Between 1961 and 1973, six African independence leaders were
assassinated by their ex-colonial rulers, including Patrice Lumumba of
Congo, who was killed 50 years ago today
Victoria Brittain
Tuesday January 18 2011
guardian.co.uk
Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of newly independent Congo, was the
second of five leaders of independence movements in African countries
to be assassinated in the 1960s by their former colonial masters, or
their agents.
A sixth, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, was ousted in a western-backed coup
in 1966, and a seventh, Amilcar Cabral, leader of the west African
liberation movement against Portugal of the African Party for the
Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, (Partido Africano da
Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde or PAIGC) in Guinea Bissau and
Cape Verde, was assassinated in 1973.
Lumumba's death in 1961 followed on from that of the opposition leader
of Cameroon, Felix Moumie, poisoned in 1960. Sylvanus Olympio, leader
of Togo was killed in 1963. Mehdi Ben Barka, leader of the Moroccan
opposition movement was kidnapped in France in 1965 and his body never
found. Eduardo Mondlane, leader of Mozambique's Frelimo, fighting for
independence from the Portuguese, died from a parcel bomb in 1969.
The loss 50 years ago of this group of leaders, who all knew each
other, and had a common political project based on national dignity,
crippled each of their countries, and the African continent. The
effects are still evident today.
Ben Barka and Cabral were revolutionary theoreticians - as
significant as Frantz Fanon [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Frantz_Fanon" title="Frantz Fanon] and Che Guevara. Their influence
reverberated far beyond their own continent. At the 1966
Tricontinental Conference in Havana, organised by Ben Barka before his
death, Cuban leader Fidel Castro's closing speech referred to "one of
the most lucid and brilliant leaders in Africa, Comrade Am?lcar
Cabral, who instilled in us tremendous confidence in the future and
the success of his struggle for liberation."
The Third World Movement, challenging the economic and political world
dominance of the colonial powers, the US, and the neocolonial leaders
favoured by the west, would have two short decades of ambition and
optimism despite the long shadow of its great leaders' deaths.
Today, it is impossible to touch down at the (far from modernised)
airport of Lubumbashi in the south of the Democratic Republic of
Congo ? in 1961 known as Elizabethville, in Congo (then renamed
Zaire) ? without a shiver of recollection of the haunting photograph
taken of Lumumba there shortly before his assassination, and after
beatings, torture and a long, long flight in custody across the vast
country which had so loved him. This particular failure of the United
Nations to protect one man and his two colleagues was every bit as
significant as that in Srebrenica in 1995, when 8,000 men and boys
were killed.
Lumumba's own words, written to his wife just four months after the
exhilaration of independence day in the capital Kinshasa are a
reminder of who he was and why he meant so much to so many people
then, and still does today.
"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."
Lumumba would not have been surprised that his successor, Joseph
Mobuto was the US strategic ally in Africa for 30 years. Congo was too
rich, too big, and too important for the west to lose control as they
would have had Lumumba lived.
How ironic that Mobuto was succeeded by Laurent Desire Kabila, whose
10th anniversary of assassination, by his own guards, falls just one
day before Lumumba's? (There are conflicting reports as to the exact
date of Kabila's death, a good overview can be found here [http://
www.irinnews.org/InDepthMain.aspx?InDepthId=57&ReportId=72398"
title="here]).
Kabila came to power in 1997 as the useful figurehead of the armies of
Rwanda, Uganda, and Angola. He trailed some historical legitimacy from
his involvement in one of the rebellions against Mobuto, inspired by
Lumumba's death. Che Guevara was then, in 1965, deep in his second-
last catastrophic attempt to change the world, working then from his
concept of Lumumba's Congo.
When Kabila sprang from obscurity in 1997 as leader of the Democratic
Republic of Congo, Che's African diaries from eastern Congo had not
yet been published, with the acid comment, "I know Kabila well enough
not to have any illusions about him."
In Kabila's first chaotic weeks in power in 1997, the great Tanzanian
leader, Julius Nyerere visited Kinshasa and addressed the new and
unformed leadership. "There are no uncles any more for Congo, do not
wait for them to come and help you ? the country is yours and you must
take the responsibility for it and for your people," he said.
As one of those present told me: "They did not like Nyerere's speech,
they could not wait to use their new power to make allies with foreign
businessmen and get rich themselves ? just like the others." But
Lumumba's ideas are still alive, and he himself had no illusions that
the road to dignity for his people would be extremely long.
guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2011
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