How to Appear Evolu

It was a week of triumph for the Congo's professionals. In a freelance foray, a band of 14 white mercenaries blithely recaptured the strategic Congo River port of Lisala, despite orders from the timorous Congolese army high command not to overextend their supply lines. The mercenaries -- mostly Southern Rhodesians -- cut down 160 of the 3,000 well-armed rebel defenders, had to drive their Jeeps over mounds of rebel dead to enter the Moyen Congo provincial capital. Another mercenary band took back the North Katanga town of Kongolo, found that, as usual, the rebels had slaughtered the whole "intellectual" population of the town --anyone who could read and write.

For all their success, the mercenaries remained in bad odor with the rest of black Africa. But Premier Moise Tshombe, in Nairobi for talks with the Congo Reconciliation Committee headed by Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta, made it clear that though he wants black African help in quelling the rebellion, he would brook no "interference in the internal affairs" of his country. That seemed to mean the mercenaries would stay--for the time being at least.

Assemblage of Aphrodites. In the Katangese capital of Elisabethville, professionals of a different sort were performing. They wore such names as Alphonsine la Turbulente and Mathilde la Coquette, and they were competing for the title of Miss Katanga 1964. No ordinary beauty contest, this year's assemblage of African Aphrodites was hallmarked by the narcissistic story the girls planted in a local newspaper praising their own good looks. "My mirror says I can enter the competition without fearing the outcome," wrote Marie Framc,oise la Sentimentale. "My fans say I am very seductive and I agree."

More seductive to the judges, though, was Marie Chantal la Charmante, 17, who paraded across the stage in a black dress and a rakishly cocked, daffodil-yellow boater while a 22-man band, consisting largely of electric guitars and tom-toms, shrilled maniacally. La Charmante won handily, thus enhancing a future few American beauty queens could or would hope to have. For she, like the rest of the contestants, is a femme libre (literally "free woman") --one of a select crowd of Congolese hostesses who play a key role in official life as semi-wives.

Back to the Manioc. The men of Katanga, particularly those in government, have no greater desire than to appear evolues (progressive) in the eyes of visiting African and European dignitaries. But they learned long ago that their wives would be no help. Usually married by 15 and quickly saddled with the burdens of multiple motherhood, the Katangese wife has no time to acquire social graces. At a formal affair, she usually sits immobile, responding to conversational gambits with an agonized oui or non, counting the minutes until she can return to her manioc masher.

The femmes libres on the other hand, dress with style, rarely drink too much, and often come equipped with a handful of French phrases which they drop as delicately as perfumed handkerchiefs. Tightly organized by a formidable, fortyish femme who sees to it that they mind their manners, Elisabethville's 2,000 free women now dominate the distaff side of diplomatic life. And if now and then they go beyond the call of diplomatic duty, the wives don't mind and neither do the husbands. In any case, the femmes feel they have considerable social utility. "If someone distinguished like a minister takes a liking to me," said Marie Chantal la Charmante, "I am naturally very pleased. I am more evoluee than the wives."

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