"Why don't we talk about this situation over lunch?" Lorimer said.
"Mr. Ambassador," Castillo said when he had finished what in effect was a briefing about the chemical factory, "we were hoping you could tell us something of the Congo. We're really in the dark, and only you and DeWitt have ever been there."
Ambassador Lorimer looked at him coldly.
Oh, shit, I called him "Mr. Ambassador."
What he's doing now is considering how to point out to me how unforgivable that blunder is.
"It's been some time, of course, since I have been there," Lorimer finally said. "But on the other hand, I spent a long time in that part of the world, and I have since--akin to someone not being able to stop looking at a run-over dog--kept myself as up to date on it as possible."
"Please, whatever you could tell us, Philippe," Castillo said.
"Better," the ambassador said. "The best way to do what you ask, I think, is to begin at the beginning. But where is the beginning?"
He paused as he considered his own question.
"In 1885," he began, "the Association Internationale Africaine, chairman and sole stockholder Leopold the Second, King of the Belgians, announced they now owned what today we call the Democratic Republic of Congo. Nobody challenged him. The Germans were doing the same thing--I can't recall the name of their company--in what is now Burundi, Rwanda, and Tanzania, and the French right next door in what later became known as Congo-Brazzaville.
"They were going to bring Christianity and culture to the savages, and also see about making a little profit from the copper, rubber, other minerals, and from whatever else they could exploit.
"They established the capital in a town they called Leopoldville, now called Kinshasa, and others at the interior navigational end of the Congo River. They called this one, now called Kisangani, the one in which you are interested, Stanleyville, after the famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who went looking for a missionary who was bringing Christ to the savages in the bush and had gone missing.
"Stanley found him on the rapids of the river and with great elan said, 'Doctor Livingstone, I presume,' as we all heard about in the eighth grade."
There were the expected chuckles.
"This went on for about twenty years," the ambassador continued. "Then, somewhere around 1906 or 1907, the King got some bad press, a lot of it American. An English diplomat named Roger Casement toured the Congo and learned that the Belgians had been unkind to the natives; Casement said they had starved to death or murdered large numbers--thousands upon thousands--of them.
"We Americans tend to be a little self-righteous, and there was a predictable hue and cry in the press.
"To which King Leopold replied that he had no idea that anything of the sort was going on and he would put an end to it. The Belgian Government, in the name of His Majesty, Leopold Two, annexed the Congo in 1908, with unspecified compensation to the Association Internationale Africaine.
"The bad press stopped, and now the Belgian parliament was in charge of improving the lot of the natives, who now found honest employment harvesting rubber, extracting copper, etcetera for Belgian firms, many of which had close ties to the Association Internationale Africaine.
"This situation lasted until 1960, and to be honest, what was termed 'paternalistic colonialism' wasn't all bad. They brought schools, religion, and medicine to the Congo. Their hearts were in the right place, but very little of it stuck on the natives. It's politically incorrect to say this, but the natives of Sub-Saharan Africa weren't ready to govern themselves.
"I guess the best way to make that point is to quote Doctor Albert Schweitzer, organist, philosopher, and physician, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his lifelong humanitarian services to Africa. He built a hospital in French Equatorial Africa and did a great deal else for Africans, to whom he referred to his dying day as 'Les Sauvages.'
"I was in Leopoldville as a junior consular officer in June 1960 when the Belgians gave in to UN pressure--a lot of that generated by the United States--and granted the Congo its independence. It became the Republic of the Congo. So did the former French colony Middle Congo, next door. So we had two new independent countries with the same name. They became Congo-Brazzaville and Congo-Kinshasa, when the new government renamed Leopoldville.
"At that time, there were two--yes, two--university graduates in Congo-Kinshasa. There were some other very bright people, however. Some were friends of mine. I had one particular friend, a fellow named Joseph Desire Mobutu, who had been a corporal in the Belgian gendarmerie. He loved to hear about the formation of the United States. I used to loan him books. He was really impressed with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
"As soon as parliamentary elections could be held, they were. Mobutu was at the inauguration. In his new uniform. He was now a colonel in the Congolese Army.
"Things promptly started to come apart. Katanga, where the copper mines are, could see no reason to share its wealth with the rest of the country and announced its secession under a lunatic named Moise Tshombe. The Congo's second-richest province, Kasai, also announced its independence a couple of weeks later. A military coup broke out in the capital and there was rampant looting.
"The prime minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, turned to the Soviet Union for help. Khrushchev promptly started to send technicians and some really fancy weaponry to the Congo. They denied anything but honorable intentions.
"And we denied, of course, that we were sending weapons and CIA people to 'advise' President Joseph Kasavubu, even though that was about as much of a secret as the fact that it will grow dark when the sun goes down tonight.
"In my long government service," Lorimer said, looking at Castillo, "I never saw a sitting U.S. President or heard from one. But the word going around then was that President Eisenhower was not going to tolerate the Russians in Sub-Saharan Africa and that he had decided that Nikita Khrushchev's pal Lumumba was a bump on the road to international peace, harmony, and goodwill, and therefore had to be--to use the euphemistic terms I have heard so often since becoming friendly with Charley--whacked, terminated, eliminated.
"What happened was that in December 1960--this is six months after independence, mind you--Kasavubu overthrew the government. To make sure he wouldn't come back, Lumumba was removed from the scene, it was rumored, by Colonel Joseph Desire Mobutu.
"When I asked my old friend, the great admirer of Washington and Jefferson, that he tell me the rumors were not true, his response was that it would well behoove me to keep my nose out of Congolese in
ternal affairs, and further that it might be a good idea for me to request a transfer home before something happened that would force President Kasavubu to declare me persona non grata.