On the 55th anniversary of his assassination, we take a look at Patrice Lumumba’s unparalleled legacy. Backed by the Movement National Congolais Party, Lumumba became the first freely elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in May 1960. Once in office, he made sweeping changes, promoting ideals of economic self-sufficiency, nation building and a Pan-African paradigm. Additionally, he replaced the colonial names of some cities with indigenous ones.
The newly elected leader overthrew Belgium, which had colonized the country over a century earlier, and declared Congo’s independence June 30. During its ceremony, Lumumba laid out the atrocities his country faced and how it was being brutally exploited by Belgium for its natural resources while also responding to arrogant remarks previously made by Belgium’s King Baudouin.
“It was a speech he gave on this subject that I think began the process which ended a few months later when the CIA, with White House approval, decreeing that he should be assassinated,” alleges author Adam Hochschild.
Riding Africa’s independence movements of the 1950s, Lumumba rose to prominence and consistently challenged the neocolonial state and its pro-Western ideologies. He sought genuine independence and battled against greedy European imperialists who leeched off the Congo’s enormous natural wealth. He always advocated having full control of his country’s resources and was perceived as a major threat to Western interests there. Some contend that the Congo was too important and too rich for the West to lose control, citing it as a reason for his extermination. According to reports, Belgium and the United States actively sought to have him extinguished but were unable to do so.
“The CIA had developed a program to assassinate Lumumba … the operation didn’t work, they didn’t follow through on it,” revealed former CIA agent John Stockwell. “It was to give poison to Lumumba, and they couldn’t find a setting to get to him successfully in a way that it didn’t look like a CIA operation.”
Instead, both countries covertly supported rival politicians who then seized power, abducted, imprisoned and tortured Lumumba before executing him Jan. 17, 1961, at age 35. Some say his assassination crippled the Congo’s social progress and that of the African continent, the effects still lingering today. Regarded as “the most important assassination of the 20th century,” some imperialists were concerned that he was going to reunite an Africa that Europeans had carved up during 1884’s Berlin Conference.
“Lumumba [is] the greatest Blackman who ever walked the African continent,” contended Malcolm X. “He didn’t fear anybody. He had those people so scared they had to kill him. They couldn’t buy him, they couldn’t frighten him, they couldn’t reach him.”
Lumumba surmised: “Dead, living, free or in prison on the orders of the colonialists, it is not I who counts. It is the Congo, it is our people for whom independence has been transformed into a cage where we are regarded from the outside … History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations will teach, but that which they will teach in the countries emancipated from colonialism and its puppets … a history of glory and dignity.”
You can listen to Malcolm X comment on Lumumba’s assassination online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDzKABje16g.