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ture, his father died. The Belgians his father had cooked for had left, and shortly after he'd found a
new job as a logger, he was crushed by a falling tree.
At the funeral, André's uncle, his father's brother, asked him to return to their traditional home
in Kokolopori. He said that because André was an only child, it was his duty to come back; other-
wise, he would be lost. The family, his uncle insisted, needed him in Kokolopori.
Under the Belgians, the national territory was divided into provinces, provinces into districts,
districts into territories, territories into sectors, sectors into groupements . Each sector had a chief,
or échevin , and each territory had a bourgmestre . When the Belgians left, the posts were filled with
Congolese.
Albert's father was twenty-eight when he returned to his tribal village, Yalokole, situated in the
middle of some of the densest, most biologically diverse forests in Équateur. No one in the Kokolo-
pori region had his level of education, so the bourgmestre of the territory asked him to become an
échevin . Though André had intended to study in Belgium, he was swayed not only by the splendor
of his reception—women dancing, men bringing him gifts of wild meat each evening—but also by
the political changes.
In 1964, a four-part rebellion began in which the revolutionary who would become the DRC's
president thirty years later, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, participated. Among its soldiers were the Simbas
of the Armée Populaire de Libération. Tribesmen whose sorcerers told them that in battle they
would become lions, or simbas , anointed themselves with water blessed by witchdoctors and
chanted Simba Lumumba mai , “lion, Lumumba, water,” to make themselves impervious to bullets.
The rebels captured nearly half the country, and when they took Kisangani, they declared it the cap-
ital of the People's Republic of the Congo.
Kasavubu was still president, and he appointed Moïse Tshombe, the former leader of the break-
away Katangan state, as interim prime minister to unify the country. In Kisangani, the Simbas held
thousands of Western hostages and évolués , and to free them, Tshombe requested the support of the
Belgian and American militaries. He also hired hundreds of foreign mercenaries, who, along with
the Congolese army, began taking the country back.
Believing that colonization was again being carried out in the Congo, with Tshombe as a puppet
leader, six African countries—Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, and Tanzania—moved to re-
cognize the Kisangani government. As the mercenaries and ANC neared Kisangani, the Simbas
forced the hostages into the street, making them stand in rows so as to dissuade an attack, but
as soon as US airplanes dropped Belgian paratroopers, the Simbas began executing the hostages.
Though more than 150 were killed, the paratroopers rescued nearly 3,000, and shortly afterward the
mercenaries and government army took back the city. In the process of reuniting the Congo, the
West was securing the resources it viewed as strategically essential to winning the Cold War: co-
balt for fighter jets and industrial-grade diamonds used in the machining of engine parts. Tshombe
forever lost popularity among the Congolese for having invited their former colonizer back, and
Tshombe's decline paved the way for Mobutu's rise to prominence, despite his own role in coordin-
ating the intervention.
During this time, in Kokolopori, many of the communities fled into the forest to avoid capture
but left a few people, largely children and the elderly, to make the Simbas believe that the villages
were still inhabited and to keep them from searching further. The Simbas had become known for
taking all of the pretty women with them and lining the men up, inspecting them, and then execut-
ing those who didn't have callused hands and feet.
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