Jean "Black Jack" Schramme was a Belgian mercenary and planter.
27 Facts About Jean Schramme
1.
2.
Jean Schramme managed a vast estate in the Democratic Republic of the Congo until 1967.
3.
In 1947, Jean Schramme moved to the Belgian Congo at the age of 18, where he worked as an apprentice for a planter.
4.
Jean Schramme had a strong entrepreneurial streak and by the age of 22 he already owned his own plantation covering 22 acres at Bafwakwandji in the eastern half of the Belgian Congo.
5.
Jean Schramme performed his national service with the Force Publique, which provided him with his military training.
6.
Mr Jean Schramme deeply loved Africa and called himself un Africain blanc.
7.
Jean Schramme ran his estate along militaristic lines, having a very authoritarian and paternalistic leadership style as he took to calling himself a pere to his black African workers.
8.
Jean Schramme thought that he understood the Congo far better than the Congolese, and believed that the country should remain a Belgian colony forever.
9.
Jean Schramme hated the evolues who for him were not real Congolese at all; his ideal Congolese were his workers on his estate who called him pere.
10.
Unwilling to accept Congolese independence, in the spring of 1960, Jean Schramme started to stockpile arms and ammunition while he attached metal plates and a machinegun to his car to create a makeshift armored car.
11.
Jean Schramme claimed to have been arrested twice and to have seen 8 white settlers hanged without a trial, through the historian Christopher Othen noted that Jean Schramme was prone to lies and exaggerations, and his accounts might very well be fabrications.
12.
Jean Schramme himself fled to Uganda, where he heard about the State of Katanga led by Moise Tshombe.
13.
Jean Schramme went to Katanga to fight as a mercenary and to reestablish himself as a planter in Africa, having abandoned his estate.
14.
Jean Schramme spent several weeks in Belgium, and then went to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, where he purchased the book Quotations from Chairman Mao to "know his enemy" as he phrased it.
15.
In October 1961, Jean Schramme took the town of Kisamba from the Congolese, proudly reporting his small unit had just routed two battalions of the Armee Nationale Congolaise, owing to their superior discipline.
16.
Jean Schramme was one of the mercenaries whom Tshombe recruited to fight for the Congo, crossing over from the then Portuguese colony of Angola.
17.
Jean Schramme commanded the Batabwa group, which operated independently of the Lunda group commanded by another mercenary, Ferdinand Tshipola, a state of affairs that owed to personal rivalries between Jean Schramme and Tshipola than ethnic rivalries between the Batabaw and Lunda peoples.
18.
Jean Schramme was imprisoned in Algeria and two years later he died in suspicious circumstances.
19.
For Jean Schramme, this was a sign that he was fighting the wrong enemy and on 3 July 1967 he began to lead an uprising in the Tshopo province against Mobutu along with fellow mercenaries Denard and Jerry Puren.
20.
Jean Schramme led the attack on the army's barracks at Stanleyville, leading a force of 11 white mercenaries and about 100 Katangese in the assault.
21.
The attack that Jean Schramme planned was described as "badly executed" as he behaved with over-confidence in believing that his small force would be enough to take Stanleyville.
22.
The Congolese fought back and within a week, Jean Schramme had been forced to retreat from Stanleyville.
23.
Jean Schramme was able to hold Bukavu for seven weeks and managed to defeat all ANC troops who were sent to retake the town.
24.
The shortages of ammunition were a major problem for the ANC, but Jean Schramme's forces suffered from even greater shortages of ammunition as the expected support from abroad failed to arrive.
25.
Thomas Tshombe, the brother of Moise Tshombe and the current reigning Mwaant Yav, pressed for Jean Schramme to be placed in charge of the Katangese exiles in Angola, a request refused by the Portuguese authorities who did not want such a well-known man in Angola.
26.
Jean Schramme was not living in Belgium at the time of the sentence: he died in 1988 in Brazil.
27.
Jean Schramme was played by the French actor Aladin Reibel in the 2011 film Mister Bob.