MAD MIKE AND HIS WILD GEESE
In war some cities fall in battle, others by starvation. But in early August 1964 Stanleyville—present-day Kisangani, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—fell to black magic. From the windows of the U.S. Consulate on Avenue Eisenhower the few Americans who hadn’t evacuated were astounded to see their ostensible protectors in the Armée Nationale Congolaise (ANC) desert their posts and flee. Moments later a bare-chested witch doctor walked up the street, chanting and waving palm branches to sweep the city of government troops—and it worked. Some 1,500 soldiers threw down their rifles, machine guns and mortars and abandoned Stanleyville to a mere 300 warriors armed with little more than spears, bows and hoodoo.
It was the Americans’ first glimpse of a Simba (“lion” in Swahili), one of the fearsome communist Congolese rebels who—made brave by dagga (cannabis) and faith in dawa (magic they were told would turn enemy bullets to water on contact)—that summer had conquered an area the size of France. They proceeded to terrorize Stanleyville’s 300,000 Congolese residents and round up American and Belgian diplomats, missionaries, nuns, businessmen and their families—nearly 2,000 all told. As hostages the whites would become pawns in a Cold War gambit played out in the dark heart of Africa.
(present-day Kinshasa) 45-year-old Thomas Michael Hoare—former British officer, safari operator, accountant and soldier of fortune—was summoned to meet with Congolese leader Moïse Tshombe and ANC commander Maj. Gen. Joseph-Désiré Mobutu. Three years earlier Tshombe, then president of the breakaway province of Katanga, had fought Mobutu’s forces to a draw. Under Tshombe’s hire at the time, mercenary captain Hoare had run a truck convoy 840 miles through hostile jungle to resupply a rebel garrison. No sooner had it arrived, however, than United Nations peacekeepers received orders to arrest all mercenaries. Hoare and his commandos fled into the jungle, in the process losing two men, who were captured by locals, ritually tortured and killed. The rebellion ultimately collapsed. Tshombe and Hoare were both expelled. Katanga was
