CONGO: Entr'acte

While the world's statesmen hotly debated its fate in the U.N., the Congo sprawled in the equator's heat, torpid and listless. The riotous chaos and killing had mostly stopped. In its place was a vapid, restless calm.

The Congolese are supposed to hate the Belgians, but daily a wizened black appeared at the big statue of King Albert to tend the flowers and clean away the scraps of paper; no mob had thought to topple Albert or the big figure of Leopold II that stands before the Parliament building. Léopoldville has no visible revenue, but somehow the lights functioned, the garbage was collected and the water ran normally. Government departments were hardly functioning, but to the utter amazement of Manhattan financiers, a check arrived at Dillon. Read & Co.'s Wall Street offices from the Congo's Central Bank paying in full the $393,750 interest due Oct. 1 on Congo bonds.

Scotch & Politics. Lopoldville had the look of a foreigners' town; Indonesian captains and Swedish colonels strolled the sidewalks, putting their U.N. salaries into snail, pâté and wine dinners at the few remaining good restaurants or into the mass-produced ivory "handicraft" souvenirs spread on the sidewalks by tall Hausa hawkers from the north. Influence peddlers, spies and quick-money operators were flocking in from abroad; an American opened the "Afro-Negro Bar," where U.N. officials, newsmen and merchants crowded in to drink Scotch and argue politics amid the din at the bar while a Nigerian band played Dixieland jazz in the next room.

The Congo's political Hydra still had three heads: Colonel Joseph Mobutu, Joseph Kasavubu and Patrice Lumumba. But each now seemed to have lost even the vigor for plotting one another's doom. All had their squads of gun-toting guards, but the most strenuous weapon any dared to use was the press conference; in one day harassed reporters covered five. Now and then, one or the other summoned energy for a daring stroke, then subsided quietly. Colonel Mobutu, complaining of fever and frazzled nerves, seemed mainly content to send occasional squads of his troops through the streets to remind everyone of the "neutrality" that he had imposed on all the others.

"Hear, Hear." Erratic Patrice Lumumba emerged from the Premier's residence only long enough to attend a 9 p.m. "luncheon" put on by the diplomats from Guinea, who still wistfully hoped to propel him back to power. Looking dour and wan, he declaimed his standard piece: the Soviet Union was the only nation interested in peace; he had asked the U.S. for help but was told to get it from the U.N. "I did not understand this comedy," he cried. But now everything was clear: the U.S. wanted a monopoly on Katanga's uranium, and big American interests wanted to extend their concessions to exploit Congolese raw materials.* Ghana's representatives cried "hear, hear." But when it was all over. Lumumba went forlornly home and did not emerge for days.