Word: mobutu
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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...yellow plaster house with a red tin roof on the outskirts of 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...
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...
Constitutionally, the Congo was a worse shambles than ever. There were now three governments instead of two-Mobutu's, Lumumba's and moderate President Joseph Kasavubu's. But in the 3,000-man Léopoldville garrison of the Congolese army, Mobutu had at least temporarily enough firepower to make his orders stick. This was a detail that both Lumumba and Kasavubu had overlooked. Both had always been happy when they could line up enough loyal soldiers to form a personal honor guard...
After nightfall, Mobutu organized a dependable detachment of military police into a flying wedge and hustled Lumumba through the milling soldiers to an army truck. But along the way, Congolese reached past the guards to kick and spit on Lumumba and rip his flapping white sports shirt to shreds. As Lumumba rode off, General Lundula sneaked out the back way aquiver with fear, and with all insignia of rank carefully removed. At Lumumba's official residence, Ghanaian troops put the Premier under heavy guard. Next day, Mobutu's men raided Lumumba's headquarters, arrested 26 staff members...
Chaos Ahead. Mobutu's coup seemed to be proceeding smoothly. He closed the cable office to wires by politicians of whatever stripe. He told Parliament to take a vacation for the rest of the year, and when the Deputies tried to meet anyway, his troops 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...