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61 TheWinds Have Already Changed Every once in a while you see and hear things in this country that you wouldn’t believe a large majority of people thought and believed in. Ever since the Congo got its independence people here have been making jokes about the names of the Congo leaders.* Each day they joke about them as if they were dance tunes, but very few realize that though the sound of their names may remind people of a dance, Kasavubu and Lumumba (whether they remain leaders or not) are the sounds of the winds of change. The other day in the United Nations, Khrushchev made an idiot of himself by proposing the UN secretary be removed from his post. The African nations voted against him and for the first time in a long time the United States was in a favorable position with the new African nations. But when Nkrumah, president of Ghana, spoke and emphasized that no nation should control Africa but the Africans, Mr. Herter put the United States right back where they were before the Russian blunder. Herter said Nkrumah was leaning to the left, whereupon Nkrumah had to remind Mr. Herter that for ten years he has been saying that the Western powers do not understand the African problem at all. The United States can’t understand the idea that Africans do not want to be dominated by either bloc or pressure group, just as they can’t understand that the colored people who are marching and demonstrating all over the United States have finally gotten tired of waiting for the United States to understand what they want. It is time for some people in the United States to separate themselves from the jokes and laughing and underestimating the new African nations and their expression of total freedom.† A few years ago it was possible to say that anyone who thought Africans would achieve freedom was indulging in some wishful thinking. Today those winds of change that people have been talking about have become a tornado as one nation after another *The former Belgian Congo became independent on June 30, 1960, establishing itself as the Republic of Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) with Patrice Lumumba as prime minister and Joseph Kasavubu as president. Almost immediately after the independence ceremonies, political, military, and diplomatic crises engulfed the Congo. On September 5 military forces under the command of Joseph Mubutu (who would become the country’s long-ruling despotic head of state) captured Lumumba,leading to his execution on January 17,1961.The CIA had some involvement in Lumumba’s arrest,imprisonment, and assassination. His murder remained secret for nearly one month, but as soon as it became public protests erupted worldwide. In the United States, black activists in NewYork mounted an unprecedented protest at the United Nations, which helped announce a rising black nationalist politics in the early 1960s to which James and Grace Lee Boggs were connected and which they closely covered in Correspondence. —Ed. † SeventeenAfrican nations gained independence in 1960. —Ed. Ward.indb 61 12/21/10 9:27 AM Part I 62 and these same people who a few years ago could be joked about and passed off arrive at independence. Only a few years ago, the English people had a habit of not renting rooms to Africans who came up to London because they were black. Suddenly in 1957* they realized that they were playing with fire. The blacks they were refusing accommodations to might some day become prime minister of their countries and thus become powerful figures. Today all one has to do is count heads in the UN and see how many heads are of color and how many people they represent. Anyone seriously doing that will be rudely awakened. There are already some new names around the world, names not to be so callously spoken about. They have been blown in on the winds that have already changed. [ October 22,1960 ] * This is the year that Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast colony) achieved independence from Britain, making it the first sub-Saharan country to free itself from colonialism. —Ed. Ward.indb 62 12/21/10 9:27 AM ...

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