Vanishing Friends

Into the glass-enclosed winter garden of his pink palace strode Katanga's Secessionist Moise Tshombe with an important announcement. "I am pleased to have ended my work and have done my duty," Tshombe told newsmen, and now he would be leaving for Northern Rhodesia to take care of a troublesome eye ailment. How long would he be gone? "The doctors will decide that," said Tshombe, but Elisabethville hummed with rumors that he was going for good. Moise did nothing to squelch the gossip, for 48 hours after he left his capital he was on a plane bound for Paris.

At the rate Tshombe's friends were deserting him, self-exile might not be such a bad idea after all. Last week 23 of Tshombe's top Katanga gendarmerie officers flew into Leopoldville for a let's-be-friends dinner of roast chicken and crepes suzette with leaders of the Congolese army, then swore oaths of allegiance to the central government.

Even Tshombe's erstwhile African allies were re-examining their relations with Leopoldville. First to bury the hatchet was President Fulbert Youlou of the Congo Republic, formerly the French Congo, whose capital city of Brazzaville lies across the river from Leopoldville. Youlou, a nonpracticing Roman Catholic priest who stubbornly continues to wear his cassock, supported Tshombe's secession in 1960. But with Tshombe on the way out, Youlou suddenly sailed across the Stanley Pool to make friends with the Leopoldville crowd. Then, looking like a shorter, soutaned version of Sonny Listen, he took off on a five-day tour of the country with Leopoldville's President Joseph Kasavubu. The Congolese bore no grudge. The day Youlou left for home, school was canceled in Leopoldville so the children could line his departure route.

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