Here is an excerpt from a certain 
history forum noted for requiring bloated responses:
The documentary you’ve watched on YouTube was produced by affiliates of the John Birch Society (JBS), which is famous in the United States for manufacturing many far-right conspiracy theories. It is actually quite interesting that the origin of the video is disguised on YouTube, being provided a neutral channel name and description without any hint of its origins.
If the picture of Katanga in this documentary seems idyllic, it’s because the John Birch Society selected images specifically designed to appeal to Westerners – depicting an African nuclear family in a ranch-style suburban home, with a father sitting in an armchair with a shirt and tie. One National Review article (Jan 15, 1963) described the video as depicting “an orderly, industrious people – the most promising, in many respects in Africa.” While the objective was to legitimize the secessionist state Katanga, it was also to delegitimize the United Nations, a great bugbear of the JBS. You observe that “whites and blacks were fighting alongside each other” in Katanga. This is true in an amusingly deceptive way: White South African mercenaries were assisting Katanga’s ethnonationalist rebellion against the postcolonial Lumumba government of the Congo, which the far right painted as communist and anti-white.
I guess it is worth addressing how to contextualize these images historically. In terms of geopolitics, Congo-Léopoldville was recognized by both the Western powers and the USSR, while Katanga was an unrecognized breakaway state run by ethnic interests that wanted control over the local supply of uranium. There’s much more to this history, but this is why Léopoldville got UN support while Katanga/Élisabethville hired white mercenaries from South Africa and elsewhere. The elite of both sides were descended from educated native families of the colonial era (which Belgians still refer to today by the ugly name évolués or “evolved”), so a ranch-style house, a modern city street, or a busy airport could have been cherry picked from either Léopoldville or Élisabethville, but that does nothing to aid our understanding of the origins of the Katanga conflict. It is worth noting that by the time this slick video was produced in 1961, Katanga had already murdered Congo-Léopoldville’s former prime minister Lumumba.
The JBS’s pro-Katanga lobby front was headed by Max Yergan, a Black ex-communist who spoke in praise of apartheid. Having been “turned” during the McCarthy era, Yergan had lost most of his black friends over his willingness to sign on to far-right initiatives disguised as anti-communist. JBS members assisted Yergan’s operations at the grassroots level. This complex structure used Yergan’s group to launder the extremist views of the JBS network, and successfully legitimized Katanga to more mainstream conservative publications, most notably the National Review. John F Kennedy’s advisors noticed that this was a JBS-National Review collaboration and characterized it as an anti-UN propaganda operation.
I intend to do some more posts and writeups about Congolese history, in honor of their 66th independence anniversary just two days ago. And of course that World Cup run.The Katanga Lobby was, from 1960-63, an active if astroturfed and forgotten force within American reaction. Katanga was essentially a Belgian neocolonial operation with a proto-Rhodesian character. Those lines about ‘whites and blacks fighting together’ always got me chuckling, beyond their profound misunderstanding of what military service meant/did in post colonial countries. Anyways. It sought to maintain the order where Congo was underdeveloped save for the machinery of extraction (as in traditional colonialism), an untenable order in the face of African nationalism. Versus fantasies of a New Frontier in Africa, the US CIA and actual foreign policy leaders had been maneuvering with Joseph Mobutu from the start, for a united Congo, against Lumumba. Who got quite a smearing in the western press. You can read absurd stories in the New York Crimes where they make fun of his ‘rhythmic’ name and call him every insult in the book. Pretty much because he was a popular leader who didn’t go comprador. Some coalition of US-Belgium killed him, and the CIA asset Mobutu was installed dictator, keeping that uranium and cobalt out of Soviet hands.