Word: schrijvers
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Dates: during 1959-1959
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Nine months ago bloody nationalist riots in the Congo (TIME, Jan. 19) shocked all Belgium into realizing that the death knell was tolling for Belgian colonialism, too. Last week from Brussels, Belgian Minister of the Congo Auguste de Schrijver (rhymes with driver) broadcast the most conciliatory message yet to the freedom-hungry Congolese. But the words he used, though unthinkable a year ago, already seemed to come too late...
...first time, Schrijver openly offered the vast (900,000 sq. mi.) colony a definite timetable for achieving its freedom. By next fall, he said, the Congo will have its own Parliament. Within four years after that, it can decide whether to break with Belgium entirely or adopt a modified independence that would leave control of currency, defense and foreign policy to Brussels. Whatever the ultimate decision, added Schrijver sternly, "I wish to stress that responsibility for democratic government will really be in the hands of the Congolese people...
Sermon of Hate. But even as Schrijver spoke, the Congolese were tragically showing how little sense of political responsibility they have. Once again the colony's leading political party, Abako, was up to its old tricks of playing upon the superstitions of the ignorant. In the port of Matadi, 160 miles southwest of Léopoldville, 400 Congolese were suddenly overcome by hysteria after listening to a sermon by one of the many "apostles" of Kibangu, a "black savior" who died in 1951 but is expected by his followers to return one day and drive out the white...