John A. Williams, Frantz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Robert F. Williams
JOHN A. WILLIAMS
b. December 5, 1925—d. July 3, 2015
FRANTZ FANON
b. July 20, 1925—d. December 6, 1961
PATRICE LUMUMBA
b. July 2, 1925—d. January 17, 1961
MEDGAR EVERS
b. July 2, 1925—d. June 12, 1963
MALCOLM X
b. May 19, 1925—d. February 21, 1965
ROBERT F. WILLIAMS
b. February 26, 1925–d. October 15, 1996)
―Patrice Lumumba, Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961
―Patrice Lumumba, Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961
― Patrice Lumumba, Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961
by Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick
Harvard University Press, 2015
Death in the Congo is a gripping account of a murder that became one of the defining events in postcolonial African history. It is no less the story of the untimely death of a national dream, a hope-filled vision very different from what the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo became in the second half of the twentieth century.
When Belgium relinquished colonial control in June 1960, a charismatic thirty-five-year-old African nationalist, Patrice Lumumba, became prime minister of the new republic. Yet stability immediately broke down. A mutinous Congolese Army spread havoc, while Katanga Province in southeast Congo seceded altogether. Belgium dispatched its military to protect its citizens, and the United Nations soon intervened with its own peacekeeping troops. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, both the Soviet Union and the United States maneuvered to turn the crisis to their Cold War advantage. A coup in September, secretly aided by the UN, toppled Lumumba’s government. In January 1961, armed men drove Lumumba to a secluded corner of the Katanga bush, stood him up beside a hastily dug grave, and shot him. His rule as Africa’s first democratically elected leader had lasted ten weeks.
More than fifty years later, the murky circumstances and tragic symbolism of Lumumba’s assassination still trouble many people around the world. Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick pursue events through a web of international politics, revealing a tangled history in which many people―black and white, well-meaning and ruthless, African, European, and American―bear responsibility for this crime.
Lumumba (2000) | A Film on Patrice Lumumba | With English Subtitles
Aritra Konar
Premiered July 9, 2021
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56oKpJVlX8E
by Stuart A. Reid
Knopf, 2023
The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A spellbinding work of history that reads like a Cold War spy thriller—about the U.S.-sanctioned plot to assassinate the democratically elected leader of the newly independent Congo
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The Economist, Financial Times
“This is one of the best books I have read in years . . . gripping, full of colorful characters, and strange plot twists.” —Fareed Zakaria, CNN host
It was supposed to be a moment of great optimism, a cause for jubilation. The Congo was at last being set free from Belgium—one of seventeen countries to gain independence in 1960 from ruling European powers. At the helm as prime minister was charismatic nationalist Patrice Lumumba. Just days after the handover, however, the Congo’s new army mutinied, Belgian forces intervened, and Lumumba turned to the United Nations for help in saving his newborn nation from what the press was already calling “the Congo crisis.” Dag Hammarskjöld, the tidy Swede serving as UN secretary-general, quickly arranged the organization’s biggest peacekeeping mission in history. But chaos was still spreading. Frustrated with the fecklessness of the UN and spurned by the United States, Lumumba then approached the Soviets for help—an appeal that set off alarm bells at the CIA. To forestall the spread of Communism in Africa, the CIA sent word to its station chief in the Congo, Larry Devlin: Lumumba had to go.
Within a year, everything would unravel. The CIA plot to murder Lumumba would fizzle out, but he would be deposed in a CIA-backed coup, transferred to enemy territory in a CIA-approved operation, and shot dead by Congolese assassins. Hammarskjöld, too, would die, in a mysterious plane crash en route to negotiate a cease-fire with the Congo’s rebellious southeast. And a young, ambitious military officer named Joseph Mobutu, who had once sworn fealty to Lumumba, would seize power with U.S. help and misrule the country for more than three decades. For the Congolese people, the events of 1960–61 represented the opening chapter of a long horror story. For the U.S. government, however, they provided a playbook for future interventions.
https://letterboxd.com/film/lumumba-death-of-a-prophet/watch/
Lumumba: Death of a Prophet
Lumumba : La Mort du prophète
Directed by Raoul Peck
Synopsis
Documentary about African political leader Patrice Lumumba, who was Prime Minister of Zaire (now Congo) when he was assassinated in 1961.
Cast
Patrice Lumumba Raoul Peck Pierre Devos
69 minutes
The US-sponsored plot to kill Patrice Lumumba, the hero of Congolese independence, took place 50 years ago today
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About this content
by Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja
The Guardian (UK)
Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was assassinated 50 years ago today, on 17 January, 1961. This heinous crime was a culmination of two inter-related assassination plots by American and Belgian governments, which used Congolese accomplices and a Belgian execution squad to carry out the deed.
Ludo De Witte, the Belgian author of the best book on this crime, qualifies it as "the most important assassination of the 20th century". The assassination's historical importance lies in a multitude of factors, the most pertinent being the global context in which it took place, its impact on Congolese politics since then and Lumumba's overall legacy as a nationalist leader.
For 126 years, the US and Belgium have played key roles in shaping Congo's destiny. In April 1884, seven months before the Berlin Congress, the US became the first country in the world to recognise the claims of King Leopold II of the Belgians to the territories of the Congo Basin.
When the atrocities related to brutal economic exploitation in Leopold's Congo Free State resulted in millions of fatalities, the US joined other world powers to force Belgium to take over the country as a regular colony. And it was during the colonial period that the US acquired a strategic stake in the enormous natural wealth of the Congo, following its use of the uranium from Congolese mines to manufacture the first atomic weapons, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
With the outbreak of the cold war, it was inevitable that the US and its western allies would not be prepared to let Africans have effective control over strategic raw materials, lest these fall in the hands of their enemies in the Soviet camp. It is in this regard that Patrice Lumumba's determination to achieve genuine independence and to have full control over Congo's resources in order to utilise them to improve the living conditions of our people was perceived as a threat to western interests. To fight him, the US and Belgium used all the tools and resources at their disposal, including the United Nations secretariat, under Dag Hammarskjöld and Ralph Bunche, to buy the support of Lumumba's Congolese rivals , and hired killers.
In Congo, Lumumba's assassination is rightly viewed as the country's original sin. Coming less than seven months after independence (on 30 June, 1960), it was a stumbling block to the ideals of national unity, economic independence and pan-African solidarity that Lumumba had championed, as well as a shattering blow to the hopes of millions of Congolese for freedom and material prosperity.
The assassination took place at a time when the country had fallen under four separate governments: the central government in Kinshasa (then Léopoldville); a rival central government by Lumumba's followers in Kisangani (then Stanleyville); and the secessionist regimes in the mineral-rich provinces of Katanga and South Kasai. Since Lumumba's physical elimination had removed what the west saw as the major threat to their interests in the Congo, internationally-led efforts were undertaken to restore the authority of the moderate and pro-western regime in Kinshasa over the entire country. These resulted in ending the Lumumbist regime in Kisangani in August 1961, the secession of South Kasai in September 1962, and the Katanga secession in January 1963.
No sooner did this unification process end than a radical social movement for a "second independence" arose to challenge the neocolonial state and its pro-western leadership. This mass movement of peasants, workers, the urban unemployed, students and lower civil servants found an eager leadership among Lumumba's lieutenants, most of whom had regrouped to establish a National Liberation Council (CNL) in October 1963 in Brazzaville, across the Congo river from Kinshasa. The strengths and weaknesses of this movement may serve as a way of gauging the overall legacy of Patrice Lumumba for Congo and Africa as a whole.
The most positive aspect of this legacy was manifest in the selfless devotion of Pierre Mulele to radical change for purposes of meeting the deepest aspirations of the Congolese people for democracy and social progress. On the other hand, the CNL leadership, which included Christophe Gbenye and Laurent-Désiré Kabila, was more interested in power and its attendant privileges than in the people's welfare. This is Lumumbism in words rather than in deeds. As president three decades later, Laurent Kabila did little to move from words to deeds.
More importantly, the greatest legacy that Lumumba left for Congo is the ideal of national unity. Recently, a Congolese radio station asked me whether the independence of South Sudan should be a matter of concern with respect to national unity in the Congo. I responded that since Patrice Lumumba has died for Congo's unity, our people will remain utterly steadfast in their defence of our national unity.
Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja is professor of African and Afro-American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People's History
Explore more on these topics
The Assassination of Lumumba
by Ludo De De Witte
Verso Books, 2003
[Translated by Renee Fenby and Ann Wright]
See all languages and editions
Patrice Lumumba, first prime minister of the Republic of Congo and a pioneer of African unity, was murdered on 17 January 1961.
Democratically elected to lead the Mouvement National Congolais, the party he founded in 1958, Lumumba was at the centre of the country’s growing popular defiance of the colonial rule of oppression imposed by Belgium. When, in June 1960, independence was finally won, his unscheduled speech at the official ceremonies in Kinshasa received a standing ovation and made him a hero to millions. Always a threat to those who sought to maintain a covert imperialist hand over the country, however, he became within months the victim of an insidious plot and was arrested and subsequently tortured and executed.
This book unravels the appalling mass of lies, hypocrisy and betrayals that have surrounded accounts of the assassination since it perpetration. Making use of a huge array of official sources as well as personal testimony from many of those in the Congo at the time, Ludo De Witte reveals a network of complicity ranging from the Belgian government to the CIA. Chilling official memos which detail ‘liquidation’ and ‘threats to national interests’ are analysed alongside macabre tales of the destruction of evidence, putting Patrice Lumumba’s personal strength and his dignified quest for African unity in stark contrast with one of the murkiest episodes in twentieth-century politics.
REVIEWS:
“De Witte has assembled a staggering amount of detail to support his allegations of direct government participation in Lumumba's murder.”—Washington Post Book World
“De Witte has performed an important service in establishing the facts of Lumumba’s last days and Belgium’s responsibility for what happened.”—New York Review of Books
“De Witte writes without stylish frills or narrative tricks, but this is a vivid and utterly compelling account of a nation strangled at birth by the West.”—Ronan Bennett, Los Angeles Times
“De Witte’s book, politically passionate as it is, is an unignorable effort to bring the West face to face with its culpability in this entire sad and sanguinary tale.”—Richard Bernstein, New York Times
“One Belgian author has triumphed over decades of official obfuscation: Belgium did collude in Patrice Lumumba’s assassination ... It raises questions about Western policy in Africa that will reverberate for decades to come.”—Michela Wrong, Financial Times
“One should never underestimate the ruthlessness of British gentlemen cradling endangered shares.”—Neal Ascherson, London Review of Books
“Thoroughly researched, passionately written, deeply disturbing.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Whilst the battle for control over the resources of the Congo (now DR Congo) continues today this important book restores Congolese history and saves it from the official version peddled by those directly implicated in the affair.”—New Internationalist
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ludo De Witte is a sociologist and a writer. He is author of the Dutch work Crisis in Kongo and has researched two broadcast television documentaries on Patrice Lumumba.
This Day in History
January 17, 1961:
Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was Executed
Time Period: 1961
Themes: Imperialism, US Foreign Policy, World History/Global Studies
VIDEO:
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/1/21/patrice_lumumba_50_years_later_remembering?jwsource=cl
https://www.democracynow.org/embed/story/2011/1/21/patrice_lumumba_50_years_later_remembering
Patrice Lumumba (center), at the 1960 round table conference in Brussels to discuss Congo’s independence. Source: National Archives of the Netherlands.
On January 17, 1961, democratically elected prime minister of the Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, was executed with the assistance of the governments of Belgium and the United States.
In his 1960 independence day speech Lumumba said,
We are going to show the world what the Black man [and woman] can do when he works in freedom, and we are going to make of the Congo the center of the sun’s radiance for all of Africa. We are going to keep watch over the lands of our country so that they truly profit her children.
Just six months later he was imprisoned and executed by firing squad.
The Zinn Education Project has a lesson for high school classes on the Congo, examining the brutal exploitation of the Congolese for rubber in the 19th and 20th centuries and for coltan (in smart phones) today. Here is the text for the role of Lumumba in the lesson:
Patrice Lumumba:
"I was the first elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I was a postal clerk and traveling salesman. In 1958, I helped found the Mouvement National Congolais, a political party that demanded independence from Belgium. In October 1959, I was arrested and imprisoned for inciting anti-colonial riots. I won the country’s first parliamentary election in June 1960.
On June 30, 1960, King Baudouin of Belgium came to grant us our independence. How arrogant. His speech was even worse. He told us that we should be thankful the Belgians brought us civilization. In my speech, I reminded him of all the crimes they committed against us. As you can imagine, he thought I was ungrateful. White kings get upset when Black men talk back to them. Predictably, the United States and Great Britain were also angry. They accused me of being a communist because I believed that the wealth of Congo should remain in Congo to create a strong society. The U.S. CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) and their counterparts in Britain and Belgium paid a group of Congolese military men (including Joseph Mobutu) to kill me. I was executed by a firing squad on January 17, 1961, after a long torture session. Before they killed me, they made me eat the paper on which my Independence Day speech was written. After my assassination, people all over the world protested the destruction of our democracy." Download and use full lesson.
To learn more, read “An Assassination’s Long Shadow,” in the New York Times by Adam Hochschild and watch “Patrice Lumumba: 50 Years Later, Remembering the U.S.-Backed Assassination of Congo’s First Democratically Elected Leader” on Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/1/21/patrice_lumumba_50_years_later_remembering?jwsource=cl
https://www.democracynow.org/embed/story/2011/1/21/patrice_lumumba_50_years_later_remembering
https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/lumumba/index.htm
Patrice Lumumba
1925-1961
Question: "Some of your political opponents accuse you of being a Communist. Could you reply to that?"
Answer: "This is a propagandist trick aimed at me. I am not a Communist. The colonialists have campaigned against me throughout the country because I am a revolutionary and demand the abolition of the colonial regime, which ignored our human dignity. They look upon me as a Communist because I refused to be bribed by the imperialists."
(From an interview to a "France-Soir" correspondent on July 22, 1960)
“We are neither Communists, Catholics nor socialists. We are African nationalists. We reserve the right to choose our friends in accordance with the principle of positive neutrality.”
The goal Patrice sought to achieve
Political Statements
Statement at the Closing Session of the Belgo-Congolese Round Table Conference, February 20, 1960
Independence Day Speech, June 30, 1960 [alternative translation]
Interview with TASS, July 28, 1960
Correspondence with United Nations General Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld, July & August, 1960
From a letter to the President of the Security Council, August 1, 1960
From a telegram to the President of the Security Council, August 1, 1960
Statement at a press conference in Leopoldville, August 16, 1960
Statement at a press conference in Leopoldville, August 17, 1960
Statement at a press conference in Leopoldville, August 19, 1960
Speech at the opening of the All-African Conference in Leopoldville, August 25, 1960
Concluding speech at the All-African Conference in Leopoldville, August 31, 1960
Address to Congolese Youth, August, 1960
Radio Broadcast Message, September 5, 1960
Solemn Appeal to the President and members of the Security Council and to all the member states of the United Nations, September 10, 1960
From the letter to the President of the UN General Assembly, November 11, 1960
Letter to A.M. Dayal, Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary-General, January 4, 1961
Letter from Thysville Prison to Mrs. Lumumba . [alternative translation]
Poetry
May Our People Triumph
[alternative translation]
Dawn in the Heart of Africa, Voice of Africa, May 1961
Reminiscences of Lumumba
A Life given up for the People by Jean Bulabemba
The goal Patrice sought to achieve by N. Khokhlov
Patrice Lumumba's Second Life by Tomas Kolesnichenko
In the Struggle for Independence by Henri Laurent
Meetings with Lumumba by Romano Ledda
The Congo before and after the arrest of the Prime Minister by Oleg Orestov
Last days of Freedom by Lev Volodin
Such was Lumumba by Yuri Zhukov
Patrice Lumumba, from the book Fighters for National Liberation [Progress Publishers] 1984
Marxism and Anti-Imperialism in Africa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrice...
