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

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

Similar scenes were playing out across the country. In Stanleyville, white residents organized convoys and drove through the bush to reach Sudan or Uganda. In Katanga, some 250 whites spilled over the border into Northern Rhodesia every hour.

The exodus hit the Congo fast, and it hit hard. The white elite that had stayed on after independence—doctors, pharmacists, teachers, accountants, mechanics, engineers, telegraph operators, air traffic controllers—was now leaving en masse, draining the young country of badly needed expertise. Of the Congo’s 175 Belgian postal officials, only one resolved to stay. Of its 542 university-educated agricultural engineers, none did. The national radio fell silent as inexperienced Congolese operators blew through the fuses. At the Ministry of the Interior, two lonely clerks manned an office usually run by dozens of employees. This was white flight on an unprecedented scale: within two weeks of independence, some 60,000 of the 80,000 Europeans remaining in the Congo had left.