The Unorthodox Abbe

More than 5,000 cheering blacks, in headgear ranging from French army kepis to straw boaters and Davy Crockett caps, were at the Brazzaville airport to meet him, and even his wizened old mother, after performing a little weaving dance in his honor, fell on her knees before him. As he drove through the streets in his blue-grey Pontiac, his excited fans followed in trucks and jeeps, shooting into the air and shouting, "Olele! Olele! The Abbe has won!" The abbe--Brazzaville's round, smiling Mayor Fulbert Youlou, 41--had just returned from the French Middle Congo's capital city of Pointe-Noire. There the Assembly had turned the territory into an autonomous republic within the French community and named abbe Youlou its new Premier.

But while Brazzaville rejoiced last week, Paris received the news with something of a shudder. Everywhere else, the transfer of power had gone without a hitch. In the Republic of Congo, it cost the lives of at least eight people, and trouble was not yet over.

L'Homme et L'Hommerie. Raised by Roman Catholic missionaries in Mindouli, 100 miles west of Brazzaville, Youlou started his career as a simple parish priest. But he had always had a penchant for politics. Over the protests of his archbishop, he decided to run for the French National Assembly. He was forbidden by his archbishop to say Mass, though he still wears black or white cassocks, topped by a Homburg. He lost the election, but while his opponent went off to Paris, the abbe's admirers refused to believe that he had lost, and took their problems to him as if he were their actual Deputy. In 1956 Youlou was elected mayor of Brazzaville (pop. 100,000) in a landslide. By the time Charles de Gaulle visited Brazzaville last summer, the abbe was able to greet the general three different times in reception lines, by appearing in his three different capacities--as mayor, assemblyman and Minister of Agriculture.

A cagey politician who is given to spouting fractured French ("La ou il y a de I'homme, il y a de I'hommerie"), and making resounding promises ("The thirst for a better state itches us"), the abbe likes to foretell "tomorrows that sing."

Come Over, Come Over. What keeps the abbe's todays from singing is the fact that upriver he has a political challenger named Jacques Opangault. The abbe took care of him in great style. The abbe has a 23 to 22 majority in the territorial Assembly, but the capital city of Pointe-Noire is in the hands of M'vili tribesmen friendly to his rival. When the Assembly gathered to choose the territory's future status, the abbe's rivals began throwing chairs about and smashing windows. Opangault himself whacked the Speaker over the head with a microphone. Police cleared out the invaders with tear gas, and the Assembly dutifully settled down to vote for autonomy. Then the abbe introduced a resolution postponing elections until 1962. Opangault's socialists stomped out in protest, and after they were gone the abbe was elected Premier.

But he was still in enemy territory. The abbe's majority therefore voted to transfer the seat of government to Brazzaville, and the abbe ordered up a special train to transport all his parliamentarians, their wives, their children and baggage that very night. Getting wind of the abbe's plans, Opangault called on stationmasters along the route, most often M'vili tribesmen, to stop the train at all costs. Invoking his new powers as Premier, the abbe ordered a motor-driven handcar, loaded with armed guards, to clear a path for the two-car diesel train along the 300-mile mountainous jungle route. The special train got through, and the triumphant abbe called a press conference in Brazzaville to tell about his future intentions.

By styling his new nation the Republic of Congo, was he casting covetous eyes on the Belgian Congo across the river? The ambitious abbe blandly replied: "Wisdom draws its sap from philosophy. It is evident that the Congo is an entity. It is also evident that our peoples must reunite."

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