Missing Person

It was either the inglorious end of one saga or the unpredictable start of another.

Where was Patrice Lumumba? According to some of his pals, he lay dead, victim of his jailers' bullets. But according to his jailers, he had got away, in a stolen black Ford, dodging the law which waited at every roadblock with Tommy guns and rifles.

If the Katangese were to be believed, it all began one dark night outside the little Katanga town of Mutshatsha, near the border of Portuguese Angola. There Lumumba and two of his former aides sat interned in a lonely farmhouse. The Ford belonged to the tough 15-man guard charged with keeping Lumumba in total isolation from his countrymen. Unhappily, 13 of the 15, after a hard week, decided to turn in early, entrusting the watch to two yawning sentinels on the porch. When the time came, the prisoners simply slugged the lonely pair, and in a flash were off in the Ford.

One If by Land. Next morning, when the word of Lumumba's escape got back to the Elisabethville headquarters of Katanga's President Moise Tshombe, officials scurried into action, calling conferences, mobilizing troops. Out went a helicopter and a small spotter plane to scan the back roads for signs of a speeding car. There was little chance of the fugitives crossing an Angolan border point, for the heavily armed Portuguese police would hardly welcome a notorious revolutionary at this stage (see below). If Lumumba was free, a safer bet was that he and his friends were making their way toward the north, where Lumumba's allies were strongly entrenched in Kivu and Eastern provinces.

But had Lumumba really escaped? Or was it all a careful plan by Tshombe's men to conceal a political assassination? Tshombe is Lumumba's deadly enemy, and some of Tshombe's Belgian backers might be anxious to eliminate a foe who was getting greater and greater backing for a comeback among the U.N.'s members. For days, Elisabethville's gossip mills had buzzed with rumors that Lumumba had been shot in jail. According to one story, the famous prisoner had died from a bullet on the morning of Jan. 18, a day after he was shipped in from Leopoldville by Colonel Joseph Mobutu.

Finding the Ford. Convinced that their hero had indeed been done in, eleven pro-Lumumba nations (Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Morocco, Libya, India, Indonesia, U.A.R., Ceylon, Russia and Yugoslavia) petitioned the U.N.'s Dag Hammarskjold for an immediate investigation. Moscow radio--which has reason to be expert in such matters--went on the air with a prediction that the whole escape story had been manufactured as a cover ("shot while escaping") to explain away the fact that Lumumba would be found dead. In Katanga, Moise Tshombe, busy in conferences with a visiting foreign dignitary, seemed totally unconcerned. "President Tshombe does not feel that Lumumba's escape justifies comment," announced one of his aides. "It is not important enough."

The only trace of the vanished VIP was the cops' black Ford itself. Somewhat battered, it was found on the road 45 miles from the scene of the escape. Perhaps, suggested the Katangese, Lumumba was trudging through the bush in the hope of reaching Bukamu, a Katanga town held by the pro-Lumumba rebels. But this was 200 miles away, a tough week's walk for a city lad like Lumumba.

Alive or dead, Lumumba clearly was still the center of the Congo's troubles.

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