Word: bakongo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...President out. Then he discovered that he and his fellow officers, divided by tribal jealousies, could not agree on who should take over. The coup makers, hailing from tribes in the north and the west, quickly came to realize that the only man with any control over the powerful Bakongo tribe of the south (who make up 53% of the population of 900,000 and dominate commerce) was Massamba-Debat, a Bakongo himself...
...Congo, the prevailing voice was that of President Fulbert Youlou, the cassocked, nonpracticing priest who runs the old French Congo. Living just across the river from Léopoldville, and a fellow Bakongo tribesman of Congo President Joseph Kasavubu, Youlou rallied the other delegates to a stand that urged the U.N. to cooperate with Kasavubu. said nothing at all about Kasavubu's archrival, Patrice Lumumba...
After Katanga's, the most serious secession threat came from the proud, million-strong Bakongo people, once rulers of an ancient coastal empire, who talk of amputating much of the Lower Congo. Here at the mouth of the huge Congo River, where the nation squeezes into the Atlantic with a mere 20 miles of coastline, is the Congo's solitary seaport: sultry, burgeoning Matadi...
...alliance is unlikely to survive for long. Kasavubu is a tribalist. His loyalties are rooted in his Bakongo tribe, and to preserve his regional influence, he fiercely defends his goal of a loose federal system for the Congo's government, even talks of setting up his region as a separate province. His parents sent him off to train for the priesthood at a mission school, but after five years of studying and teaching, he left to work as a clerk with a timber firm, then took a job with the colonial civil service. Later he took over leadership...
Africa Irredenta. The maps of Africa, with their artificial and arbitrary boundaries drawn years ago by the European colonialists, may be in for severe revision at the hands of the tribalists. In the Congo itself, leaders of the million-strong Bakongo people dream of doing away with the frontiers that currently split them three ways: one-third in Portuguese Angola, one-third in the French-oriented Congo Republic, and one-third in the Belgian Congo. A united Bakongo nation would control Matadi, the chief sea outlet for much of central Africa's vast hinterland...