Word: congo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...cloudy, hot morning last week in Leopoldville, capital of the vast Belgian Congo (about four times the size of Texas and 77 times larger than Belgium itself), long lines of natives stood quietly in the dusty streets. Across town, amid the mangoes, palms and cassia trees of the European quarter, far fewer white citizens were similarly lined up. Belgian gradualism was making another cautious move forward, permitting the first elections-for either whites or blacks-to be held in Belgium's fabulously rich (cobalt, uranium, copper, gold) and only colony...
...colonial administrators walk a tightrope over the twin volcanoes of white repression and black extremism. They have given fewer civil rights to their Africans than either the British in Nigeria (due for Dominion status in 1960) to the northwest or the French in Equatorial Africa across the Congo River. They have never had the racial clashes or race hate that flame in apartheid-cursed South Africa or in British-ruled Kenya. In fact, the only rioting in recent years occurred last summer after a badly refereed soccer game between white and black teams in Leopoldville's big King Baudouin...
Belgium's plan for the inevitable march to self-government for Africans lies in education and economic opportunity for the blacks. The multiracial, Catholic-run Lovanium University will graduate its first Negro lawyers and engineers next year. At Luluabourg, deep in the heart of the Congo, black cadets are training at the colony's first military academy. Nowhere in Africa is there such a solid, well-paid class of native technicians. Congolese pilot river and lake steamers, run locomotives, do 90% of the repair work at the big military base at Kamina. But Africans are still segregated...
BISHOP ALOYSIUS BIGIRUMWANI, Apostolic Vicar of Ruanda Urundi (bordering on the Belgian Congo), is a descendant of the kings of the famed Watutsi tribe of giants. From a mountaintop mission at Nyundo, overlooking Lake Kivu and the flaring volcanoes of Nyiragongo and Nya-mulagira. tall (6 ft. 3 in.) Bishop Bigi-rumwani, 53, directs five white bishops and 471 priests, both white and Negro. Since his consecration in 1952, 20,000 converts have joined the church in his own diocese, but two-thirds of the half-million tribesmen in the territory he administers as senior bishop are still pagan...
Collector of Injustice. He was a handsome, romantic, cranky figure, that most irritating kind of idealist, a collector of other people's injustices. A poor orphan boy from Ballymena in County Antrim, he joined the British consular service, was stationed in Africa. The Belgian Congo, then being run as a private slave factory by Belgium's King Leopold II, captured his horrified attention. It was a time before Europe knew itself capable of Belsen, and Europe was shocked by Casement's voluminous, angry reports (published in 1904) on torture, floggings and forced labor. Later, he made similar...