Word: za
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...ZAÏRE REPUBLIC
...proof positive of its independence, almost every new African nation has made a show of changing many of the place names imposed by its former colonial masters. None, though, have gone quite so far as the Zaïre Republic, once known as the Belgian Congo. This month President Joseph Désiré Mobutu held a mass rally in Leopoldville (today known as Kinshasa), his capital city on the mighty Congo River (sorry, the Zaïre), to announce a sweeping "return to Zaïre authenticity...
...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...
...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...
...palpitations. They did more than that in Italy, where she was campaigning to rouse opinion against the dictatorship in Greece. In Genoa she gave such an incendiary speech ("Hurrah for Liberty! And for all those tortured by the colonels, those thousands locked up in concentration camps! Re-si-sten-za!") that crowds stoned the Greek consulate and battled police. Next she turned up in Turin, where extreme left-wingers used the occasion to pelt police with paving stones, overturn cars and generally raise a ruckus. In Athens the government shrugged off her campaign. "She is just a has-been...