Word: congo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...evidence is that the Belgian way is working. The Congo, under hard-working capitalism, has become a tropical cornucopia in the heart of a poverty-stricken continent...
Giants & Pygmies. The Congo supplies the U.S. with well over half the uranium produced in the non-Communist world; it also mines and exports 75% of the free world's cobalt (essential for jet aircraft engines), 70% of the industrial diamonds. One third the size of the U.S., it is a hot, humid, fecund basin drained by a river system second only to the Amazon in volume. In the east lies Ruanda-Urundi, where the seven-foot Watussi live; in the south lies Katanga, the metalliferous wonderland that fronts on Rhodesia and is the site of Shinkolobwe, the world...
...Novelist Joseph Conrad, the Congo River was "an immense snake uncoiled" curving through "joyless sunshine into the heart of darkness." There was plenty of darkness in the Congo during the igth century "scramble for Africa," when Baudoin's great-granduncle, Leopold II staked out his monarchical claim to the uncharted Congo Free State. Leopold's rubber gatherers tortured, maimed and slaughtered until at the turn of the century, the conscience of the Western world forced Brussels to call a halt...
Brains & Muscle. Today, all has changed. Nowhere in Africa is the Bantu so well fed and housed, so productive and so content as he is in the Belgian Congo...
Belgian brains and Bantu muscle have thrust back the forest and checked the dread diseases (yaws, sleeping sickness, malaria) which sapped the Bantu's strength. In some areas, the Congo's infant-mortality rate is down to 60 per 1,000-better than Italy's figure. More than 1,000,000 children attend primary and secondary schools-40% of the school-age population (compared with less than 10% in the French empire...