Word: lumumba
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...Leopoldville, Colonel Joseph Mobutu, 29, bit his fingernails, answered the telephone, coped with a stream of visitors, and tried to keep his three children (aged five, three, and nine months) from crawling off with state papers. In a big, three-story, official residence near the river, bespectacled Premier Patrice Lumumba peered out curtained windows, occasionally shouted invented communiqués to passing newsmen, and cried defiance at the world. On a grassy hilltop overlooking the foaming Congo rapids, stolid President Joseph Kasavubu huddled in his modern-design palace and issued laconic statements to the effect that whatever Lumumba said...
There were the usual alarms and excursions. A pro-Lumumba major tried to assassinate Colonel Mobutu, who wrestled the gun from the man's hand. A squad of pro-Mobutu soldiers arrived with a warrant to arrest Patrice Lumumba but were turned back by a Ghanaian officer of the U.N. corps because the warrant was not properly drawn. A big river boat loaded with 400 soldiers pulled up at a Leopoldville dock, and the panicky word went out that they were Lumumba troops from his upriver stronghold of Stanleyville. Truckloads of Mobutu's forces raced to the dock...
...happy enough as a drip-dry diplomat until he suddenly encountered a new group of Congolese in the U.N. corridors. He was aghast when told that "they alone" represented the government of Kinda's hero, President Kasavubu, while his master Thomas Kanza was supporting wild-eyed Premier Patrice Lumumba. Next, the dazed Kinda learned that "neither Kasavubu nor Lumumba was anything any more, and a colonel I didn't know was in command of the Congo...
...barred the doors and turned them away. There was even a good chance that Mobutu could get along with Kasavubu and with Katanga province's Moise Tshombe, an anti-Communist who last week said he had not even "dreamed" of seceding from the Congo until forced to by Lumumba's "dictatorship...
...knew the allegiance of the 22.000 Congolese soldiers outside Léopoldville. Many of them were doubtless prepared to rally around Lumumba, and at week's end, despite his Ghanaian guard. Lumumba mysteriously slipped into hiding...