The Wanted American

In a vague way, Mark Higgins was determined to do good in the world--just how, he was not sure. Tall (6 ft. 5 in.) and high-strung, he could not settle down to the idea of college after boarding school, and the thought of going to work in his wealthy father's steel-fabricating plant in Worcester, Mass, appalled him. He decided that a year working with Missionary Albert Schweitzer at Lambarene in Gabon on Africa's West Coast might help him sort things out. There the work was backbreaking, but he loved the life; month after month he helped clear jungle thickets and unloaded the heavy supplies that arrived by boat. "Hi ho. ho hum, here I am in the middle of Africa," Mark wrote his mother exultantly, typing out a letter on his portable. "I sit at my desk with my mongrel dog at my left foot, and Ooka, my pet chimpanzee, playing with my shoelaces. A goat is walking on the roof."

Jeeps & Boxcars. But when he bade farewell to Dr. Schweitzer last June, Mark still could not go home. The 20-year-old youth had become interested in the World Federalists and decided he wanted to see more of the young nations of Africa. He headed south toward the Congo, planning to cross the continent to Kenya and Ethiopia, then make his way to Israel before returning to the U.S. He made his own way by hitching rides on passing trucks or jeeps, even in boxcars on the occasional trains that passed; often he slept in the mud huts of natives he had befriended along the route, shared their rude fare at mealtimes.

Mark boarded a boat at Leopoldville for the long journey upcountry just as the flames of chaos had begun to spread through the new Congo nation. "It is purely and simply panic," he wrote home in early July. "I have passed seven boats headed downstream, all dangerously loaded with fleeing [Belgian] families. I am the only passenger headed into the interior--all alone on a 32-passenger steamer." He added: "I have had only friendly reactions from the Africans and anticipate no problems . . . They ask why there aren't Americans out here where they're needed and wanted."

Terse Telegram. There was one more letter, postmarked July 25. Then only silence followed until three weeks ago when an envelope arrived from Southern Rhodesia containing some old letters and photos Mark had been carrying. Alarmed, the family pressed the State Department to open a search. A check with consulates in Kenya and Uganda, where the boy was overdue, produced no trace. Then a native arrived at the consulate in Elisabethville with grim news: a soldier of the mutinous Congolese army, presumably searching for Belgians, had shot an unknown white man near Kasongo; the body was found on a bar along the bank of the Lualaba River. At first there was hope, but last week Mark's family opened a terse telegram from Washington: DEPARTMENT REGRETS INFORM YOU . . . BODY OF PERSON IS THAT OF MARK. HIGGINS.

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