Change of Venue

As the circling DC-4 bounced through the tropical thunderstorm over Elisabethville, a cryptic message crackled down to the tower: "I've got a big parcel for you fellows." Minutes later, the parcel stumbled down the plane ramp into the eager hands of the tough Katanga gendarmes. It was Patrice Lumumba, blindfolded and shackled to two of his government lieutenants. The Katanga cops fell on all three, dropped them to the ground in a hail of swinging rifle butts. Then they flung Lumumba into a waiting Jeep. With four gendarmes sitting on him, Lumumba was whisked off to a new and secret jail.

Though temporarily humiliating, the abduction was actually a testament to Lumumba's burgeoning strength. Congolese President Joseph Kasavubu took alarm when he visited Lumumba in Camp Hardy, only 86 miles from Leopoldville, where he was technically incarcerated by order of Colonel Joseph Mobutu. Kasavubu found Lumumba with the run of the camp and energetically subverting the loyalty of the troops guarding him. For a few hours, no one was certain whether it was Lumumba or Kasavubu who was the prisoner. When order was restored, Kasavubu decided that it was time to move Lumumba to a safer place. He opened negotiations with Katanga's Moise Tshombe. Late one night Lumumba was hustled on board a chartered Air Congo plane and delivered to Elisabethville. En route, the guards pummeled Lumumba so severely that the alarmed pilot went back to the cabin to warn against damage to the plane.

But Lumumba's partisans pushed on. From Stanleyville, Lumumba's old friend and former Vice Premier, Antoine Gizenga, probed westward into Equator province, where his patrols terrorized isolated white communities, roughed up some missionaries, rifled mission collection boxes. Arms and supplies came from Gamal Abdel Nasser's U.A.R. troops, who man a U.N. base in Equator. The head of the U.N. Congo force, India's Rajeshwar Dayal, seemed to be at least tacitly helping the Lumumba cause. In northern Katanga, where Gizenga's troops marched into a U.N.-protected "neutral zone" unimpeded by Dayal's troops, the U.N. was accepting the interlopers as permanent occupiers; many U.N. unit commanders were grumbling that their orders from Dayal clearly were aiding the pro-Lumumba side.

In Stanleyville Antoine Gizenga's men arrested twelve Belgians, talked darkly of "getting even" for Lumumba's transfer to a Katanga prison. When local whites paid $10,000 ransom to free the twelve, Gizenga's agents, seeing a lucrative business, simply arrested 40 more. Belgium promptly massed two battalions along the border in Ruanda-Urundi, warned that if the captives were harmed, the troops would march in to rescue them.

After seven months, the Congo seemed right back where it started.

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