Word: congos
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Streaming into Leopoldville last week, the delegates to the Congo's first Parliament were a strange-looking lot. Some had the sharply pointed heads of a tribe that practices infant skull bandaging. Newly elected Senators in elaborate robes sat soberly at sidewalk cafes sipping beer, looking somewhat dazed. Others were tieless and in shirtsleeves, but sported bright, beaded caps with dangling horns and tassels as they gawked at the sights. Most were obscure villagers who had never before been to the city, but some of the faces were already nationally and even world famous...
...people, was also deep in negotiation with key faction leaders such as Paul Bolya of the Mongo tribe and Jean Boli-kango, the Ngombe spokesman. The corridors of Leopoldville's new Palais de la Nation echoed to the jabber of a score of languages and dialects, for the Congo's first legislators represent a nation of more than 150 separate tribes, each with its own interests and jealous point of view, its own savage and mystic creed, its own desire for power...
Political Potpourri. Out of this tribal nightmare must come a national cabinet, a prime minister and a chief of state in time for independence day on June 30; but bloody tribal fighting has raged for months through the Congo. Bitterest of all was in the land of the Lulua. Since the 19th century, when Arab slave raiders drove the frightened Baluba westward into Lulua territory, the Baluba had happily tilled Lulua soil in semi-serfdom in exchange for the right to remain in the area. Then last year, when whispers of Congolese independence filtered out from Leopoldville, the Baluba began...
...party newspaper darkly suggested that "in former days, African women had to slave to bring up the white man's mulatto children, but in the future, white women will have to rear the mulatto offspring of the black man." As if all this were not enough, the Congo's finances were chaotic; $230 million in capital escaped the country before exchange controls were imposed, leaving scarcely enough in currency reserves to back the Congo franc...
...House's 137 seats (v. 36 for Lumumba), but with Belgian help might attract enough support from among the 18 other elected parties to form a coalition government. In pursuit of this scheme, Kasavubu last week flew to Brussels to dicker with Belgium's Minister of the Congo and to call on young King Baudouin, who is scheduled to open the Congo's first Parliament at the end of the month, provided the country does not explode into bloody civil war beforehand. Watching the events in Brussels with rising anger, choleric Patrice Lumumba growled: "The Belgians prefer...