The Wet Days

In the Congo, it rained all week. Flash floods washed out streets of Leopoldville's native city, where hundreds of huts slowly caved in under the ceaseless downpour. In Coquilhatville, striking civil servants who had not been paid for three months gave up their picketing in the driving rain and stayed indoors. This was the land of crisis, the subject of endless U.N. debates, but on the scene it wore a lethargic air.

Well-fed Belgians, the tails of their sports shirts hanging over their khaki shorts, clogged the noisy Manhattan Bar at Leopoldville's Hotel Regina, and diners at the Sabena guest house could still enjoy coquilles St. Jacques, snails and mussels flown in from Brussels. With the flood of U.N. soldiers in town, the souvenir business was bigger than ever; on every street corner, the inevitable Hausa traders from Nigeria offered carved ivory, lizard handbags and ebony figures at prices tailored to the foreigners' handsome wages.

If the natives were restless, a visitor would never know it from the faces of the jolly, giggling, black taxi drivers, who clustered outside all the hotels, clamoring for attention when a potential passenger strode out to the street. The statistics proved that 60,000 were jobless in Leopoldville; yet carefree Africans drank the local Primus or Polar beer until all hours at the neighborhood taverns.

A thousand miles to the east, in Katanga's little copper-rich capital of Elisabethville, the flame trees were out in glorious profusion alongside the spacious swimming pools of the Union Miniere officials, whose mines and refineries were working at capacity. If the service had deteriorated at the little Hotel Leopold II, the cannibal sandwich (raw hamburger, raw egg, chopped onion) remained excellent at the terrace dining room. No one much cared when news arrived that Katanga's mercenaries had clashed with the U.N.'s Ethiopian troops up north where President Moise Tshombe was clearing out his enemies.

Things are less pleasant at Stanleyville, the headquarters of Moscow-backed Antoine Gizenga, where months of near anarchy have left their mark on whites and blacks alike. Stanleyville's white population, once 4,000, had dwindled to a hardy 250. Along the Avenue Wagenia, many of the shops are closed, and salt and sugar are not to be found. In Gizenga's interior plantation country, the few remaining whites pay token salaries to black workers to fight back the encroaching jungle, despite the fact that markets for their goods are well-nigh gone. Down at Luluabourg, once the prosperous commercial center of Kasai province, only two shops in the European section remain open--a jeweler and a hardware dealer. Everything else is closed along the main street, where the local Africans doze in the shelter of over hanging sidewalk roofs, occasionally rising to walk out into the drizzle and urinate on the sidewalk.

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