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All told, five big companies control about 90% of the Congo's capital investment. They treat their Bantu workers with the same assiduous paternalism shown by the Congo state. For its 63,000 black dependents, the Union Minière furnishes attractive brick bungalows and good schools, prenatal care and milk for mothers and children, medals for the men who excel at their work in the mines. "This is capitalism as it works in the Congo," said one industrialist proudly.
Christian Missionaries. But the Congo is also run by Christian missionaries, who in most cases got there first. Of the Congo's 14 million Africans, 4,700,000 are baptized Roman Catholics (the rest are almost all pagan). The Roman Catholic Church maintains 678 medical centers, 16,500 primary, 103 secondary and 171 technical schools.
The churchmen are more aware than the government or the corporations that the half-educated African, stirred by the white man's literature and moved by his religion, cannot always be satisfied by bread and machines alone. The Congolese, or those among them who have climbed fastest from darkness to light, are slowly starting to talk about such verboten things as self-rule and democracy. Their stirrings are not enough to disturb the massive calm of the Belgian administration, or impede the spectacular advance of the Congo economy, but they are perceptible. To some Belgians they are alarming. Says a top-ranking Congo official: "What would the Negroes do with votes? Votes mean Communism."
Small Voice. To most of the hard-headed businessmen who run the Congo government, the signs of a Negro awakening present not a danger but a challenge. "Once advance has begun, you cannot stop it, on any front," says Economist Henri Cornélis, Pétillon's deputy and almost certain successor. The Brussels Cabinet agrees, and the result is that the Congo government is getting ready to give the Congolese a small voice in the colony's affairs. Some time next year, if present plans are carried out, the literate Africans in the principal Congo cities (15% of the total native population) will vote alongside the whites for panels of urban councilmen, who will advise the local prefects.
The Belgians plan to move slowly—and progress steadily. "We adapt and adjust continually to the Congo's circumstances," says Governor Pétillon. "In the cities perhaps we shall move towards the ordinary concept of democracy, for black and white alike, but in the countryside, we may have to be content for a long time with a modified form of tribalism."