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The tribes butchered each other for centuries before the white man arrived, and in colonial days white soldiers killed countless, nameless Africans. But Dr.
Carlson's murder, along with the massacre of perhaps another hundred whites and thousands of blacks, had a special, tragic meaning.
Carlson symbolized all the white men —and there are many—who want nothing from Africa but a chance to help.
He was no saint and no deliberate marr tyr. He was a highly skilled physician who, out of a strong Christian faith and a sense of common humanity, had gone to the Congo to treat the sick. His death did more than prove that Black African civilization—with its elaborate trappings of half a hundred sovereignties, governments and U.N. delegations —is largely a pretense. The rebels were after all, for the most part, only a rabble of dazed, ignorant savages, used and abused by semi-sophisticated leaders.
But virtually all other black African nations, including the more advanced and moderate ones, supported the rebels without even a hint of condemnation for their bestialities. Virtually all these nations echoed the cynical Communist line in denouncing the parachute rescue as "imperialist aggression." When this happened, the sane part of the world could only wonder whether Black Africa can be taken seriously at all, or whether, for the foreseeable future, it is beyond the reach of reason.
Naked Nuns. The U.S.-Belgian intervention was decided upon only as a last resort, when all negotiations had failed with the rebel regime of Christophe Gbenye—the bearded "President" of the Peking-backed Congo People's Republic, who packs a Colt revolver in his blue jeans and drives a Rolls-Royce.
When the more or less Communist-backed rebels first launched their attack on the government, the U.S. helped Premier Tshombe only with relatively modest sums of money and supplies.
He himself recruited white officers of various nationalities to stiffen the loyal Congolese army.
When the rebels captured Stanleyville last August, they treated the whites living there relatively well at first. But as the war began to turn against them, they grew increasingly venomous, until finally all whites were "Americans" and deserving of maltreatment or death.
The rebel regime kept announcing that 10,000 Americans were fighting alongside Tshombe. Except for an occasional refugee's horror story, little was known on the outside about the fate of the whites during that period. But last week, the grim details were filled in.