The Congo: With Magic Juice & Lucky Grass

It took a peak commitment of 19,400 United Nations troops to restore a sullen peace to the strife-torn Congo. By June 30, the last 3,000 members of the U.N. force will be withdrawn, and already chaos is coming back. Leopoldville has been rocked by a succession of antigovernment plastic-bomb explosions since May. In Kwilu Province, the Communist-inspired Jeunesse (youth), led by Pierre Mulele, still hold their own against Congolese troops. Though one of the Congo's provincial presidents recently sent Premier Cyrille Adoula a hippopotamus, the traditional sign of loyalty, it is clear that the Congo's 21 provinces remain precariously balanced on the brink of anarchy.

To counter the plastiqueurs of Leopoldville, Adoula imposed a 6 p.m. curfew, and now each day when the sun sets over the Congo River, Leo is transformed into a ghost town. Adoula also closed his border with the neighboring Brazzaville Congo, where the Peking-backed Congolese National Liberation Committee has its Western headquarters. Formed by politicians loyal to the late Patrice Lumumba and imprisoned Antoine Gizenga, the rebel group is determined to carve up Adoula's tottering nation. Last week, in bucolic, mountainous Kivu province, where the Congo borders Rwanda and Burundi, the rebels were well on their way to success.

Panic & Poo-Poo Guns. Egged on by a Liberation Committee agent, a loosely organized band of 5,000 pygmoid Bafulero tribesmen rose against the Congolese army. Armed with poisoned arrows and "poopoo guns" (homemade muzzle loaders that fire bolts and nails) and anointed with mai Mulele (Swahili for "water of Mulele"), the 5-ft.-tall warriors believed they had been filled with a juice that made them invulnerable to bullets. In their first encounter with government troops, screaming, white-painted Bafulero died in droves under a hail of bullets near the village of Kamaniola (see map).

When a government patrol was attacked by spearmen at the village of Lubarika, the troops fled, leaving their commanding officer skewered in the dust. As the panic-stricken patrol sped north, government soldiers along the way were infected with their fear, and news of the "massacre" spread. By early last week, there were no Congolese soldiers left in the Kivu capital of Bukavu, and the rebels threatened to take the entire province, once the coffee-producing pride of Belgian white settlers.

Chaos & Countermeasures. In Bukavu, U.S. Consul Richard Matheron burned his secret papers, armed his staff and two American newsmen on the scene, and began evacuating women and children. The government's local commander, who had been a sergeant in the Belgian Force Pitblique, regrouped 300 of his men in Bukavu, got advice over the phone from three Belgian colonels and his former commanding officer, now Belgian Ambassador to Burundi. Premier Adoula swallowed his pride and asked the U.N. for help. In flew a U.S. Air Force C-130 with armored cars and reinforcements. For the moment, the pygmoid threat to Bukavu seemed to have diminished. But the Congolese soldiers were taking no chances against mai Mulele: their witch doctors told them to wrap grass around their gun barrels in order to counter the magic water of the Bafulero.