CONGO (See Cover) The tom-tom must beat this night to call our warriors to the fight. Everywhere in the bush the army of warriors must answer this ancestral call.
—Moise Tshombe, on the eve of the U.N. offensive
In the U.S., the tom-tom of headlines, echoing queer names and remote places, was becoming all too insistent. It told of the United Nations' painful effort to pacify a province called Katanga and unify an emerging nation called Congo. To many it seemed a strange and distant venue to win so much of the world's attention. In a sense, it was; the Congo crisis hardly compared with the peril of war in tense Berlin, nor was it as immediate a danger to peace as the furtive Communist advances in the paddyfields of Southeast Asia. In the U.S. and elsewhere, many would have liked to wash their hands of the whole mess and leave the Congolese to fight it out.
But these days political shock waves travel too fast and too far for that: the ugly little Congo squabble was not to be ignored. As Africa's colonial empires crumble, a wobbly league of immature new countries is taking their place. In their midst, like it or not, the U.S. must try to prevent chaos.
For the West, the situation had its divisive ironies. At Washington's orders, a caravan of giant U.S. Air Force Globe-masters was busy hauling Swedish, Indian and Ethiopian soldiers to the U.N. garrison at Elisabethville, there to fight Belgians, Frenchmen and Britons serving with the Katanga forces. The NATO allies, sorely split over the U.N. intervention, discussed a solution for hours at their Paris conference. They were really discussing the fate of one man—Katanga's Moise Tshombe, the crafty, flamboyant black leader who had taken his copperrich province out of the Congo and called it a nation.
Vivid as a Flag. Republic of Katanga was its name, and red, white and green were its colors—"Red for the blood shed for Katanga's freedom, white for purity and green for hope," explained Tshombe in an exultant moment. There also were three Maltese crosses on his banner—in the burnished red-brown of copper. The man was as vivid as the flag. He dressed his mounted honor guard in plumed helmets and blazing tunics bought secondhand from the Garde Républicaine in France, and seated them on broken-down nags sent up from Rhodesia. He was the solemn black defender of white capitalism in middle Africa, a rarity; yet he sneered at his Belgian sponsors as deceitful, and at the U.S. as "cowardly and decadent." He was urbane and charming, with a clever turn of phrase couched invariably in excellent French. But he was also superstitious enough to blame messengers for any bad news they bore, and he was volatile and unpredictable; often Tshombe ended a conference with U.N. officials with a friendly smile, only to walk out and hotly accuse them of all sorts of perfidy.