Word: congo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...darkest days of World War I, about the only consolation that fell to the Belgians was the capture in Africa of two small and scenically beautiful German territories on the eastern border of the vast Belgian Congo. Thereafter, first under a League of Nations mandate and then under the U.N., Belgium continued to rule Ruanda and Urundi through a master tribe of willowy African giants named the Watutsis. The Watutsis had been for four centuries the lords of the Land of the Mountains of the Moon, and there seemed little reason why they should not continue...
...death in 1931. Poet Vachel Lindsay was out of date; chanting about the heartland seemed naive to readers caught by the puzzles of The Waste Land. In the age of Eliot. Lindsay was remembered chiefly as the eccentric and faintly embarrassing author of two throbbing poems, the boomlay-booming Congo and General William Booth Enters into Heaven. Yet 15 years earlier, few had doubted that he was a genius. Author Eleanor Ruggles (Prince of Players: Edwin Booth) avoids outright judgment, but the sum of her sympathetic, somewhat sentimental biography seems correct: Lindsay was less than a major poet, but considerably...
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...
...Brussels, Parliament was called back into special session to discuss the riots. Minister of the Congo Auguste De Schrijver announced that he would visit the Congo himself this month to confer with Congolese leaders. "I ask, nay I implore, all concerned to renew the dialogue between Belgians and Congolese," said De Schrijver plaintively. The Socialist opposition wanted De Schrijver and the government to be ready to negotiate independence now with the Africans. "Why wait for elections when you know the major parties will boycott it?" demanded Socialist Leader Léon Collard...
...conference as well as the December elections. "Nineteen Sixty will be a year of war and misery," predicted Troublemaker Lumumba before he was led off to jail by the Stanleyville police. As if fearing this prediction was all too accurate, Belgians began flying troop reinforcements south to the Congo...