Word: lubumbashi
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...rich Shaba province ended last week. Driven from the city by the hard-fighting paratroopers of France's Foreign Legion (see box), an estimated 2,000 Katangese rebels faded back into the bush, retreating toward their home bases in eastern Angola. The paratroopers took up new positions at Lubumbashi, 160 miles away, turning over their guard duty to Zaïrian troops loyal to President Mobutu Sese Seko...
...government, holding government forces in check while allowing Mobutu, then head of the army and considered "safe" by the Belgians, free rein to take over. There is evidence, revealed by former CIA officer John Stockwell, that the CIA had a hand in Lumumba's eventual kidnapping and murder at Lubumbashi. His body has never been found...
...VISITING LUBUMBASHI now, one can still see the scars of the civil war, although Mobutu has nominally established independence for a united Zaire. Houses still lie in ruins and roads are a shambles; at the university, the frame of a three-story building, originally meant to be a library, stands unfinished and rusting. All the university students were drafted and placed under military discipline when they protested Mobutu's policies. Most of the rest of the city consists of mud huts, where the people eke out a living on the edge of starvation. And corruption is a way of life...
Outside the mines the Shaba economy is stagnant. The only development in the area is the investment by OTRAG, a huge West German company, in a rocket-testing site near Lubumbashi. Mobutu gave the site, covering hundreds of kilometers, to OTRAG in much the same way colonies were assigned to European monopolies in the 19th century. OTRAG may remove the inhabitants and establish its own laws; its personnel are not subject to Zaire laws. The site borders on Zambia and Tanzania, and is only a few hundred kilometers from Angola--a fact that has made these independent countries understandably nervous...
...Mobutu has succeeded in giving his country the two things it needed most: a measure of peace and relative stability. In consequence, Zaïre is beginning to attract foreign investment on a rising scale. A Japanese mining group is about to open a large new copper mine near Lubumbashi (the former Elisabethville), for instance, and to the northwest of Lubumbashi an international consortium has discovered what may be the world's richest bed of copper ore. In Kinshasa, formerly Leopoldville, four auto manufacturers are planning to open assembly plants, Goodyear has just completed a $16.8 million tire factory...