Word: katanga
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Into the Crater. Dr. Tazieff was born in Warsaw of Russian parents, lives in Paris and is a Belgian citizen. A geologist by training, he got hooked on volcanology in 1948 when he was working in Katanga and got a telegram telling him to investigate an eruption near Lake Kivu. He found Mount Kituro blasting furiously, but descended alone into the crater with only a handkerchief tied over his face. The volcano stepped up its action, attacking him with poisonous fumes and great gobs of molten lava. He barely managed to struggle out of the crater alive. "I found...
Then came the question of who owned the ex-colonial government's bulging stock portfolio. In return for mining, forestry and transport concessions, Congo-based private companies had paid the colony in stock. As a result, the colonial government controlled nearly 20% of Katanga's wealthy Union Minière, had control of diamond mines in Kasai province and hundreds of smaller concerns. At independence, the portfolio was worth more than $700 million; it has since skidded to less than half that value. More than any other economic factor, the desire to keep control of Union Mini...
...improved when the Belgians, three months later, failed in a move to ease him out of office. Papa Spaak's visit last week was aimed at renewing the negotiations. Long a friend of Adoula's central government, Spaak had opposed the Belgian conservatives who backed Katanga's secession...
Nowhere has independence been so agonizing as in the Congo. After the Belgians left, tribal warfare and secession sent the once promising young nation slithering almost instantly back toward the Stone Age. Today, in Katanga's Elisabethville, once a delightful, well-fed little city, meat hunters sell rats to hungry housewives. Congolese, from children to Cabinet ministers, play the game of je souffre, their long faces proclaiming their suffering even while their hands reach out for matabich-the bribe. The bribe rarely works for long. Says one would-be fixer with frank wistfulness: "You can't buy these...
Where to Watch? Given the Congo's endemic anarchy, the government can ill afford to spare many troops. Leopoldville, as usual, is seething with discontent. Last week 200 Leopoldville soldiers had to be jailed when they refused to go to Kwilu. Volatile Katanga, where the secessionist rebellion was crushed a year ago, still harbors roaming bands of ex-gendarmes...