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No one could keep up with Lumumba, and, apparently, nothing could get him down. When both houses of Congo's Parliament refused to ratify his hasty ultimatum to the U.N. and his arbitrary breakoff of relations with Belgium, Lumumba's only reaction was to say he could not consult Parliament because its members were plotting against his life. He specifically named as chief assassins moderate Senate Speaker Joseph Ileo and two of his old political rivals, Jean Bolikango and Albert Kalonji.
Crimson Tilt. Since Lumumba will not remain in one place long enough for his political coloration to show, most Leopoldville observers eye dubiously the three men closest to him, all of whom have obvious Red leanings. Of the three, Secretary of State for Defense Jacques Lundula and Lumumba's private secretary, Bernard Salumu, have made junkets to Red China. Information Minister Anicet Kashamura runs the Congo radio and, at least on those days when puzzled Congolese technicians can get it on the air, broadcasts endless letters of sympathy from Communist groups in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Russia. His favorite charge: the Belgians started all the trouble by raping Congolese women.
Reckless Rush. At week's end reckless Patrice Lumumba took off for New York and the U.N. The heady prospect of having a world forum for his torrential words seems, in Lumumba's opinion, well worth the risk of being ousted from power while absent from his disordered homeland. In Leopoldville and some of the other large cities under U.N. control, a few factories were cautiously reopened by European managers, and peddlers were again hawking carved trinkets of ivory and mahogany on the streets. But there was promise of a new dispute. Belgian troops withdrew only to the two big Congo military bases of Kamina and Kitona, balked at leaving the country as Lumumba demanded.
Stopping off in Accra for a few hours talk with Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah—whose lordly behavior makes a strong appeal to nationalist leaders like Lumumba —he flew on to London. A passel of Fascist-minded Mosleyites picketed the Ritz Hotel where Lumumba stopped, and Ghana's High Commissioner in Britain, Sir Edward Asafu-Adjaye, was knocked down by two of the Mosleyites, whose slogan is "Keep Britain White!" Unscathed, as usual, Patrice Lumumba reached New York's Idlewild airport this week. Speaking to a dawn patrol of newsmen, Lumumba said softly that peace in Congo "is conditioned on the immediate withdrawal of Belgian troops," and offered his "compliments and friendship" to President Eisenhower. Signing autographs on his way through the air terminal, and looking more like an earnest divinity student than a political boss, Patrice Lumumba slipped into a rented Cadillac and was whisked off through the sleeping borough of Queens to Manhattan's respectable Barclay Hotel. The V.I.P. luncheons and the ceremonial meetings with U.N. and U.S. representatives might help to mellow Lumumba after the past few weeks of fumbling and failure in his newly independent homeland.