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Tshombe knows how to maintain his popularity at home—and he does it in a way no other African leader would dare. He talks about the dignity his people have lost through laziness and the common response, "Pas moyen, patron [No can do, boss]." He gives them hell.
In Stanleyville, just before the rebels took it, he told a crowd: "You tell me you don't have enough to eat. But I see you drinking beer at 9 o'clock in the morning. First work, then drink your beer." Africans respect a winner, and so Tshombe banked on his firm stand against the rebels in Stanleyville. If he succeeds, the Congo could become a watershed in the history of emerging Africa. For five years, African politicians have indiscriminately whiplashed the Western world while glorifying themselves with such airy phrases as "African personality" and "African socialism." Tshombe—that rarest of Africans who seems to have no complexes about being black—recognizes the brutal side of the African personality, and the phony side of African socialism. He is willing to accept people from the outside—whether mercenaries, technicians or missionaries—to give the Congo a measure of stability. Canny and unscrupulous, candid and pragmatic, he just might do it—although the odds are overwhelmingly against him.
The blacks of Stanleyville and Paulis are not likely soon to forget the heavy tread of the mercenaries. And it will take the whites even longer to forget or forgive the enormities committed by the Simbas. A great many of the Belgians and other whites who lived and worked in the Congo now shudder at the thought of returning. And yet, others—a surprisingly high number—have already said that after a while, they will go back, if asked. In all likelihood, they will not go in the spirit of a Paul Carlson, who once said, "In this century, more people have died for their witness for Christ than died in the early centuries, which we think of as the days of martyrs." They will be in the Congo for more mundane reasons. But if there is ever to be a normal, sane relationship between Black Africa and the white world, they will have to be there, and they will have to be accepted. For so life goes.