Foreign News: THE MANY LANDS OF CONGO

Through all his weathervane shifts of mood, Congolese Premier Patrice Lumumba has never shifted on one point: the Congo, he insists, is a single, unified nation of 14 million people. But with or without U.N. help, the odds against a unified Congo are enormous. In bustling Leopoldville, where 15-story office buildings rise only a few miles from huts on stilts, it was the dry season and customers on the terrace of the Hotel Regina sipped their beer in relative comfort, grateful for a temperature dip that had taken the thermometer down to the 80s. Upriver at Coquilhatville, astraddle the equator, it was sweltering as usual, and the natives crept out of their huts to sleep in the tall moist grass. To the east, where the rain forest changes to flat plains, then rolling hills, then towering mountains, blacks and whites alike lit fires as the sun disappeared, folding themselves in blankets to keep off the bitter chill.

Climatically, historically and emotionally, the Congo is many lands. Even when the Congo’s radios and telephones were working again, orders from Leopoldville would scarcely be heard, understood or heeded by the equatorial Logo craftsman, the fiercely independent Lokele fisherman or the Balamba villager of Katanga. Scattered through a land roughly the size of the U.S. east of the Mississippi, the Congo’s 150 major tribes speak 38 different languages, observe a bewildering variety of rites ranging from lip tattooing to magic rain making.

On the Plateau. Faithful to the classic principle of “divide and rule,” Belgian colonial administrators carefully preserved the tribal system. The result was a painful anachronism: a people dominated by primitive loyalties suddenly presented with the tools of modern industrial society and the trappings of independence. To Moise Tshombe and his Katangans. no one in Leopoldville has any legitimate interest in gleaming little Elisabethville (pop. 177,000), the Congo’s second largest city, where today supermarkets and the luxurious Hotel Leopold II rise from the cool, 5,000-ft.-high plateau. Nor to them does any “outsider” have any right to share in the revenues of the rich mines and plants that produce and process the copper, tin, uranium, and cobalt (60% of free world output) developed by Belgium’s fat Union Minière du Haut-Katanga.

Tshombe’s narrow-eyed provincialism strikes an echoing chord in many, perhaps most, Congolese. From Coquilhatville came word last week that Equator province had been declared a republic by the local native leaders. In the big central province of Kasai, Baluba tribesmen declared the independence of something called Mining State, which, they hoped, would allow them to retain the huge industrial diamond lodes that supply three-quarters of the free world’s production.

After Katanga’s, the most serious secession threat came from the proud, million-strong Bakongo people, once rulers of an ancient coastal empire, who talk of amputating much of the Lower Congo. Here at the mouth of the huge Congo River, where the nation squeezes into the Atlantic with a mere 20 miles of coastline, is the Congo’s solitary seaport: sultry, burgeoning Matadi.

Enough Bananas. For politicians in Leopoldville the logic of centralization is easy to see. Lying alongside the Stanley Pool, where the Congo waters widen out to become 13 miles across before plunging into a series of rapids and cataracts, “Leo’s” only reason for existence is to serve as a terminus for the radar-guided cargo boats bringing raw materials downstream for export and pushing upstream imported gasoline, radio sets, refrigerators and Perrier water to supply such river ports as busy Stanleyville. Without Matadi and its outlet to the sea, Leopoldville would wither. Without the taxes of the Katanga, it would become the capital of another undeveloped nation rather than of the richest state in Africa. But so long as manioc and bananas remained in plentiful supply, the bush natives who make up 77% of the Congo’s population would not care much about the subtleties of maps and governments.