When trouble broke out in the Congo, Paul Carlson took his wife, Lois, and two children across the Ubangi River to the Central African Republic. When he left them there to return to the Congo, the missionary doctor with the Evangelical Covenant Church assured his family that he had several escape routes mapped out. He would leave if the Simba rebels got too close to the hospital at Wasolo, deep in the Congo where this family from California had lived for a year. Soon, on a radio contact, Carlson told her, “I must leave this evening.” It was not soon enough.
In 1960, Belgium granted independence to its diamond-rich colony, the Congo. No government had mastered its terrain and tribal differences, and now, in the early fall of 1964, a rebel movement called the Simbas had captured Stanleyville (Kinshasa) and were moving to consolidate their gains. Carlson feared for the safety of his family and his patients at the eighty-bed hospital in this jungle town “at the edge of the world.”
Carlson did not fit the profile of a hero. A quiet man deeply committed to healing, he was a graduate of North Park College, Stanford University, and the George Washington Medical School. Then he signed up with the Christian Medical and Dental Society for a six-month term in the Congo. That was 1961. The African service appealed to him, but he had a young family and had planned a normal medical career, so back they went to Redondo Beach, California, to set up a practice. Returning to the Congo in 1963, the family was stationed in Wasolo to care for 100,000 regional people and to help build the church.
A year later, on 9 September 1964, Paul was captured by Simba rebels. He was accused of being a spy, and transported three hundred miles to Stanleyville as rebels negotiated for his release. Weeks went by while rebels made sport of killing foreigners. Carlson was routinely marched to face a firing squad, blindfolded, kicked, pushed, and hit, but never shot. Finally, in mid-November, a joint command of American-supported Belgian paratroopers dropped outside the city in a daring effort to rescue diplomats and hundreds of other trapped expatriates.
That morning, Carlson and fellow hostages at the Victoria Hotel were quickly ordered into the streets. Young Simba soldiers, eyes turned upward at the descending rescuers, guns turned level at the massed foreigners, went blank with fear and rage, firing indiscriminately into the hundreds huddled in the street.
Around him, children were falling, women were covering their babies, and men were bleeding and dying. A small group including Carlson at the back of the crowd saw their chance for escape and ran toward a house just past a two-metre cement wall. Carlson arrived first and helped missionary Charles Davis over the wall. Then Carlson grabbed Davis’s hand to pull himself over, but one of the Simba machine gunners fired a volley. Carlson slumped to the ground dead.
Minutes later, paratroopers secured the house where the missionaries had taken refuge. Photographers documented Paul Carlson’s riddled body lying in the street. Time and Life magazine featured his story – the self-giving doctor who almost got away. Carlson was sure, however, where his true refuge lay. Earlier he had scribbled in his New Testament the date “24 November” and the single word “Peace.”
The Paul Carlson Partnership still works to assist the people of Wasolo, and a memorial at North Park University in Chicago remembers the quiet hero who kept his humour and trusted the Lord during a too-short career as ‘Mongonga Paul’, missionary doctor.
Submit a Prayer