Word: congos
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...name of the game is names in the newly renamed Zaïre Republic, formerly Republic of the Congo. When President Joseph Mobutu announced a "return to Zaïre authenticity" last month and changed his name to one with a more African sound, Mobutu-Sese-Seko (TIME, Jan. 24), many of Zaïre's citizens loyally followed suit. But then came a word of caution to the nation's 8,000,000 Roman Catholics from Joseph Cardinal Malula. 54, Archbishop of Kinshasa and one of Africa's three black cardinals. Malula, though long an advocate...
...proof positive of its independence, almost every new African nation has made a show of changing many of the place names imposed by its former colonial masters. None, though, have gone quite so far as the Zaïre Republic, once known as the Belgian Congo. This month President Joseph Désiré Mobutu held a mass rally in Leopoldville (today known as Kinshasa), his capital city on the mighty Congo River (sorry, the Zaïre), to announce a sweeping "return to Zaïre authenticity...
Inflexible Will. Mobutu's latest burst of name changing produced a volley of protest from Brazzaville, capital of the former French Middle Congo, which insisted that Mobutu had no right to unilaterally change the name of the Congo River since it is an international waterway and threatened to take the matter to the World Court. Some outsiders were unkind enough to suggest that Mobutu, a missionary-educated Roman Catholic, might well de-Westernize himself by dropping his Christian names. The President, as it happens, had that thought in mind. Last week he announced that he was considering renaming himself...
...elaborate welcoming ceremonies-the second one for Mobutu, who landed an hour after the other three in a DC-8 whose fuselage bore the freshly painted words Air Zai're to denote that he had changed the name of his country from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the Zai're Republic a week earlier. The same name change compelled the Israeli Foreign Ministry to revise all its programs and invitations. All told, it was a trying time for the ministry; when it ordered 400 flags, 100 for each country, they were almost delivered late because...
Until last week, it was known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the name that the former Belgian Congo took when it won independence from Brussels in 1960. To the present government in Kinshasa, however, the name unduly celebrated the Bakongo tribesmen who reside along the lower reaches of the Congo River. Seeking a name to please the non-Bakongo majority, Kinshasa last week officially rechristened the country the Zaire Republic, and the river the Zaire River. Originally, the word was the result of misunderstanding-or mispronunciation -on the part of a Portuguese naval captain, Diogo...