(See Cover) The Simbas came at 7 o'clock. Grim-faced in their manes of monkey fur and feathers, they banged on the doors of the Residence Victoria with spears and gun butts, roughly hustled their white hostages out into the street. For an hour, the skies over Stanleyville had pulsed with airplane engines and apprehension. Watchers on the rooftops saw parachutes bloom and fall over the airfield to the west; gunfire ticked closer in the near distance. The Belgians had come, and help for the hostages was on its way—fast, but for many not fast enough.
The Simbas marched the 250 whites out into the broad, dawn-pale streets near the monument of the late Patrice Lumumba, the wild leftist demagogue who was the Congo's first Premier and remains its leading martyr. The marble steps below the rain-blanched image were discolored with the blood of more than 100 Congolese executed in recent months: even before the rebels turned on the whites, they had brutally exterminated black opponents of their arcane revolutionary cause. At the monument, in the name of socialism and the Congolese People's Republic, the former mayor of Stanleyville had been eviscerated, his liver and kidneys eaten raw by a laughing rebel officer while the mayor slowly died.
No Scruples. The hostage column was marched into nearby Avenue Sergeant Kitele, then ordered to sit down in the street. "We didn't believe they would harm us deliberately," recalls U.S. Consul Michael P. Hoyt, who walked with one of his aides at the head of the column. "But there was always the chance of an accident. The firing kept getting closer. Then I saw one of the Simbas fire into the crowd and I saw people running. Everybody began running. I was not running properly and I fell down twice. My legs wouldn't function right. A guy ahead of me went over a wire fence. I decided it was best to keep down. I didn't hear any screams during the firing. Funny. I always thought that people being shot at screamed."
There were plenty of screams elsewhere. As the U.S. planes kept coming and stick after stick of Belgian paratroopers popped silk over the city, Radio Stanleyville shrilled its last message: "Ciyuga! Ciyuga! Kill them all! Men, women and children. Kill them all! Have no scruples!" The Simbas (Swahili for "lions") of Rebel General Nicholas Olenga did their best to carry out the order. In the Avenue Sergeant Kitele, according to some survivors, the command to fire was given by "Major Bubu," a deaf-mute ex-boxer addicted to hemp who served as personal bodyguard to Rebel Defense Minister Gaston Soumialot. Bubu's order could not have been a scream, but in its strangled, inarticulate ferocity must have expressed precisely the blood lust of the Simbas.
Rifles and Sten guns rattling, they fired point-blank into the seated hostages. The gunners picked women and children as their first targets. Many whites flopped onto the pavement, pretending to be dead. Others did not have to pretend. One Belgian child was cut in half by a Sten-gun burst. Parents who flung themselves over their children were stitched by the wild bullets that sprayed the crowd. A woman sat openmouthed as gunfire chopped down the people on either side of her. She somehow came through unhurt.