Word: katanga
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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LUMUMBA. The Soviet Union supported him with money and arms in the contest to take the former Belgian Congo out of the West's orbit. While the CIA supported President Moïse Tshombe of Katanga against Lumumba, it had no part in Lumumba's arrest and murder by Katanganese soldiers. He was a casualty of African tribal politics...
...Brien was an Irish delegate to the United Nations and served the U.N. in the Congo. His book To Katanga and Back and his play Murderous Angels were indictments of the role of the U.S. and Europe in the Congo war. O'Brien portrayed Dag Hammarskjold as a man who believed God had chosen him to bring peace to Africa...
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 Zaïre 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...
...celebrates the anniversary of its freedom, the country is at peace. The copper mines of Katanga are working at full capacity. At Inga Rapids, a project to begin damming the Congo River is under way at last. Its first stage, a 150-megawatt dam, will be finished by 1972. Even the interior city of Kisangani, formerly Stanleyville, which suffered terrible damage during the Simba rebellion of 1964-65, is returning to life. The town glitters with a coat of fresh paint in honor of a visit by Belgium's King Baudouin, who arrived in the Congo for the anniversary...
History Distorted. O'Brien, of course, is much too sly to pretend that he is recording straight history, even though he was a U.N. official in Katanga province in 1961 during its secessionist struggle with the Republic of the Congo. In one of the most disingenuous prefaces ever tacked onto a play, O'Brien announces: "My Hammarskjold and my Lumumba are not to be thought of as the 'real' characters of that name, but as personages shaped by the imitation of a real action associated with their names." What O'Brien is proclaiming here...