Word: abako
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Dates: during 1959-1959
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...tattered colonial policy. Until last week Minister of the Congo Auguste de Schrijver clung fiercely to the line that the Belgian Congo Africans must be content with local self-rule now, with a gradual transition to independence in 1964. His plans collapsed when Joseph Kasavubu's big Abako Party and other native groups announced a boycott of territorial elections, the first step in De Schrijver's plan for a slow evolution. As nervous Belgian officials sent wives and children off on "holidays"' in nearby Portuguese Angola, Abako's party organ Notre Kongo issued a warning...
Bidding for political power, the Lower Congo's Abako Party announced it would boycott the December vote rather than submit to the "slowness" of Brussels' timetable. Hoping to gain control of the rival Congolese National Movement, an ambitious politician named Patrice Lumumba increased the ante. Fiery Lumumba, a 33-year-old former postal clerk and convicted embezzler, cried, "Total independence NOW NOW NOW," at a Stanleyville meeting of his followers, many of them armed with spears and painted as if for battle. Police rushed in to arrest Lumumba, and his supporters fought back, touching off two days...
Sermon of Hate. But even as Schrijver spoke, the Congolese were tragically showing how little sense of political responsibility they have. Once again the colony's leading political party, Abako, was up to its old tricks of playing upon the superstitions of the ignorant. In the port of Matadi, 160 miles southwest of Léopoldville, 400 Congolese were suddenly overcome by hysteria after listening to a sermon by one of the many "apostles" of Kibangu, a "black savior" who died in 1951 but is expected by his followers to return one day and drive out the white...
...with such rapidity that one Congolese leader found that the party he heads had split in two while he was flying from Leopoldville to Brussels last week. The most powerful Congolese politician is Joseph Kasavubu, 42, one of Leopoldville's ten native commune burgomasters. But Kasavubu's Abako Party represents mostly the Bakongo people of the southwest, who want immediate independence only for themselves. Abako's chief rival is the National Congolese Movement Party, headed by a flamboyant convicted embezzler who wants independence without bothering with elections until later. From a Belgian point of view, there...
...threatening them with death unless they clear out, the Congolese have begun quarreling among themselves. Last week, at the Kitona paratroop base, 180 men were wounded, after a band of Bakongo tribesmen threw up picket lines to keep non-Bakongo workers away from their jobs. In Moanda, where the" Abako Party has been accusing chiefs of selling out depinda (independence) for a million Congolese francs, at least one chief's house has been burned to the ground, and tension runs so high that Belgian youngsters now go to school escorted by troops carrying Tommy guns...