Word: congos
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Things were a little awkward from the very start, as young King Baudouin arrived in the Congo to celebrate and declare its independence. On the way into Leopoldville from the airport, an exuberant nationalist pressed close to his open limousine, grabbed the King's sword from beside him, and flourished it above his head before the police could move in and pommel him away. Later, as the King entered the new parliamentary chamber, where Ghanaians in togas mingled with bemedaled Western ambassadors, the Belgians shouted, "Vive le Roi!" The Congolese Assemblymen, preferring to cheer the new nation...
...protect the Congo!" said Baudouin, and formally proclaimed its independence. But New Premier Patrice Lumumba, jealous of the limelight everyone else was enjoying, took the opportunity to launch a vicious attack on the departing Belgian rulers. "Slavery was imposed on us by force!" he cried, as the King sat shocked and pale. "We have known ironies and insults. We remember the blows that we had to submit to morning, noon and night because we were Negroes!" Deeply offended, King Baudouin was ready to board his plane and return to Brussels forthwith. Only the urging from his ministers persuaded...
...scene was set in the unfinished grand ballroom of what was to have been the Belgian Governor's new official residence. Now it was the debating hall of the Congo's first Parliament. A grey wastebasket was pressed into service as the voting urn. Amid the happy hubbub, a black soldier loped down the aisle, crying, "Mr. President of the Provisional Assembly, he has arrived!" As the President strode briskly to his seat, his Belgian adviser whispered, "Have you got your hammer...
...alliance is unlikely to survive for long. Kasavubu is a tribalist. His loyalties are rooted in his Bakongo tribe, and to preserve his regional influence, he fiercely defends his goal of a loose federal system for the Congo's government, even talks of setting up his region as a separate province. His parents sent him off to train for the priesthood at a mission school, but after five years of studying and teaching, he left to work as a clerk with a timber firm, then took a job with the colonial civil service. Later he took over leadership...
Eyes of Fire. Lumumba is the Congo's nearest approach to a national figure. He is determined to install a strong central government rising above tribal loyalties. The son of a Batetela tribesman, he grew up in equatorial Stanleyville, where he attended first a Catholic, then a Protestant mission school, finally completing his education at the Belgians' training school for postal employees. A year after Lumumba took his first job as clerk in the Stanleyville post office, he was in jail, convicted of embezzling $2,520 of government money. Freed in 1957, he prospered as the persuasive salesman...