Word: mobutu
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...that point, President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (formerly known as the Congo) decided to help Micombero by airlifting to Burundi a planeload of veterans from his own army. Among other things, Mobutu wanted to get rid of a handful of onetime Congolese rebels-the notorious Simbas-who had paddled across Lake Tanganyika and joined in the fighting on the Hutu side. Mobutu's tough troops enabled the loyalist forces to put down the rebellion. Last week the Burundi radio announced that all leaders of the aborted coup had been captured-and appealed to the world for food...
...name of the game is names in the newly renamed Zaïre Republic, formerly Republic of the Congo. When President Joseph Mobutu announced a "return to Zaïre authenticity" last month and changed his name to one with a more African sound, Mobutu-Sese-Seko (TIME, Jan. 24), many of Zaïre's citizens loyally followed suit. But then came a word of caution to the nation's 8,000,000 Roman Catholics from Joseph Cardinal Malula. 54, Archbishop of Kinshasa and one of Africa's three black cardinals. Malula, though long an advocate...
Henceforth, Mobutu decreed, Katanga province will be called Shaba (after the Swahili word for copper, the source of the province's and the country's wealth), and the Stanley Pool -the Kinshasa harbor area named for Journalist-Explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley-will be referred to as the Malebo Pool (palm tree, in one Zaïre dialect). Elisabethville had already been renamed Lubumbashi and Stanleyville had been changed to Kisangani. Now, even street names like Avenue Charles de Gaulle will have to go, says Mobutu, "despite the admiration we have for this illustrious Frenchman...
Falling into the carnival spirit, a crowd chanting "Mobutu, cha, cha, cha!" promptly tore down a statue of King Leopold II of the Belgians. Then they toppled a bronze statue of Explorer Stanley, which stood on a hill once named for him but now called Mount Ngaliema. On hand for the festivities was Foreign Minister Mario Cardoso, who these days is known as Mario-Philippe Losende. Like other Zaïrians who had foreign fathers, he was obliged by law to take the name of his African mother...
Inflexible Will. Mobutu's latest burst of name changing produced a volley of protest from Brazzaville, capital of the former French Middle Congo, which insisted that Mobutu had no right to unilaterally change the name of the Congo River since it is an international waterway and threatened to take the matter to the World Court. Some outsiders were unkind enough to suggest that Mobutu, a missionary-educated Roman Catholic, might well de-Westernize himself by dropping his Christian names. The President, as it happens, had that thought in mind. Last week he announced that he was considering renaming himself...