THE BELGIAN CONGO: Sounds of the Future

Nine months ago bloody nationalist riots in the Congo (TIME, Jan. 19) shocked all Belgium into realizing that the death knell was tolling for Belgian colonialism, too. Last week from Brussels, Belgian Minister of the Congo Auguste de Schrijver (rhymes with driver) broadcast the most conciliatory message yet to the freedom-hungry Congolese. But the words he used, though unthinkable a year ago, already seemed to come too late.

For the first time, Schrijver openly offered the vast (900,000 sq. mi.) colony a definite timetable for achieving its freedom. By next fall, he said, the Congo will have its own Parliament. Within four years after that, it can decide whether to break with Belgium entirely or adopt a modified independence that would leave control of currency, defense and foreign policy to Brussels. Whatever the ultimate decision, added Schrijver sternly, “I wish to stress that responsibility for democratic government will really be in the hands of the Congolese people.”

Sermon of Hate. But even as Schrijver spoke, the Congolese were tragically showing how little sense of political responsibility they have. Once again the colony’s leading political party, Abako, was up to its old tricks of playing upon the superstitions of the ignorant. In the port of Matadi, 160 miles southwest of Léopoldville, 400 Congolese were suddenly overcome by hysteria after listening to a sermon by one of the many “apostles” of Kibangu, a “black savior” who died in 1951 but is expected by his followers to return one day and drive out the white man. The result was a pitched battle with black Congolese police, which left six Africans dead. But of all the troubles that beset the Congo last week, none so clearly foreshadowed the future as the massacre at Luluabourg, 500 miles east of Léopoldville.

Until 1891 Luluabourg belonged solely to the Lulua, a tribe of warriors who hated work in any form. Then a pair of nomadic Arab tribes invaded the area, driving before them a batch of captives from the unwarlike Baluba people. When the Lulua finally drove the invaders off, the captives settled down happily in Luluabourg as voluntary serfs of the Lulua —a state of affairs that persisted until last January, when the downtrodden Baluba finally began to listen to Albert Kalondji, a Baluba politician who told them that they deserved to own the land they tilled.

The Feminine Touch. To keep the peace, the Belgians packed Kalondji off to jail, but they could not hold him long. When he was released last month, the Lulua howled in rage. Last week they sought revenge. Smeared with war paint, Lulua warriors began by burning two Baluba villages to the ground and killing their inhabitants with spears and homemade muzzle-loading rifles. In the suburbs of Luluabourg, naked Lulua women swarmed through the streets screaming to their men to kill, kill, kill. Like a grass fire, murder and mutilation swept over an area of 40 miles until the number of deaths mounted to an estimated 300.

At week’s end, as reconnaissance planes droned ineffectively over the bloodstained jungle around Luluabourg, Belgian officialdom was hopefully awaiting the reaction of Congolese politicians to Schrijver’s timetable for independence. But to outsiders—and to many Belgians as well—it seemed doubtful that any timetable, however reasonable, could ward off the chaos that was descending upon one of the world’s richest colonies.