The name Patrice Lumumba, the first elected prime minister of what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), still echoes down the decades as a martyr of African decolonisation; seen as the hope of many of his people — he was brutally murdered in 1961 by conspirators of the ancien régime colonial.
Today, a 92-year-old Belgian, Etienne Davignon — the very last survivor of the 10 conspirators accused of entanglement in Lumumba’s assassination — is scheduled to be tried for what many Africanists see as one of the worst crimes of the colonial rearguard as it attempted to impose its imprint on the continent in the midst of the dramatic “wind of change” liberation period.
What had started as a trickle in 1956 with the cautious granting by France, already embroiled in what would become its most bitter colonial war in a failed attempt to retain Algeria, of independence to Tunisia and Morocco, became an unstoppable flood in the 1960s, with fully 35 territories gaining at least “flag independence”.
Their special commercial interests in Africa now threatened, the former colonialists tried to ensure varied forms of neocolonialism obtained in their former territories; notably, France turned West Africa into its chasse privée, or hunting ground, exclusively reserved for exploitation by French companies, while the Quai d’Orsay ruled its ex-colonies through banking and financial wizardry.
For the former Belgian Congo, which attained independence on June 30 1960 as the Republic of the Congo, a trail of tears awaited.
With his spiffy bow-tie and horn-rimmed spectacles, Lumumba, on his ascension to the post of first civil servant of his newly independent nation, appeared as the quintessential pan-Africanist intellectual of the era, though he was born the son of a farmer saddled with an original Tetela tribal surname that meant in essence “heir to the cursed”.
He had an unpromising, peripatetic start as a travelling beer salesman, then as a postal clerk, though he read voraciously and joined the Liberal Party of Belgium, visiting the colonial motherland in 1956; but then fell from grace when he was bust for embezzlement and did a year in prison.
His time in chookie obviously sobered the young man, already married, as on his release he founded the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC) in 1958, deliberately cutting across the tribalism of other pro-independence parties in formulating the notion of an umbrella Congolese nationality; however, it is curious, given his post-mortem reputation as a revolutionary, that when the MNC split the following year, Lumumba consolidated the more conservative majority faction.
His six-month prison term for allegedly inciting a deadly anti-colonial riot in Stanleyville only boosted his reputation, so he was released early to attend negotiations in Brussels on the colony’s independent future; partly as a result, Lumumba’s MNC faction won the May 1960 democratic elections, but was unable to form a government of national unity with his opposition, as the Belgians desired; despite intense horse-trading, however, Lumumba’s government came to power on June 24.
But Lumumba had failed to convince not only important opposition blocs such as those representing the vital southeastern mining province of Katanga, but also junior officers in the military Force Publique such as Mobutu Sese Seko (secretly linked to Belgian and US intelligence services who were starting to regard Lumumba as a “communist”) irritated with their lack of career advancement; in July, the military mutinied and Moise Tshombe declared Katanga independent.
It was the start of the “Congo Crisis” that sucked in everyone from mercenary adventurers like Bob Denard to the UN, whose secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld would be killed when his plane was shot down over the Congo on September 18 1961; meanwhile, Mobuto was appointed military chief-of-staff by Lumumba, but violence spiralled and became ethnicised.
Lumumba was dismissed on November 5 by then president Joseph Kasa-Vubu for his troops’ suppression of secessionist South Kasai province, and for asking the USSR to monitor the Congo Crisis; Lumumba declared Kasa-Vubu a traitor, but Colonel Mobutu broke the deadlock by staging a coup d’etat on September 14; increasingly, Cold War rivalries came to bear on Congo.
On December 1 1960, Mobutu loyalists captured Lumumba; on January 17 1961, supposedly while awaiting trial for inciting the army to “rebellion”, Lumumba and two political advisers, who had been flown to Elisabethville in rebel Katanga on the orders of Count Harold Lynden, the last Belgian minister of colonies, were sorely beaten and tortured.
The trio would be tied to trees and executed the same evening by a firing squad commanded by Belgian mercenary Julien Gat while Belgian police commissioner Frans Verscheure and Tshombe looked on, their bodies buried in a shallow grave but exhumed the next day, then on January 21, hacksawed into pieces by a squad lead by Belgian gendarmerie commissioner Gerard Soete, and dissolved in vats of sulphuric acid.
Murdered three days before the assumption of the US presidency by John F Kennedy, a Democrat known to favour the release of Lumumba, subsequent inquiries and investigative journalism have shown that US CIA chief Allan Dulles and British MI6 agent Daphne Park, the latter having been stationed in Leopoldville at the time, had conspired to have Lumumba “eliminated”, though the guilty parties appear in the end to have been the Belgians and Katangans.
Soete had secretly kept grisly memento mori from his dissolution of Lumumba’s remains in acid, two teeth and a bullet, which he revealed in a 1999 interview just before his death; in 2002, Belgium accepted the “moral responsibility” for Lumumba’s death, and his remains were repatriated to the DRC and laid to rest in a mausoleum in Kinshasa on June 30 2022.
Now, a liver-spotted Davignon, the last of 10 suspects named in a 2011 war crimes complaint by Lumumba’s children, at the time of the assassination a trainee diplomat, who was, according to Belgian prosecutors, involved in the “unlawful detention and transfer” to Katanga of the deposed head of state, is headed for pretrial pleadings in January next year.
On November 18 last year, Lumumba’s mausoleum was vandalised; his legacy remains both cloudy and contested.
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