Word: congo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Belgian Congo last week massed tom-tom drummers practiced a welcome tattoo. Prosperous Negro shopkeepers climbed up wooden ladders and draped the Congolese flag (a golden star on a blue field) from lampposts and triumphal arches set up along Boulevard Albert I, the spanking concrete highway that bisects the capital city of Leopoldville. In far-off mission churches, encircled by the rain forest that stretches through Belgian territory from the Atlantic to the Mountains of the Moon, choirs of Bantu children rehearsed the Te Deum. African regiments drilled, jazz bands blared in the bush, and on the great brown river...
...Congo is King Baudouin's richest, widest realm. It is eighty times the size of the mother country, and half again as populous. Booming Congo exports provide the dollars and pounds that make the Belgian franc one of the world's hardest currencies. Belgians drink Congo coffee, wear shirts made of Congo cotton, wash them with soap made from Congo palm kernels. Without the mighty Congo, little Belgium might go broke; with it, a nation of 9,000,000 still counts as a world empire...
Middle Way. The Belgians are determined to hang on to their African treasure house. The task may not always be easy. The Congo lies between the all-black Gold Coast, where 4,500,000 Negroes are close to independence under Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, and unhappy South Africa, where Boer Prime Minister Johannes Strydom seems determined to enslave 9,000,000 Negroes for the benefit of 2,500,000 whites. Caught between, both geographically and psychologically, the Belgians are contemptuous of both black and white "extremes." They fear that South Africa's apartheid may spark race disorders that could...
Thus went the "Congo Canoemen's Mass." Its drumbeat did not seem out of place to the natives who crowded the mission church of St. Anne in Brazzaville, French Equatorial Africa. The church's curving Gothic arch resembled the silhouette of an outsized mud hut, and its lofty vaults and arches were modeled after palm trees. The altar was made of two rough boulders topped by a monolith and the simple carved benches resembled witch doctors' ritual chairs. With its glassless windows admitting light and air and its roof covered with brilliant emerald tiles, the church seemed...
There is a man going around town taking names for a Belgian Congo safari to capture rare birds for a Yale museum...