Word: kasai
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...Kasai. Maladroit as he was, bearded Patrice Lumumba last week staged an erratic but undeniable demagogic comeback. As the week opened, secessionists in Katanga and Kasai provinces still held large portions of his nation. In the Congolese Parliament, Senator Sebastian Fele, newly sprung from a Lumumba jail, won cheers from his col leagues when he roared that the Premier should be removed from office. To restore his sagging power, Lumumba badly needed a quick, dramatic victory...
...hastily promoted Congolese army corporals and sergeants to officer rank, ordered hundreds of his troops into requisitioned Sabena planes to be flown to Luluabourg, deep in Kasai province. "National emergency," explained Army Chief of Staff Colonel Joseph Mobutu, suggesting that it was only an expedition to quell new fighting between Baluba and Lulua tribesmen. But the moment they landed, the troops struck out by rail and truck along the 166-mile road to Bakwanga, stronghold of onetime Lumumba pal, Albert Kalonji, who had declared the diamond-rich region an independent nation called Mining State. Swearing that his tribesmen, mainly armed...
Then, a column moved down the dusty road toward Katanga itself, 100 miles away. There, Tshombe's hastily mobilized Katanga army was deployed, in grim determination to resist with machine guns, mines and booby traps. Stretches of the single-track rail line leading into Katanga from Kasai were ripped up, and armed Katangans with dynamite rushed out to block the few dirt roads at the Kasai frontier. Most of Tshombe's force was a ragtag outfit, but Belgian officers at Kamina airbase were openly supplying him with spotter planes and tactical advice. At week...
Tshombe's narrow-eyed provincialism strikes an echoing chord in many, perhaps most, Congolese. From Coquilhatville came word last week that Equator province had been declared a republic by the local native leaders. In the big central province of Kasai, Baluba tribesmen declared the independence of something called Mining State, which, they hoped, would allow them to retain the huge industrial diamond lodes that supply three-quarters of the free world's production...
...Belgian merchants crept back into the cities, taking down the shutters from their shop windows in hasty compliance with the Congo Cabinet's decree that stores and factories must reopen by August 8 or be confiscated. Reports of continuing tribal warfare among the Baluba and Lulua in the Kasai interior hardly ruffled Léopoldville's street crowds. Here and there local commanders of the Congo's restive Force Publique set up as semi-independent potentates. One Sabena pilot on a routine flight to Stanleyville suddenly heard on his radio the voice of the "commander...