mistakenly loaded onto an American military plane, “never to be found again.”

We know this because Cauvin recounted it in his report on the mission, adventure-story style. The finished film also adopts this style. Congo begins with the derogatory comparisons that had been used to depict the colony from its inception. The Congo was a “primitive” place until Belgium “civilized” it. Cauvin’s camera lingers on hunters in the rainforest, on ceremonial dances and dress, before turning to the Western science and urban planning, the ships and planes and railroads that Leopold and his successors introduced, all of them bent towards transforming the colony’s raw materials into the objects of trade.

These materials are Congo’s focus — as they were in so many colonial films before it, and in the German and American books about raw materials published around the same time — and the film follows them as they’re harvested and transformed for war. In the film’s opening scene, a white schoolgirl recites a list of the materials. The colony is endowed with rubber and radium, copper and palm oil. It has elephants, gorillas, rivers strong enough to produce hydroelectric power, African statues, and precious metals. “The Congo has given all these riches to our Allies during the war,” the girl concludes. “It is worthy of Belgium.”

The film’s concern with Congo’s “riches” reaches a climax in the film’s penultimate scene, which turns to the place most important to the Allies: Katanga, whose mines are the source, the voiceover tells us, of 160,000 tons of copper each year and of masses of tin (“uranium” is never uttered). These metals are refined on site, ingots poured and stacked, barrels upon barrels massed neatly at the river port, ready for shipping. The editing speeds up as the sequence draws to a close, paced by a score by the modernist composer and author Paul Bowles, whom Latouche recruited to the project. An orchestra is layered over African drums, and shots of Congolese laborers stacking and rolling goods are intercut with shots of dances. “The song of work,” the voiceover intones, “the song of the ancestors.” The comparison implies that the movements of these laborers — and they are forced laborers — are exquisitely modern. Because they are modern, they cannot be the product of an inhumane system. Perhaps, Congo suggests, the oppositions are not so stark between Congo before colonization and Congo after colonization.

Because this was calculated to appeal to Americans, many of whom still remembered Leopold’s gruesome rubber campaigns with horror, Belgian diplomats orchestrated Congo’s U.S. release as an extravagant media blitz, ensuring reviews in The New York Times, the Chicago Defender, and other prominent publications. The film was distributed commercially by Warner Brothers and screened to government and artistic organizations. If you were in Washington, you could have seen it at the National Geographic Society, alongside 3,500 others. Or if by some chance you were at the White House, you might have watched it with President Roosevelt, who requested a private screening on March 9, 1944. 

At the same time, the Belgian Foreign Ministry sent photographs from the film’s production across the country, hoping they would both advertise Congo and serve as propaganda themselves. Members of the crew, quasi celebrities, sometimes appeared at the exhibitions. Finally, there was a book: an oversized hard-back with glossy photographs by Cauvin and text by Latouche, published by Willow, White, & Co. In fact, Congo seems to have been the only book that Willow, White, & Co. ever released. The publisher was apparently a fiction, an invention by the Belgian government to give the book an aura of legitimacy. Given the dire wartime shortage in paper, it was also evidence of the astonishing expense to which Belgium was willing to go to lay claim to its sole colony and the materials within it.

Latouche’s writing in the book is in the first person, conversational. It follows the parallel arcs of the film and the filmmakers’ journey in Congo, concluding in Katanga. There, Latouche meets a mining superintendent for Union Minière, Edgar Sengier’s company. The man shows him Union Minière’s company housing, its doctors, hospitals, and nurseries — echoes of Fordlândia and of the corporate welfare programs that companies like Kodak offered as a substitute for a closed shop. Standing with Latouche overlooking a mine in Jadotville, not far from Shinkolobwe, the superintendent muses, “There’s nothing like it anywhere, I bet. Over 150,000 tons of copper ingots a year. Cobalt — 60% of the world production comes from that big place down there. Tungsten, radium, zinc, cadmium … oh, I tell you there’s nothing like it. And the blacks. They are the best product, perhaps.”

In the 1940s, this analogy would have been familiar to Americans, echoing George Eastman’s interest in his farm’s Black foreman’s “development” and in J. Fred Johnson’s young Kingsport neighbors — interest that equated people with the material they worked with, cotton for the first, wood for the second. There, on the edge of a mine, the analogy was to metal.

The supervisor turns from the pit and looks straight at Latouche, a question on his lips. “Some of your journalists, m’sieu l’américain, are hard to satisfy. Now that they cannot find lurid stories to exploit, they have other complaints.” Latouche responds directly to the reader:

“I stated earlier that I have no affection for imperialism, and certainly there is no denying the fact that the advance would be quicker still if the profits not already substantially diminished by governmental taxes were turned back into Congolese improvements, rather than flowing into the oubliettes of abstract absentee fortunes. My personal sympathies are with the former idea. But I am not an economist, and until the colonial administrations change throughout the world (and there seems small hope of that at the moment, alas), the Katanga must be judged from existing standards. And judged from that point of view, it ranks high among the major experiments being made internationally by commercial combines.”

With this, Latouche hit on what the entire thing meant for the Allies. Like Holston, Tennessee Eastman, Agfa Wolfen, and Kodak Park, Union Minière was industry on a massive scale, dealing in metals and minerals instead of explosives, chemicals, rayon, or film. And while the United States wanted to distance itself from the Belgian Congo, it wanted the colony’s copper, cobalt, and above all its uranium, even more.