Mouvement National Congolais
|
Congolese National Movement
Mouvement National Congolais |
|
|---|---|
| President | Patrice Lumumba |
| Founded | 1958 (first) 1990 (second) |
| Dissolved | 1965 |
| Succeeded by |
Unified Lumumbist Party (not legal successor) |
| Headquarters | Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo |
| Ideology |
Congolese nationalism Lumumbism Civic nationalism Federalism Tribalism |
| International affiliation | None |
| Colours | Blue, red, yellow |
| Party flag | |
.svg) |
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The Congolese National Movement (French: Mouvement national Congolais, or MNC) is a political party in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The MNC was founded in 1958 as an African nationalist party within the Belgian Congo. The party was a united front organization dedicated to achieving independence "within a reasonable" time and bringing together members from a variety of political backgrounds in order to achieve independence. The MNC was created around a charter which was signed by, among others Patrice Lumumba, Cyrille Adoula and Joseph Iléo. Joseph Kasa-Vubu notably refused to sign, accusing the party of being too moderate. By the end of 1959, it claimed to have 58,000 members.
The MNC was a national party with substantial support in the whole of Congo, while most other parties were based primarily on tribal or ethnic allegiances and garnered support in their respective provinces.
The MNC was the biggest nationalist party in the Belgian Congo but had many different factions within it which took different stances on a number of issues and was increasingly polarized between moderate évolués and the more radical mass membership. In July 1959, Iléo attempted to split the party and create a more radical party based on support of federalism rather than centralization, but his group failed to achieve mass defections from the main party.
As a result of the split, the remaining majority of the party took the name MNC-Lumumba (MNC-L) but the split also divided the MNC between the Lumumba-ists who held the Stanleyville region and its faction, which became the MNC-Kalonji (MNC-K; after Albert Kalonji who became its leader after his release from prison) which attracted support in Élisabethville (modern-day Lubumbashi) and among the Baluba ethnic groups.
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