Word: congos
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Like corporation directors, the paternalistic Belgian masters of the mineral-rich Congo have tried to avoid politics altogether, keeping the vote from black and white alike and striving to give each an equal opportunity to enjoy the highest standard of living in Middle Africa. It has worked well. France's policy, in the great sweep of its Middle Africa territories, Equatorial Africa and the Western Sudan, has been that of education and assimilation-the idealistic if not always practicable notion that once Africans think of themselves as Frenchmen, everything will be all right. In Mozambique and Angola, Portugal...
Carcasses & Calico. To the adventuring sailors of Portugal's Prince Henry the Navigator, the idea of freedom for the African was as unheard of as the 20th century minerals germanium and uranium now being mined in the Congo. Slavery and servitude were the African's way of life, and in the first west coast trading posts established at the malarial edge of jungles as dark and green and impenetrable as the ocean bottom, native chieftains were only too glad to exchange the surplus humanity of their fiefs for the trinkets and calicoes of the newcomers. The human life...
...opium war in China kept him from achieving his ambition to go there. There was Henry Stanley, a British-born U.S. reporter, who went to Africa in search of a feature story for James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald and stayed to open up the whole Belgian Congo for King Leopold II. Through the doors opened by the explorers came a stream of colonizers and empire builders like Cecil Rhodes, bringing with them armies of semiskilled labor from India to help build today's Middle Africa, and to complicate its racial patterns...
Just Another Intellectual. Collier's japes with apes begin with Alfred Fatigay, a tired African mission schoolmaster who leaves Boboma on the Upper Congo to return to England and marry his fiancée Amy, an intellectual sort of girl. For company he takes with him "a well-grown, sagacious, fine specimen" of a chimpanzee named Emily. All goes very well for a while ("In England the Primate takes precedence of all but Royal Dukes"). But Emily, no ordinary chimp, knows how to read. She takes a course in the British Museum, and she thinks she had better start...
Monkeyshining Paradox. Emily, by impersonating the bride, thoughtfully intervenes to save Fatigay from marriage to the heartless Amy. ("Marriage between cousins is perfectly legal," says the clergyman when the imposture is discovered.) As Mr. and Mrs. Fatigay return to the Congo, the groom tells shipboard interviewers: "My message to your readers is simply this. It is true my wife is not a woman. She is an angel . . . Behind every great man there may be a woman, and beneath every performing flea a hot plate, but beside the only happy man I know of-there is a chimp...