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University Daily Kansan Monday. Sept. 19, 1960
Placing the Blame
Anarchy is spreading like a plague across the face of one of Africa's richest nations, the newborn Republic of Congo. Tribal warfare, a ruined economy and the see-saw struggle for power between political factions have combined to make the new nation's hopes for the future dark indeed. And the infection may spread. Uganda and Tanganyika, soon to gain independence, must be weighing every move made in their neighboring state. Watching over their shoulders are the members of the Communist bloc, alert to the least chance to seize a secure foothold on this rich and undeveloped continent.
THE BLAME FOR THE CRITICAL situation in the Congo must be placed squarely on our ally, Belgium. If there is a white man's burden, Belgium dropped it and fled. To be sure, the Soviet Union had been courting Congo political leaders for some time prior to independence. They doubtless had a hand in inflaming the people, but this should have come as no surprise to Belgium or anyone else. In abandoning the Congo and all the responsibilities attaching to that area, Belgium made a mockery of Badouin's promise for independence "without undue haste."
Today, the Congolese population is about 11 million. Prior to independence, this vast area and population was administered by a Belgian colony of about 50,000. When this cadre fled the country in the wave of rioting and atrocities that followed independence, they took with them all the administrative skills that the new nation possessed.
THE BLAME FOR THE CONGO situation rests on the Belgians not only because they deserted their responsibilities, but because in 52 years of colonial rule they utterly failed to provide the nation with administrators or professional people of its own. They were masters in the old colonial sense. When the agitation for independence burst upon them, they were shocked and afraid. They hastily handed over to local rule a nation that was not a nation at all, but a collection of tribes loosely knit together by ties that would disappear when the white man left. They also failed to educate the society they were soon to abandon, leaving the Congolese without the necessary foundation for governing themselves with intelligence and foresight. This is a sorry record to leave behind after 52 years of rule.
The Congo's problems are staggering. The attempted political federation has disintegrated into tribal warfare; there is no real sense of being as a nation. Each man's first allegiance is to the tribe of his fathers. The government is therefore ineffectual, and its weaknesses are compounded by the immense difficulties in communications. No one can tell how long Colonel Mobutu, the latest strong man to assume control, will be able to dam the flood of violence and disorder.
THUS FAR THE U.N. has been able to avert total disaster, but it seems that the Congo will never know peace and order until its people can be prepared to govern themselves. This will require years of protectorship and administration, a job that the U.N. might be able to do. During the protectorship, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Social and Cultural Organization) could do for the Congolese what the Belgians failed to do — uplift them by educating them. If a program of this sort can be successfully carried out, it might set a pattern for other nations who are now straining to free themselves from the bonds of ignorance and exploitation.
Bill Blundell
A Thirsty Cry
Editor:
KU's football team moved into the big time with its 21-7 win over TCU Saturday. Attendance also showed a marked improvement over past years—32,000 were reported at the game.
Probably an eighth of the total attendance was students. The pitiful thing is that there were only three attendants selling refreshments to more than 5,000 people.
If the Jayhawkers are going to
It was impossible to buy a drink without missing nearly a quarter of the game. The temperature did not make it any more comfortable.
play great football and good crowds are going to watch the game, I think University authorities should assure people at the game adequate service.
Rick Phillips, Colby junior
Assistance Needed
Students:
As we told you in the first issue, the Kansan is not a University publication, but a newspaper run by students for students. This means any students, regardless of school or year, may work on the Kansan.
We would like to take this opportunity to invite any interested students to drop in at the newsroom, 112 Flint Hall, and see one of the editors. We have a big year ahead of us and can use all the help we can get. And—not the least important—you may have the satisfaction and fun that comes with working on a newspaper.
Remember, the Kansan is all yours. We're counting on your help.
The Editors
Short Ones
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
College physics courses, for example, are usually rather distinctly made up for future engineers. They are perhaps satisfactory for secondary teachers but the typical elementary teacher throws up her hands in dismay and says "How can I use this stuff?" - Herbert A. Smith
"NAW.TH' LIGHTS DIDN'T GO OUT -YER HELMET GOT TWISTED"
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904,
tridayweek 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Daily Hansan
Telephone VIking 3-2700 Extension 711, news room Extension 376, business office
University of Kansas student newspaper
Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Bureau, N.Y. News service; United Press International. Mail subscription rates: $3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays. University holidays and examination periods. Entered as assistant secretary Sept. 19, 1910 at Lawrence, Kan., post office under act of March 3, 1879.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Ray Miller Managing Editor Carof Heller, Jane Boyd and Priscilla Burton, Assistant Managing Editors; Pete Coleman and Sazanne Swain City Editors; Jake Mimosa and Donna Editor; Peggy Kallos and Donna Enagle, Society Editors.
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
John Brown and CO-Editorial
Bill Hirschman
Bill Blundell Co-Editorial Editors
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Mark Dui Business Manager Rudy Hoffman, Advertising Manager; Marlin Zimmerman, Promotion Manager; Milo Harris, National Advertising Manager; Dorothy Bury, Circulation Manager; Dorothy Bauer, Classified Advertising Manager.
By W. D. Paden Professor of English
JANE EYRE, by Charlotte Brontë; WUTHERING HEIGHTS, by Emily Brontë. Signet Classics, 50 cents apiece.
For well over a century these stories have been profitable to publishers. "Jane Eyre" was an immediate scandalous success among readers who did not notice its explicit idealism. "Wuthering Heights" was sufficiently shocking to be read by many people who then denounced it as brutal and irreligious because they did not comprehend the ascetic vision that it proffers. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, for example, was temperamentally incapable of recognizing the theme of "Wuthering Heights": "a fiend of a book," he pronounced; "the action is set in Hell, only it seems places and people have English names there." This is an accurate description, of course, as far as it goes.
Yet neither Charlotte nor Emily Brontë had any intention of writing a novel that would confuse a reader. They had grown up in an isolated Yorkshire rectory where their chief occupation and joy had been to dream out elaborate stories and to write them down with care and completeness. When they were small children the stories had been irrational and fragmentary; as they grew older the stories were gradually modelled as to events and persons on recent history; as the girls entered adolescence the stories became their means to define their latent desires and to explore the possible values of life. In their novels they continued to record the result of living, according to their intensely scanned and evaluated reveries. They had left their father's rectory from time to time to live in girls' schools or in private families where they acted as governesses to children. Their knowledge of people and of life remained extremely narrow; but this did not matter, for their eyes were turned inward upon their dreams. They were Romantics, in one exact meaning of the term. And because they were young women of integrity and spirit, scornful of compromise and as candid as the day, their novels can be read as serious statements of ethical principles.
But few people who begin to read one of these books for the first time are likely to think of it in abstract terms. By the end of the second page, the reader is caught in the current of the dream and hurried on. A lonely orphan, aged ten, climbs into the deathbed of another, and sleeps there as her friend peacefully expires; large dogs chase and knock down a casual visitor to a lonely country house; a maniacal giantess emerges at midnight to find and rip apart a wedding veil; lightning splits a great horse-chestnut tree to its base; a man sits before an untasted meal, staring fixedly at an empty spot upon the opposite wall. These people and events seem real; whether they are probable is not important.
From the Magazine Rack-
Passion vs. Sentiment
"Fiedler is what is called a myth and archetype man—which is to say, his work rests on the assumption that a critic versed in Freud and Jung can reveal key symbolic themes, configurations, and myths in imaginative literature: items that do not disclose themselves fully to formalist or social critics. (These themes are considered to be worth looking for because they help to shape the meaning of the single work of art in which they are discovered, and because the method of their disguise by the writer is a clue to the realities of his inner experience, and because they point to truths of a culture that are the more potent by virtue of their repression.) The assumption is widely shared. There are at present a number of myth critics who, pursuing hints gleaned from the New Anthropology, have probed not only classical literature but (as in the case of John Speirs and C. L. Barber) Middle English romances and Shakespearean comedy. Mythicists have also looked into 18- and 19-century English fiction (an excellent result is the essay of Julian Moynahan on 'Great Expectations' in the current 'Essays in Criticism'...
"... it is clear that one of his purposes is to elucidate profound (and hidden) preoccupations. His starting point is the observation that 'Our great novelists, though experts on indignity and assault, on loneliness and terror, tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and a woman, which we expect at the center of a novel.' Why so? Partly because these novelists inherited a hopelessly sentimentalized version of womankind that they could not develop and were powerless to challenge directly; partly because the very nature of the new society made it impossible to sustain a steady vision either of common life or of mature human relations. What replaces the passionate encounter of man and woman in our books? Faustian aspiration, gothic terror, social protest, adoration of the child, incestuous or homosexual relationships. How should the psychoanalyst of the epoch interpret the evasions and substitutions? He should see that the glossy, cheery, affirmative surface of American civilization is a deceit; he should understand that beneath this surface lies a wreckage of souls, generations of torment attributable to an incapacity to envisage the wholeness of a human being in any fashion not crippling either to physicality on the one hand or to intelligence on the other. What lesson is there in all this for the judicial critic of American books? Simply that these books can be overrated..."
(Excerpted from a review of the book "Love and Death in the American Novel" by Leslie Fiedler. The review appeared in the May Commentary and is by Benjamin De Mott.)