the last book I ever read (The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, excerpt two)

from The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid:

There were two Leopoldvilles, really. The whites took the best parts for themselves: the downtown, close to the riverbank and the train station, along with the hilly suburbs, where a gentle breeze whisked away the muggy air. In these neighborhoods, the Belgians sought to import all that was European and repress all that was African, taking over with the fervor of an invasive species. They built blocky office buildings in the International Style popular in the West, shading the windows and slitting the walls to keep the tropical heat at bay. Fourteen-story buildings sprang up, elevated on piers to promote air circulation, as if raising a trouser hem to keep it from the rainy-season mud. “Europe in Leo weighs down on the African soil in the form of skyscrapers,” the novelist Graham Greene wrote when he visited the city. At Lovanium University, a nuclear reactor, Africa’s first, was installed as part of Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program.

This Leopoldville was an orderly colonial capital. By virtue of its proximity to the equator, the sun rose and set at nearly the same time all year—6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. To combat malaria, a helicopter regularly circled above and emitted from its stinger a plume of DDT, infusing the city with the chemical whiff of progress. Below, specially designed trucks did the same, engulfing the cars behind them in a disorienting fog. White passengers were chauffeured gently through streets named for Belgians: former kings, princes, colonial governors-general, vice-governors-general, and other notables unknown to the Congolese drivers. Servants, nannies, gardeners, cooks, and other domestics commuted to the European quarters on gyrobuses, state-of-the-art vehicles made in Switzerland and powered by electrically charged flywheels. Inside their employers’ houses, the yen for Europe extended to the smallest of creature comforts. Instead of filling their vases with tropical flowers, some Belgians paid for wilting carnations flown in from Brussels. It helped them feel at home. Here, one could forget that there were just 100,000 Europeans in the Belgian Congo, compared with 12 million Congolese.