Patrice Lumumba's life and betrayal by his confidants and rise of Mobutu.

 Émery Patrice Lumumba was born on the 2nd of July 1925 in the Kasai province of what is now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo. He was once a postal clerk and also a traveling beer salesman. Lumumba had a dazzling smile, and a signature pair of spectacles. He had 3 wives. But it was when he got into politics that Lumumba became truly dangerous to the old colonial order.

 

Belgium received the colony from King Leopold II, in 1908, and sustained an oppressive colonial system. It was frankly one of the most hideous colonial powers in a practice (colonization),  the native social structure was destroyed and introduced forced labor, mutilation, slavery in rubber in rubber plantations, rape and mass murder.

Since there was no one free to hunt or grow crops, starvation resulted, and with it disease. Between 1880 and 1920, the Belgium Congo lost approximately half of its population. An estimated 8 to 10 million Africans died as victims of King Leopold’s “rubber-terror.” Women and children were mutilated as punishment for the husband/father failing to meet his rubber quota for the day.

Despite these terrors, initially, Lumumba expressed his sympathy for the Belgian colonizers, hes faith in the system began to waver when he realized that despite the many efforts required for attaining a higher status, the Congolese remained less than human in the eyes of the Belgians and nothing could change that. because Congolese status was tied to their Blackness.

 

 

When Lumumba saw other African states achieving independence, his resolve for Congolese independence was strengthened. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana encouraged Lumumba to be Pan-African. So, Lumumba founded the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC) in 1958, a political party, to help realize the Pan-African project. In his view, a unified and independent Congolese state, representing all the Congolese people democratically, was a prerequisite for joining the rest of Africa in accomplishing the Pan-African dream.

After extensive negotiations between the Belgians and the Congolese nationalist leaders – including Lumumba, elections were planned for May and June 1960 and independence was scheduled for 30 June 1960. A coalition led by Lumumba won the elections and he was appointed Prime Minister of the new government with Joseph Kasa-Vubu as President. At independence he gave a strident speech which vilified the colonial order and eulogized the struggle that brought it to an end, saying 

 

‘We are proud of this struggle, of tears, of fire, and of blood, to the depths of our being, for it was a noble and just struggle, and indispensable to put an end to the humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force.’

Many in the West were alarmed by his speech. And with that speech, as the events that followed suggest, Patrice Lumumba may have signed his own death warrant.

On the 11th July, with the support of the Belgian government, Katanga the mineral rich economic heart of the Congo seceded. In the ensuing chaos, Lumumba was dismissed as PM by Kasa Vubu on the 5th of September 1960. Lumumba in turn took over the radio airwaves to denounce and depose Kasa-Vubu as a traitor. The constitutional crisis this created was ended by a coup in September of 1960 led by Colonel Mobutu. Lumumba was arrested on the 1st of December 1960.

 

His imprisonment proved to be a source of sectarian tension. So on 17 January 1961, he was forcibly put on a plane to Elizabeth ville. On arrival, he and his associates were conducted under arrest to the Brouwez House where they were brutally beaten and tortured by Katangan and Belgian officers. Later that night, Lumumba was driven to an isolated spot where three firing squads had been assembled. A Belgian commission of inquiry found that the execution was carried out by Katanga’s authorities. It reported that President Moïse Kapenda Tshombe (president of the secessionist State of Katanga from 1960 to 1963 ) and two other ministers were present, with four Belgian officers under the command of Katanga authorities.

 

 Lumumba, Maurice Mpolo ( Minister of Youth and Sports of the Republic of the Congo in 1960) and Joseph Okito (Second Vice-President) were lined up against a tree and shot one at a time. The execution is thought to have taken place on 17 January 1961, between 21:40 and 21:43 (according to the Belgian report). The Belgians and their counterparts later wished to get rid of the bodies, and did so by digging up and dismembering the corpses, then dissolving them in sulfuric acid while the bones were ground and scattered.

Angry groups protested Lumumba’s death across the world, in London, Beijing, Moscow, Dublin, Accra, Bombay, New Delhi, Paris, and Washington DC. In Cairo, Egyptians burned the Belgian embassy. In New York City, sixty protesters burst into the auditorium of the UN in protest and a scuffle ensued. The protesters believed at the very least the UN’s inaction contributed to the death of Lumumba. There were also suspicions of greater complicity. No one has ever been charged or prosecuted for the killing of Patrice Lumumba.

Colonel Joseph Désiré Mobutu ) He deposed the democratically elected government of left-wing nationalist Patrice Lumumba in 1960. Mobutu installed a government that arranged for Lumumba's execution in 1961, and continued to lead the country's armed forces until he took power directly in a second coup in 1965, He was Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba’s chief military assistant and had just promoted himself from sergeant to lieutenant-colonel. 

 

 

On 23 January 1961, Kasa-Vubu promoted Mobutu to major-general. Prime Minister Moise Tshombe's Congolese National Convention had won a large majority in the March 1965 elections, but Kasa-Vubu appointed an anti-Tshombe leader, Évariste Kimba, as prime minister-designate. However, Parliament twice refused to confirm him. With the government in near-paralysis, Mobutu seized power in a bloodless coup on 24 November, he was 35 years old. In his first speech upon taking power, Mobutu told a large crowd at Léopoldville main stadium that, 

 

since politicians had brought the Congo to ruin in five years, it would take him at least that long to set things right again, and therefore there would be no more political party activity for five years.

 

 

1 June 1966, Mobutu began renaming cities that reflected the colonial past, starting with Leopoldville became Kinshasa, Elisabethville became Lubumbashi, and Stanleyville became Kisangani. On October 1971, he renamed the country as the Republic of Zaire. He ordered the people to change their European names to African ones, and priests were warned that they would face five years' imprisonment if they were caught baptizing a Zairian child with a European name. Western attire and ties were banned, and men were forced to wear a Mao-style tunic known as an abacost. Christmas was moved from December to June because it was more of an "authentic" date.

In 1972, in accordance with his own decree of a year earlier, Mobutu renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga (meaning "The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake.").

 23 May 1997 Mobutu fleed Morocco where he died on 7 September 1997 from prostate cancer at the age of 66. He was put to rest in the Christian cemetery known as Cimetière Européen.

 

 

The life of Patrice Lumumba may have been snuffed out like candlelight, but his words still live with us.

We have long suffered and today we want to breathe the air of freedom. The Creator has given us this share of the earth that goes by the name of the African continent; it belongs to us and we are its only masters. It is our right to make this continent a continent of justice, law, and peace. All of Africa is irrevocably engaged in a merciless struggle against colonialism and imperialism. We wish to bid farewell to the rule of slavery and bastardization that has so severely wronged us. Any people that oppresses another people is neither civilized nor Christian. The West must free Africa as soon as possible.’

‘Westerners must understand that friendship is not possible when the relationship between us is one of subjugation and subordination.’