Unemployed Savior

Another man who feels the heavy weight of a continent on his shoulders is Gamal Abdel Nasser, who in 1954 wrote from faraway Cairo, "The Dark Continent is now the scene of a strange and excited turbulence . . . We shall not stand idly by . . ." With his own words ringing in his ears, Nasser sent cultural missions to all the new black nations and appointed vigorous Ambassador Murad Ghaleb as Cairo's man on the board of the Congo's informal Diplomatic Society for the Preservation of Patrice Lumumba. But last week, soon after Kwame Nkrumah's Ghanaian charge d'affaires was thrown out on his ear for overzealous tinkering in local affairs, the Congo's President Kasavubu bluntly invited Nasser to withdraw the U.A.R.'s plotting Ghaleb and staff as well. Astonished at this ingratitude, Nasser turned to an old Cairo weapon of reprisal: nationalization. Since the Congo itself owns nothing in Egypt he could nationalize, he grabbed all the big Belgian companies in town (seven major firms, including the Belgian-controlled Shepheard's Hotel) on the theory that the Belgians must be whispering in Congolese ears.

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