Nasser and Moscow are

partly to blame
CONGO RIOTS SHOW NEED OF AUTHORITY
'C.H.' Reporter
RIOTS, successively more violent, which have been breaking out in the Belgian Congo over the past few weeks, having as their chief target Catholic mission schools and churches, Government buildings, etc., were caused, according to a correspondent by the "essential African need for authority of one kind or another".
Our informant. a doctor at present working in this country who has considerable experience of the Congo pointed out that a power-vacuum has been formed by the decay of the traditional authority of the chiefs. especially among the detribalised urban proletariat that is attracted to the cities.
All too often this vacuum is filled by demagogues who are able to build on the past mistakes of the country's European administrators and missionaries.
LITTLE WORK
Over the past decade there has been an enormous influx of Africans into Leopoldville, which, incidentally, is not an industrial city; it is the administrative capital of the Congo, and has little besides the river port in the way of opportunities for work.
The situation is further complicated by political ambitions, for the urban proletariat has ever been the demagogue's chief source of power: thus, I was told, one mayor issued so many entry permits allowing Congolese to live in the city that the number of unemployed increased from about 5,000 so 20,000.
Another factor has been the transplanting of Belgian local poltlies into the Congo. Thus, when the Socialists came into power, Government schools were set up alongside the mission schools and the "free" University was founded at Elisabethville.
MISTAKES
Incidentally, I learned that the progress of this latter institution has been hampered by another erruption of local Belgian issues into the Congo; it was decided to make it bilingual, using both French and Flemish, the two official Belgian languages, with twin faculties for each subject. But apparently the African, who is quite prepared to learn and to use French. is not so keen on learning Flemish; and so there is a shortage of students in the Flemish faculties.
Then the missions have made their mistakes, so my informant holds. They neglected to train adequate numbers of skilled artisans and instead trained toomany clerks, with the result that there exists a semi-educated class who will not return to manual work but who cannot find the work for which their education has fitted them.
The problem of the African woman and her education has also been completely neglected, he says, and it is only now that it is being paid the attention it deserves.
In general, he holds that there has been too much teaching of purely Belgian Catholicism and not enough building up on whatever is good in native Bantu traditions, although he is quick to point out that, for example, there has probably been more use of n art in church decoration African the Congo than elsewhere.