WHEN my eldest son was learning to speak, fragments of a troubled world would sound every now and then through his jabbering. You'd be lulled by his babble until, all of a sudden, a startlingly familiar sound - "Mujahadeen" or "Ayatollah" or "Gorbachev" - would break through the nonsense like a radio dial suddenly happening on a station. For him, of course, they were just rhythmic noises, absorbed from the television. For us they were slightly eerie reminders that even before we know it the big world out there is entering our heads.
It struck me listening to them that when I was his age the syllables that floated into the unconscious were African - Katanga, Lumumba, Baluba, Niemba. They floated in from a faraway place - the Congo. For those of us who were children in the 1960s, not to mention the families and neighbours of the 1,200 Irish soldiers who were old enough to fight with the United Nations there, the vast country that is now called Zaire, was, quite simply, the rest of the world.
There was Ireland, England, America, and the Congo. And in the last fortnight, with the civil war in Zaire again in the news, those strange African, words have drifted back.
Some of the sounds have changed. The Congo, of course, is now Zaire, though the rebels are restoring the old name. Albertville, where the Irish troops were based, is now Kisangani. What is now Kinshasa was Leopoldville; Lubumbashi was Elisabethville.
But some of the names are the same - Goma, where the Irish soldiers had their rations stolen in a nasty foreshadowing of much worse trouble. Niemba, where nine Irish soldiers were killed by Baluba tribesmen who mistook them for the Belgian mercenaries who had been tormenting them. And above all, Mobutu, the gangster who was up to his neck in the civil war of 1960 and 1961 and is still, at least in theory, the country's ruler.
And the echo of sounds from childhood is a reminder that what is happening in Zaire is part of our history too. Irish involvement in the Congo has been, for the most part in the honourable role of helping to get the truth out. It was through the eyes of Roger Casement, and to a lesser extent of Alice Stopford Green, that much of the western world began to see the reality of Belgium's grotesquely named Congo Free State. In 1903, Casement gathered the testimony of the Africans forced to gather the rubber for John Dunlop's pneumatic, tyres:
"Wild beasts - the leopards - killed some of us while we were working away in the forest and others got lost or died from exposure or starvation - and we begged the white men to leave us alone, saying we could get no more rubber, but the white men and their soldiers said: `Go. You are only beasts yourselves. You are only meat.' We tried, always going further into the forest, and when we failed and our rubber was short, the soldiers came to our towns and killed us."
IT was through the eyes of Conor Cruise O'Brien, the UN representative in Katanga, that the appalling cynicism of Cold War politics in which the fate of the Congo was treated as a sideshow, a small move in a big game, was most damningly exposed. And it is in the work of another Irishman, Thomas Pakenham in his brilliant book The Scramble for Africa, that the most vivid and accessible account of the savage European rapacity that created the Congo in the first place is to be found.
But we also belong, as members of the EU, to the part of the world that has done the plundering. Brussels is, for us too, a kind of capital; we do well to remember that its palaces, museums and monuments were paid for with the spoils of the Congo. And it was Belgium which, as Thomas Pakenham puts it, scuttled out of the Congo in 1960, leaving it "well prepared for civil war and anarchy". The story which is ending now was begun then. .
But we also belong, as members of the EU, to the part of the world that has done the plundering. Brussels is, for us too, a kind of capital; we do well to remember that its palaces, museums and monuments were paid for with the spoils of the Congo. And it was Belgium which, as Thomas Pakenham: puts it, scuttled out of the Congo in 1960, leaving it "well prepared for civil war and anarchy". The story which is ending now was begun then.
But other European countries, too, have played a disgraceful part in the saga. Mobutu's villas on the French Riviera, in Spain, Belgium, Portugal and Switzerland, with their helipads and swimming pools, their marble colonnades and gold taps, are visible reminders of the failure of European countries to freeze assets they knew to be stolen from his own people.
A drug dealer or a bank robber can be pursued and harassed, but a kleptocratic ruler is treated as a friend and ally. And why not? Wasn't it Europe that taught Africans like Mobutu how to treat a whole vast country as nothing more than a source of loot?
And the cynicism with which the Americans, to whom we look for international leadership, have announced the end of Mobutu era and switched to the winning side is, even by the standards that apply to such things, quite stunning. Is this the same Mobutu who has received more than a billion dollars in US aid?
The same man whom President Kennedy welcomed to the White House in 1963 and presented with an Air Force plane and crew for his private use? The same great statesman whom President Reagan hailed as a "voice of good sense and good will"? The same friend of democracy whom President Bush greeted on his arrival for a state visit as "one of our most valued friends"?
THE Irish involvement in the Congo was the first physical expression of Irish independence, not as an act of separation but as a connection to a world well beyond ourselves. It should have been a kind of milestone in the development of modern Ireland. But because it was such a traumatic experience - 26 Irish soldiers in all were killed there - and because it did not save the Congo from tyranny, it became a strangely incomplete episode.
Words like Lumumba and Niemba became, except for those who had been directly involved, just meaningless sounds. The only Congolese word to enter our vocabulary was Baluba, imbibed with a strong draught of hatred, and spat out as a term of abuse. Very few of us ever knew that many of the Baluba people, distraught at their mistaken attack on the Irish, subsequently gave their lives to protect other Irish troops. It was easier to sink back into apathy or familiar racial stereotypes.
Now that the civil war of the early 1960s is being re fought (the rebel leader Laurent Kabila is, like Mobutu, a veteran of the first conflict) there is a chance perhaps for that incomplete part of modern Irish history to reach some kind of conclusion. There is even a chance that that ending might be a happy one - a peaceful, prosperous and democratic republic to join South Africa in a new beginning for the continent.
If that does come to pass, it will be some consolation to the Irish families that lost loved ones and to the Irish soldiers who endured a terrible time.a The notion that our first steps on the world stage were not merely stumbles into a bloody mire may give us some courage in facing our responsibilities to a broader humanity.
The graves of the dead in our churchyards may come to seem like some corner of an Irish fields that is forever Africa.