The Wild Reed: Remembering Patrice Lumumba

Friday, January 17, 2020

Remembering Patrice Lumumba

Today marks the 59th anniversary of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba (1925-1961), a leader of the Congolese independence movement who served as the first Prime Minister of the independent Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Republic of the Congo) and who throughout much of his adult life resisted Belgian colonialism and corporate interests.

I first became aware and interested in the life of Patrice Lumumba when I attended a special screening of Raoul Peck's film Lumumba at the University of Minnesota Film Society in 2000. According to The Guardian, the film, which features French actor Eriq Ebouaney as Lumumba, is a “commendable effort” and a “corrective to imperialism.”

I later did some research on Lumumba and found myself moved by the images that show him captured and bound while on his way to be executed. I was struck by his calm countenance, even as he no doubt knew what awaited him. To this day I find myself wondering if I could be so brave and calm in the face of torture and death.

In commemorating the life of Lumumba on the anniversary of his murder 59 years ago during a US-backed coup, Sa’eed Husaini of Jacobin Magazine has posted an informative and insightful interview with Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, a professor of African, African-American, and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina and the author of numerous books, including The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History and Patrice Lumumba.

In introducing his interview with Nzongola-Ntalaja, Husaini shares the following biography of Lumumba.

Born in 1925, Patrice Émery Lumumba was a radical anti-colonial leader who became the first prime minister of the newly independent Congo at the age of thirty-five. Seven months into his term, on January 17, 1961, he was assassinated.

Lumumba had become an opponent of Belgian racism after being jailed in 1957 on trumped-up charges by the colonial authorities. Following a twelve-month prison term, he found a job as a beer salesman, during which time he developed his oratory skills and increasingly embraced the view that Congo’s vast mineral wealth should benefit the Congolese people rather than foreign corporate interests.

Lumumba’s political horizons extended far beyond the Congo. He was soon caught up in the wider wave of African nationalism sweeping the continent. In December 1958, Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah invited Lumumba to attend the anti-colonial All-African People’s Conference, which attracted civic associations, unions, and other popular organizations.

Above: Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba in 1958.

Two years later, following mass demands for a democratic election, the Congolese National Movement headed by Lumumba decisively won the Congo’s first parliamentary contest. The left-nationalist leader took office in June 1960.

But Lumumba’s progressive-populist proposals and his opposition to the Katanga secessionist movement (which was led by the white-ruled colonial states of southern Africa and proclaimed its independence from the Congo on July 11, 1960) angered an array of foreign and local interests: the Belgian colonial state, companies extracting the Congo’s mineral resources, and, of course, the leaders of white-ruled southern African states. As tensions grew, the United Nations rejected Lumumba’s request for support. He decided to call for Soviet military assistance to quell the burgeoning Congo Crisis brought about by the Belgian-supported secessionists. That proved to be the last straw.

Lumumba was seized [above and left], tortured, and executed in a coup supported by the Belgian authorities, the United States, [Britain] and the United Nations. With Lumumba’s assassination died a part of the dream of a united, democratic, ethnically pluralist, and pan-Africanist Congo.

The murder of Lumumba and his replacement by the US-backed dictator Mobutu Sese Seko laid the foundation for the decades of internal strife, dictatorship, and economic decline that have marked post-colonial Congo. The destabilization of Congolese society under Mobutu’s brutal rule – lasting from 1965 to 1997 – culminated in a series of devastating conflicts, known as the first and second Congo wars (or “Africa’s world wars”). These conflicts not only fractured Congolese society but also engulfed nearly all of the country’s neighbors, ultimately involving nine African nations and around twenty-five armed groups. By the formal end of the conflict, around 2003, nearly 5.4 million people had died from the fighting and its aftermath, making the war the world’s second deadliest conflict since World War II.

Particularly in light of the Congo’s turbulent trajectory following his assassination, Lumumba remains a source of despair, debate, and inspiration among radical movements and thinkers across Africa and beyond. Jacobin contributor Sa’eed Husaini recently spoke with Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, a leading Congolese intellectual and the author of a biography of Lumumba, about the life, death, and politics of the radical nationalist leader.