Word: katanga
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Lumumba has powerful enemies in Elisabethville, who hope that after independence they will be able to keep the copper wealth of their Katanga province pretty much to themselves. He also has there a fiercely loyal tribal following, which he has carefully kept inflamed. The result was that no sooner had Lumumba appeared on the scene, a leopard skin draped dramatically over his well-tailored lounge suit, than the fighting began...
...along the Congo's northwestern border, began glancing covetously at the Lower Congo, the narrowing western edge around Leopoldville, which is the Congo's only outlet to the sea. Then, 1,500 miles inland, the British-controlled Rhodesian Federation was talking of annexing the Congo's Katanga province, which produces 60% of Congo wealth from a mineral-rich (copper, cobalt, diamonds, uranium) strip lying directly to the north of the Rhodesias...
...pesky intrusion from Sir Roy Welensky, burly Prime Minister of the Rhodesian Federation, who gave an interview with a visiting London Daily Express reporter and chortled, "There's going to be hell because I told you this." Welensky's "this": he had been getting letters from the Katanga region, wanting to link up with Rhodesia "when the Congo gains its independence." Who sent the letters? Sir Roy would...
Obviously not Katanga's Africans, who are 98% of the population, and want no new white masters. A likelier bet would be that the big Rhodesian and British mining interests, which own substantial shares in Katanga's rich Union Miniere du Haut-Katanga mining group, and perhaps Belgian industrialists themselves, were behind it all. Welensky talks of fearing a blood bath and "rampant tribalism" on his northern frontier, would welcome a buffer state against African nationalism...