Word: lumumba
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...began slowly one morning last week when vainglorious Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba went to the Leopold II Barracks outside Léopoldville to deliver one of his grandiose speeches. Mostly Bangala tribesmen, the soldiers were hostile because their tribal leader, Jean Bolikango, had been denied a Cabinet post. They shouted him down and chased him back to the city. Startled Europeans found the streets suddenly filled with disheveled troops, their sports shirts sticking out of their unbuttoned tunics. Carrying clubs and iron bars and swinging their belts like whips, the mutineers shouted alternately "Kill Lumumba" and "Kill all whites." They...
...Lumumba went into hiding, but Foreign Minister Justin Bomboko had the courage to mount a chair outside Parliament and quiet the rioters. He led a delegation of three sweaty soldiers to Prime Minister Lumumba. Their demands: 1) removal of the Belgian commander in chief, Lieut. General Emil Janssens, a strict disciplinarian, 2) replacement of all other Belgian officers and noncoms by Congolese, 3) general raises in pay and rank. Lumumba hastily agreed. In the most sweeping army promotion in history, he advanced every Congolese soldier by one grade, making the Force Publique the only army in the world without...
Prime Minister Lumumba, encouraged and accompanied by Foreign Minister Bomboko, who emerged last week as the coolest and most courageous member of the Congolese government, went to the Leopold II Barracks to negotiate with the army mutineers. A compromise was effected: President Joseph Kasavubu would become commander in chief of the Force Publique in place of General Janssens; the garrison would get native officers; and the army would be run by a general staff, part Belgian and part Congolese...
Returning to Léopoldville, Prime Minister Lumumba gratuitously added new fuel to the flames. He blamed the mutiny on Lieut. General Janssens, who, he said, had refused to accept proposals for the Africanization of the army; he blamed the scare about Soviet "invaders" on Belgian agents, and summoned the Belgian ambassador to make the fantastic charge that he had uncovered a Belgian plot to murder him. "The assassins were discovered and arrested in my residence," cried Lumumba. "They were armed to the teeth." Everything that was happening, Lumumba insisted, was a Belgian plot to discredit the Congolese government...
...dangers ahead for the fledgling nation. Moise Tshombe, premier of rich Katanga province, whose mines provide 60% of the Congo's income, still threatened to secede rather than hand the province's revenues over to a powerful central government. "The Katanga cow will not be milked by Lumumba's serpents!" cried the secessionists, and reportedly they had the encouragement of some white businessmen. In reply, Leopoldville officials sent jets roaring low over the region in an obvious show of force...