Lumumba, Patrice Emergy

Lumumba, Patrice Emergy (1925-1961), first prime minister of the Republic of the Congo (now Democratic Republic of the Congo). Lumumba was born in the Sankura district of Kasai province in what was then the Belgian Congo. He received a mission education at primary level: no formal secondary schooling was available for Congolese Africans at that time. He worked as a postal clerk in Stanleyville (now Kisangani), where he made up for his lack of formal education by extensive reading and correspondence courses. A dynamic speaker and master of charismatic energy and style, he became an active trade unionist, founding a post office workers’ union and becoming secretary of the Association of Native Public Servants.

In the early 1950s, Lumumba saw the political future in terms of a multi-racial Belgian-Congolese union and he expounded these views in his book Congo My Country, written in 1956 though not published until after his death. In 1957 Lumumba was imprisoned on a charge of embezzlement, almost certainly trumped-up. His treatment on this occasion seems to have radicalized his political viewpoint. By the time of his release, and in response to increasing demands among urban Africans for an end to the colony’s widespread racial discrimination, the Belgian authorities decided to allow African participation in limited local government elections in the colony’s four principal cities in late 1957 and early 1958.

As the floodgates of African political activity were finally opened, a huge number of regionally and ethnically based political parties were formed. The only party that believed in Pan-African ideals was the multi-ethnic Congolese National Movement (Mouvement National Congolais, or MNC), founded by Lumumba in 1958. As president of the MNC Lumumba broke from his earlier espousal of a multi-racial union, and after attending the All-African Peoples’ Conference in newly independent Ghana in December 1958, he called for total and immediate independence for the Congo. In 1959, as riots swept the capital, Leopoldville (now Kinshasa), Lumumba was imprisoned for “political agitation”. He was released in January 1960 to attend a Round Table Conference in Brussels, where the Belgians agreed to independence on June 30, 1960.

In the parliamentary election campaign Lumumba’s MNC was the only truly national party that advocated a single unitary state, aimed at curbing age-old ethnic divisions. The MNC won by far the largest number of seats of any party, but this was still only 33 out of 137. Lumumba was appointed prime minister, with his rival Joseph Kasavubu, leader of the Kinshasa and ethnic Kongolese-based ABAKO party, appointed ceremonial president.

At the independence ceremony, attended by Belgian king Baudouin, Lumumba dramatically broke with protocol and made a scathing attack on the brutal oppression of Belgian rule. In that speech alone he probably sealed his own fate. The oppressed people he championed expected immediate change and when that did not happen within days and, specifically, Africans were not immediately promoted to the officer corps within the army, the troops mutinied. A week later the copper-rich province of Katanga declared its independence, under the leadership of Moise Tshombe. The Belgians flew in paratroopers to support Tshombe’s secession and to protect Belgian lives and property in the rest of the country. Lumumba called for United Nations (UN) assistance, but the UN would not intervene either to end the secession or to expel the Belgians. When Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union, the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) connived at his removal. They persuaded Kasavubu to dismiss Lumumba, who was then arrested by Army Chief of Staff Colonel Mobutu. By then in the pay of the CIA, Mobutu handed him over to Tshombe in Katanga where he was murdered in January 1961. A fervent nationalist, Lumumba’s death caused such a scandal that in 1966 Mobutu, by then the country’s military dictator, retrospectively proclaimed him a national hero and martyr. In 2001 evidence emerged of direct Belgian implication in his murder, and in February 2002, the Belgian parliament formally apologized to Lumumba’s family for their failure to prevent the murder.