The Wild Reed: Remembering Lumumba

Wednesday, July 02, 2025

Remembering Lumumba

It’s the 100th anniversary today of the birth of Patrice Lumumba (1925-1961), a man I greatly respect.

A prominent leader of the Congolese independence movement, Lumumba served as the first Prime Minister of the independent Democratic Republic of the Congo (then the Republic of the Congo).

Throughout much of his adult life Lumumba resisted colonialism and corporatism, a defiant stance that led to his murder during the coup orchestrated by his political opponents within Congo as well as a number of players outside the country, including Belgium (Congo’s former colonial ruler) and the U.S.

7/29/25 UPDATE: The following is excerpted from an article by Jennifer Rankin published today in The Guardian. In it, Rankin reports on how Belgium is marking “Congo’s slain leader’s 100th birthday with an exhibition (Lumumba Everlasting) – and a possible trial.”

If he had lived, Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, would have marked his 100th birthday this month (on 2 July). This unreached milestone is being marked by an exhibition in Brussels at a time when Belgium, the former colonial power, is facing renewed questions about his death.

Lumumba was 35 when he was overthrown during a political crisis, then tortured and assassinated by a firing squad in January 1961, along with two associates, Joseph Okito and Maurice Mpolo. Nearly 65 years after the murders, which were carried out by Congolese rivals with the support of Belgian officers, Lumumba’s family are still searching for answers.

In an unexpected development in June, Belgium’s federal prosecutor referred a 92-year-old former diplomat, Étienne Davignon, to the Brussels criminal court over alleged war crimes related to the killings.

Davignon, who was dispatched to Congo as a 28-year-old diplomatic intern on the eve of independence in 1960, is the only survivor among 10 former officials accused by the Lumumba family in 2011 of involvement in his assassination. The charges relate to Lumumba’s unlawful detention, his denial of a fair trial and “humiliating and degrading treatment,” although a charge of intent to kill has been dismissed. Davignon has denied all claims of involvement.

Christophe Marchand, a lawyer for the Lumumba family, said: “The idea is to have a judicial trial and to have the truth about what happened, not only the role of Étienne Davignon – because he was one part in the whole criminal plan.”

. . . One historian has described Lumumba’s assassination as Congo’s “original sin” that shattered hopes of unity and prosperity in the newly independent country. In 2001 a parliamentary inquiry concluded that Belgian ministers bore a moral responsibility for the events that led to the Congolese leader’s gruesome death.

Marchand said the parliamentary inquiry had made clear that “Belgian civil servants took an active part in the transfer of Lumumba from Léopoldville (Kinshasa) to Katanga”, where he was murdered.

. . . Nancy Mariam Kawaya, a coordinator at the Congolese Cultural Centre, which is hosting the Lumumba centenary exhibition, said: “The murder needs to be judged so Belgium can be at peace with the story, so the Congolese can be at peace with the story and we can write a new chapter.

“I want to trust that justice will do its work now,” she added.

The exhibition, she said, sought to widen the focus beyond Lumumba’s death. The subject of his violent end “takes so much space” that “we don’t realise that people don’t know who he was, his ideas. . . . What was actually his fight?”

The small exhibition of paintings by Congolese artists at the cultural centre seeks to fill that gap. One artist imagines an idealised centenarian Lumumba, with cropped grey-white hair, gazing enigmatically into the distance. There are more unsettling works. Another painting depicts modern-day Kinshasa as an unpopulated metropolis of skyscrapers and soup of rubbish, reflecting the scourge of modern-day plastic pollution in the Congolese capital. In another work Lumumba, crowned with a halo, sits on a plastic chair in a rubbish dump as two shoeless young boys stretch out their hands. One of the boys, his hands dripping in blood, is holding a smartphone – a bleak reference to the minerals used to power the world’s devices that have fuelled years of conflict in the DRC.

Opened in 2023 by the city of Brussels, the Congolese Cultural Centre is part of efforts to turn the page on Belgium’s fraught relationship with its former colonies.

The exhibition, which runs until 30 July, is entitled Lumumba Sans Temps, a play on words. Sans temps (without time, or everlasting) sounds like 100 years (cent ans) in French and is intended to underline the timelessness, say organisers, of Lumumba’s message of unity, rather than division along religious or ethnic lines. “Lumumba remains our contemporary,” contends Dady Mbumba, the exhibition’s curator. “Lumumba fought for liberty, for equality, for unity,” he said, stressing the importance of the latter after decades of conflict in the DRC.