The Demagogues Are Rocked

A third left-oriented African government was shaken up on July 27, just a year after the fall of Ben Bella in Algeria and 122 days after Nkrumah’s ouster in Ghana. The spark this time was the firing by civilian authorities in the Marxist-controlled former French (Brazzaville) Congo of an unimportant army captain. This touched off riots in the center of the city. Demonstrators, encouraged and aided by troops, looted the headquarters of the Mouvement National de la Révolution (MNR)—the Congo’s only legal party. Earlier, rioters had tried to invade the office of Premier Amboise Naumazalay, who had been the MNR’s delegate to the 23rd Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union last April.

The Premier and his entourage just barely managed to escape to a nearby stadium with the help of a special guard of Cuban Negroes who have been serving in the Congo for some time now, courtesy of Fidel Castro (see NR, July 12,1966). After 48 hours of skirmishing, the soldiers from Havana beat off the local troops, most of whom had defected to the opposition. According to popular political mythology this kind of intervention by external forces is always necessary to keep reactionary regimes in power. But in the case of the Congo (Brazzaville) it was a totalitarian regime of the left that had to be saved by a foreign Praetorian guard.

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Gilbert Comte

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A third left-oriented African government was shaken up on July 27, just a year after the fall of Ben Bella in Algeria and 122 days after Nkrumah’s ouster in Ghana. The spark this time was the firing by civilian authorities in the Marxist-controlled former French (Brazzaville) Congo of an unimportant army captain. This touched off riots in the center of the city. Demonstrators, encouraged and aided by troops, looted the headquarters of the Mouvement National de la Révolution (MNR)—the Congo’s only legal party. Earlier, rioters had tried to invade the office of Premier Amboise Naumazalay, who had been the MNR’s delegate to the 23rd Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union last April.

The Premier and his entourage just barely managed to escape to a nearby stadium with the help of a special guard of Cuban Negroes who have been serving in the Congo for some time now, courtesy of Fidel Castro (see NR, July 12,1966). After 48 hours of skirmishing, the soldiers from Havana beat off the local troops, most of whom had defected to the opposition. According to popular political mythology this kind of intervention by external forces is always necessary to keep reactionary regimes in power. But in the case of the Congo (Brazzaville) it was a totalitarian regime of the left that had to be saved by a foreign Praetorian guard.