Word: kasavubu
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After a quick personal investigation of the evidence in the January riots. Van Hemelrijck decided that Joseph Kasavubu, 41, the fanatic leader of the ultranationalist Abako organization, had been falsely arrested for fomenting them. He ordered Kasavubu and two other Abako leaders released. Then he had the three men bundled onto a military plane loaded with paratroopers headed home on furlough. When the plane landed in Brussels, everyone from Premier Gaston Eyskens on down was astounded. Van Hemelrijck had done some daring things in his time, but no one had ever expected him to bring home in freedom the very...
...newspapers brushed off as merely a tribal organization. Originally it had been formed by the Bakongo tribe of the south as a sort of protective union against the harder-working and more favored Bangalas. But under the leadership of a slight, timid-looking but steel-willed fanatic named Joseph Kasavubu, 41, it gradually turned its anger upon bigger targets...
Just across the Congo River from Leopoldville sits Brazzaville (pop. 86,000), capital of French Equatorial Africa, which has been astir with De Gaulle's promise of autonomy. Kasavubu began to dream of reviving the fabled 14th century kingdom of the Congo, combining territories now French, Belgian and Portuguese. After his election as one of Léopoldville's commune burgomasters in 1957, he had himself declared "Supreme Leader" by his followers, and began receiving homage seated on a leopard skin, symbol of tribal supreme power. Meanwhile, the rival Bangalas also began organizing, and the bush telegraph began...
...thousands of spectators who were just then emerging from the football stadium. The swollen mob swept through the city, upset and burned cars, stoned and mauled Europeans, pillaged shops. Bands looted public buildings and invaded mission schools, concentrating their fury on Roman Catholic more than on Protestant schools (though Kasavubu, mission-educated, studied philosophy for three years as a Catholic seminarist). Under orders from their Belgian officers, African police opened fire, and Belgian paratroopers manned key points about the European part of the city. But for two whole days the rioting continued, until an estimated 175 people had been killed...