Word: congos
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...Congo is King Baudouin's richest, widest realm. It is eighty times the size of the mother country, and half again as populous. Booming Congo exports provide the dollars and pounds that make the Belgian franc one of the world's hardest currencies. Belgians drink Congo coffee, wear shirts made of Congo cotton, wash them with soap made from Congo palm kernels. Without the mighty Congo, little Belgium might go broke; with it, a nation of 9,000,000 still counts as a world empire...
Middle Way. The Belgians are determined to hang on to their African treasure house. The task may not always be easy. The Congo lies between the all-black Gold Coast, where 4,500,000 Negroes are close to independence under Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, and unhappy South Africa, where Boer Prime Minister Johannes Strydom seems determined to enslave 9,000,000 Negroes for the benefit of 2,500,000 whites. Caught between, both geographically and psychologically, the Belgians are contemptuous of both black and white "extremes." They fear that South Africa's apartheid may spark race disorders that could...
...evidence is that the Belgian way is working. The Congo, under hard-working capitalism, has become a tropical cornucopia in the heart of a poverty-stricken continent...
Giants & Pygmies. The Congo supplies the U.S. with well over half the uranium produced in the non-Communist world; it also mines and exports 75% of the free world's cobalt (essential for jet aircraft engines), 70% of the industrial diamonds. One third the size of the U.S., it is a hot, humid, fecund basin drained by a river system second only to the Amazon in volume. In the east lies Ruanda-Urundi, where the seven-foot Watussi live; in the south lies Katanga, the metalliferous wonderland that fronts on Rhodesia and is the site of Shinkolobwe, the world...
...Novelist Joseph Conrad, the Congo River was "an immense snake uncoiled" curving through "joyless sunshine into the heart of darkness." There was plenty of darkness in the Congo during the igth century "scramble for Africa," when Baudoin's great-granduncle, Leopold II staked out his monarchical claim to the uncharted Congo Free State. Leopold's rubber gatherers tortured, maimed and slaughtered until at the turn of the century, the conscience of the Western world forced Brussels to call a halt...