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Big & Quick. In recent weeks, nationalist agitators have begun distributing long lists of license-plate numbers belonging to cars the Mundele is supposed to own. Some of the cars belong to Europeans, others to native political opponents of the listmakers; all are in peril of being burned by mobs, and in the past week, five have been. In Leopoldville, black parents have been taking their children out of schools whose teachers are said to be under the Mundele's spell. A shipment of European sports cars with evil-looking radiators and outsized exhaust pipes nearly got dumped in the river, when the story spread that these were the Mundele's meat-grinding machines. And Africans and Belgians alike have been beaten up, merely on the suspicion that they might be agents of the Mundele.
Largely as a result of such terrorism, an estimated 7,000 Belgians have left the colony and European capital is fleeing as well. In Belgium, the feeling is growing that whatever the government decides to do about the Congo, its concessions will have to be big and quick. Says Leo Collard, president of the opposition Socialist Party: "It's no use finding unrealistic time schedules for gradual independence now that the Congolese seem determined to decide their own future. This we have to bear in mind, if we want to prevent a second Algeria."