The Zairization of Almost Everything

ZAIRE REPUBLIC

As proof positive of its independence, almost every new African nation has made a show of changing many of the place names imposed by its former colonial masters. None, though, have gone quite so far as the Zaire Republic, once known as the Belgian Congo. This month President Joseph Desire Mobutu held a mass rally in Leopoldville (today known as Kinshasa), his capital city on the mighty Congo River (sorry, the Zaire), to announce a sweeping "return to Zaire authenticity."

Henceforth, Mobutu decreed, Katanga province will be called Shaba (after the Swahili word for copper, the source of the province's and the country's wealth), and the Stanley Pool --the Kinshasa harbor area named for Journalist-Explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley--will be referred to as the Malebo Pool (palm tree, in one Zaire dialect). Elisabethville had already been renamed Lubumbashi and Stanleyville had been changed to Kisangani. Now, even street names like Avenue Charles de Gaulle will have to go, says Mobutu, "despite the admiration we have for this illustrious Frenchman."

Falling into the carnival spirit, a crowd chanting "Mobutu, cha, cha, cha!" promptly tore down a statue of King Leopold II of the Belgians. Then they toppled a bronze statue of Explorer Stanley, which stood on a hill once named for him but now called Mount Ngaliema. On hand for the festivities was Foreign Minister Mario Cardoso, who these days is known as Mario-Philippe Losende. Like other Zairians who had foreign fathers, he was obliged by law to take the name of his African mother.

Inflexible Will. Mobutu's latest burst of name changing produced a volley of protest from Brazzaville, capital of the former French Middle Congo, which insisted that Mobutu had no right to unilaterally change the name of the Congo River since it is an international waterway and threatened to take the matter to the World Court. Some outsiders were unkind enough to suggest that Mobutu, a missionary-educated Roman Catholic, might well de-Westernize himself by dropping his Christian names. The President, as it happens, had that thought in mind. Last week he announced that he was considering renaming himself Sese-Seko-Kuku-Ngbendu-Wa-Za-Banga Mobutu, which means, roughly, the hot-blooded warrior and man of the soil who cannot know defeat because of his endurance and his inflexible will to win and who belongs to all Zaire. Later, though, he mercifully decided to make it simply Mobutu-Sese-Seko.

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