In a yellow plaster house with a red tin roof on the outskirts of Leopoldville, Colonel Joseph Mobutu, 29, bit his fingernails, answered the telephone, coped with a stream of visitors, and tried to keep his three children (aged five, three, and nine months) from crawling off with state papers. In a big, three-story, official residence near the river, bespectacled Premier Patrice Lumumba peered out curtained windows, occasionally shouted invented communiqués to passing newsmen, and cried defiance at the world. On a grassy hilltop overlooking the foaming Congo rapids, stolid President Joseph...
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