The day Lumumba’s children departed, an American celebrity arrived. Louis Armstrong was playing Africa on a goodwill tour sponsored by the State Department and Pepsi-Cola. At King Baudouin Stadium, ten thousand people—UN soldiers, foreign diplomats, and government officials but mostly everyday Congolese—paid twenty cents for admission. Carried into the venue on a red sedan chair, an honor usually reserved for chiefs, “the King of Jazz” was introduced by Ambassador Timberlake, who had memorized some lines of Lingala for the occasion. The crowd tapped along tentatively to the sounds of “Mack the Knife” and “When the Saints Go Marching In”; this music was new to most. “Give those cats time,” Armstrong remarked to a reporter. “They’ll learn.” Armstrong and his wife, Lucille, had no dinner plans that evening, so the Devlin family hosted a meal. Maureen, who had never heard of the jazz great, reluctantly emerged to say hello.
But the feel-good interlude did not change the fact that the Congo was coming apart. Western diplomats had assumed that Lumumba was the source of the country’s woes; sideline him, and calm would return. In fact, the chaos had only deepened. Leopoldville was the epicenter of the disorder. “Many murders, assaults, rapes, burglaries are taking place without any action by police,” Dayal told Hammarskjöld. It was not unusual in the city to see soldiers pinning families up against a wall and strip-searching them. Gangs of youths, allied with one politician or another, prowled the streets. Lumumba’s supporters beat and stabbed Albert Ndele, a member of Mobutu’s College of Commissioners, outside a hotel. An unknown assassin shot and killed a pro-Lumumba provincial minister visiting from Kasai while he was in a taxi; his body was tossed out the car’s window.
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