Word: lumumba
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...elaborate tale told by Minister Munongo last week did little to change anybody's mind. Lumumba, as Munongo told it, had escaped by stolen car from a farmhouse prison near the Portuguese Angola border, along with his Minister of Youth, Maurice Mpolo, and Senate Vice President Joseph Okito. The car ran out of gas. was found overturned in a ditch 45 miles away. Three days later, fleeing on foot, all three were "massacred by the inhabitants of a small village." The villagers "may have acted somewhat precipitously, though excusably," conceded Munongo, but he would pay them...
...Katangese solemnly produced steel spikes that Lumumba supposedly used to tunnel through a wall in the farmhouse and sticks of firewood with which the prisoners slugged the guards. But a photographer allowed to take pictures of the farmhouse reported "no signs of recent habitation," except for a bar of soap and pictures of the Matterhorn on the wall. Dr. G. E. Pieters, a Belgian who signed the death certificates, had no doubts about the identity of the principal victim ("You'd recognize that goatee and those bulging eyes anywhere"). Asked how the men had died, he replied: "What happened...
While the world outside burst into uproar, the Congo itself received the news with sluggish calm, as if Lumumba's death was to be expected. There was some scattered violence-but not the widely predicted blood bath. In Léopoldville, Lumumba fans rioted for a night, and somebody cut a man in half. In Bukavu, drunken Congolese soldiers seized a Roman Catholic priest, cut off his ears and then beheaded...
Among the mourners: President Joseph Kasavubu's government, which observed a minute of silent tribute for "a sincere patriot who got involved with bad foreigners"-though it was the Kasavubu government that turned Lumumba over to Katanga after he got too hot to handle in the Thysville prison...
Success Unpredictable. Chief aspirant to Lumumba's mantle is Antoine Gizenga, 39, a onetime schoolteacher and an all-out proCommunist. Gizenga founded a small anticolonialist party in a Léopoldville saloon two years ago, later flitted off to Prague's Institute for African Studies. His party won 13 Parliament seats in last year's election. He tossed them to Lumumba, and Lumumba made him Vice Premier. Since shortly after his boss's arrest last December, Gizenga has run the show from the Eastern province river capital of Stanleyville (and to one recent visitor, he remarked...