Word: congo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Hoping to keep up with the hot spirit of independence that is racing through the Congo like fire in dry bush, Belgium is holding elections there in December to offer a modicum of local self-rule, as a forerunner of a promised national government by Africans in 1964. But Congolese Africans, in a land 99% black, are impatiently several jumps ahead of the process...
Nine months ago bloody nationalist riots in the Congo (TIME, Jan. 19) shocked all Belgium into realizing that the death knell was tolling for Belgian colonialism, too. Last week from Brussels, Belgian Minister of the Congo Auguste de Schrijver (rhymes with driver) broadcast the most conciliatory message yet to the freedom-hungry Congolese. But the words he used, though unthinkable a year ago, already seemed to come too late...
...first time, Schrijver openly offered the vast (900,000 sq. mi.) colony a definite timetable for achieving its freedom. By next fall, he said, the Congo will have its own Parliament. Within four years after that, it can decide whether to break with Belgium entirely or adopt a modified independence that would leave control of currency, defense and foreign policy to Brussels. Whatever the ultimate decision, added Schrijver sternly, "I wish to stress that responsibility for democratic government will really be in the hands of the Congolese people...
...apostles" of Kibangu, a "black savior" who died in 1951 but is expected by his followers to return one day and drive out the white man. The result was a pitched battle with black Congolese police, which left six Africans dead. But of all the troubles that beset the Congo last week, none so clearly foreshadowed the future as the massacre at Luluabourg, 500 miles east of Léopoldville...
Since January, a bewildering array of 60 political parties has emerged in the Congo. New groups and splinter groups form with such rapidity that one Congolese leader found that the party he heads had split in two while he was flying from Leopoldville to Brussels last week. The most powerful Congolese politician is Joseph Kasavubu, 42, one of Leopoldville's ten native commune burgomasters. But Kasavubu's Abako Party represents mostly the Bakongo people of the southwest, who want immediate independence only for themselves. Abako's chief rival is the National Congolese Movement Party, headed...