[News] 50 years after Lumumba: The burden of history

[Anti-Imperialist News]

50 years after Lumumba: The burden of history


Iterations of assassinations in Africa



Horace Campbell
2011-01-20, Issue <http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/513>513
<http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70252>http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70252

It wasn’t just Patrice Lumumba his assassins 
wanted to kill, it was the genuine 
self-determination, dreams and aspirations of 
African people, writes Horace Campbell, 
reflecting on the murder of the DRC’s (Democratic 
Republic of Congo) first prime minister on 17 January 1961.

In the experiences of the Democratic Republic of 
the Congo (DRC) and of Africa, the iterations of 
assassinations were meant to kill the genuine 
self-determination of the African peoples. Of 
these crimes, the murder and cover up of the 
assassination of Patrice Lumumba continues to 
reverberate across Africa, crying out for a break 
from the recursive patterns of genocidal politics 
and economics. Patrice Lumumba was the first 
democratically elected prime minister of the 
Congo. The DRC won its independence in June 1960, 
but the wishes of the Belgian colonialists were 
that the conditions after independence should not 
be different from that of the colonial era. In 
the Congo, Belgium – a small divided society in 
Europe – had worked to get a seat at the table of 
imperial overlords. In the eyes of the Belgians, 
the crime of Patrice Lumumba was that he refuted 
the speech of the King of Belgium at the 
independence celebration in June 1960. Lumumba 
refused to accept the representation of the 
Belgian mission as one of civilising and 
modernising the Congolese peoples. Lumumba was 
removed from office less than two months after 
independence. He was placed under house arrest; 
he escaped but recaptured, beaten, tortured and 
eventually eliminated. This pattern of murder, 
torture and destruction continues today, 50 years 
after the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.

 From the time of the assassination of Lumumba, 
almost every African leader who sought to chart a 
course for genuine independence was assassinated, 
whether it was Eduardo Mondlane, Amilcar Cabral, 
Herbert Chitepo, Samora Machel, Thomas Sankara, 
Felix Moumie, Chris Hani or Steve Biko. Violence 
against leaders was accompanied by the 
intimidation and assassination of journalists, 
students, opposition leaders and any social force 
that challenged oppression of Africans and the 
plunder of their resources. This nested loop of 
genocidal thinking, genocidal economics and 
genocidal politics has generated 11 wars in the 
Congo since 1960, and all of these wars have had 
implications for almost all the regions of Africa 
in relation to genocide, militarism, 
dictatorship, economic plunder and patriarchal models of liberation.

The task of reconstruction and the recovery of 
the dignity of the Congo and of Africa is a 
challenge that requires a decisive and 
revolutionary break with the ideas, organisations 
and the modes of political and economic practices 
that dehumanises Africans. The youth of Africa 
are everywhere calling for an elaboration of 
their humanity, and are challenging the 
devaluation of life. From Tunisia and Egypt in 
the North to South Africa and Zimbabwe in the 
South, the youths are seeking new organisations 
and ideas that can break from the centuries of 
oppression. The celebration of Lumumba should be 
accompanied by the spirit of healing and 
reconstruction and calls on the peoples of Africa 
to draw from the determination of Patrice Lumumba 
to continue the struggles for emancipation and unity.

PATRICE LUMUMBA AND THE BURDEN OF HISTORY

Despite the history of European plunder, looting 
and savagery in the Congo from the period of the 
trans-Atlantic slave trade to the present, the 
intellectual culture of the West represents the 
peoples of the Congo and Africa as uncivilised, 
open to atavistic violence and awaiting 
modernisation projects from Europeans. In 
November, I attended a session of the African 
Studies Association meeting in San Francisco, 
USA, where there were some young scholars making 
a presentation on Eastern Congo. In the main, the 
quality of the work was so shallow and devoid of 
historical context that one Congolese scholar in 
the back of the room asked if the presenters were 
aware that there were Congolese scholars who have 
been doing scholarly work on reconstruction and 
peace in the Congo. This question is very 
pertinent in the present moment in so far as many 
of the scholars and researchers from Turkey, 
India, Brazil, China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan 
turn to the work of European and US conservative 
scholars to orient their ‘humanitarian’ projects 
in Africa. Jacques Depelchin, Nzongola Ntalaja 
and countless others have documented the horrors 
of the forced labour, brutality and the genocide 
of over ten million Africans by the Belgians but 
their brand of scholarship and activist 
intervention was marginalised by the dominant 
Western intellectual institutions.

The documentation of Western atrocities in the 
Congo has also been brought to a wider audience 
by the writer Adam Hochschild, whose book, ‘King 
Leopold’s Ghost’, has reached a wider community 
than that which was accessible to African 
researchers and scholars. Hochschild built upon 
the work of Mark Twain in bringing to a larger 
audience the plunder and murder of the colonial 
enterprise. In his day, Malcolm X challenged 
mainstream historians and linked the history of 
genocide in the pan-African world to the murder 
of Lumumba and the search for self-determination by the peoples of the Congo.

Scholars trained in African studies centres of 
the West could not write clearly about the 
iterations of assassinations because of the ways 
in which the academy had been polluted by the 
modernising discourse that was supposed to 
depoliticise Africans. Malcolm X challenged US 
scholars to detail the massacres in the Congo. In 
a well-publicised exchange at Brooklyn College on 
24 November 1964, the professors told Malcolm X 
that he was an alarmist and that Leopold 
civilised the Africans in a humanitarian 
campaign. It was in this intellectual climate 
that Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the US 
House of Representatives was reared. Gingrich 
wrote his doctoral thesis at Tulane University on 
the civilising role of the Belgians in the Congo. 
In some academic centres, such as the African 
Studies Center at the University of Wisconsin 
Madison, there were specialists on politics in 
the Congo. The students of these professors have 
dominated the US bureaucracy and academia for the 
past 40 years, reproducing modernisation theories 
and the failings of the ‘tribal’ African.

Malcolm X himself was assassinated in February 
1965 when he articulated a clear understanding of 
the linkages between racism and oppression in the 
United States and massacres and murders in 
Africa. His famous dictum, ‘You cannot understand 
what is going on in Mississippi if you do not 
understand what is going on in the Congo’ is as 
true today as it was when he uttered these words. 
The current military crisis in the DRC 
(especially in the Eastern regions) brings out 
the need for activists to grasp the burden of 
history in order to understand the present and 
chart a new course for the future.

These utterances by Malcolm X were part of his 
work as a mobiliser and truth teller. Malcolm X 
met with Abdurrahman Babu and Che Guevara in 1964 
after the Johnson administration supported 
mercenaries to abort the second independence 
struggle in the Congo. Their meeting had agreed 
on a strategy to move beyond political mobilising 
to put in place a plan for liberation in the 
Congo and in the Americas. Four months after this 
historic meeting between three great freedom 
fighters, Malcolm X was gunned down in Harlem and 
the CIA hunted down and murdered Che Guevara. 
(See details in the book by Karl Evanzz, ‘The 
Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X’). 
Professor Manning Marable is also working on a 
new book that exposes the conspiracy to murder and cover up.

The iterations of assassinations had taken their 
own roller coaster ride so that not even the 
president of the United States was immune to this 
mindset of killing and murder. John F. Kennedy 
was assassinated in November 1963 by the forces 
of the military industrial complex and the 
intelligence agencies that continue to promote 
death tendencies all over the world. James 
Douglass, in his book, ‘JFK and the Unspeakable: 
Why He Died and Why It Matters’, has documented 
in extensive detail how the cover-up of the 
assassination has been even more elaborate and 
meticulous than the actual assassination. This 
same cover-up continues in the cases of Martin 
Luther King Jr and hundreds of freedom fighters 
whose lives have been snuffed out at an early age.

COLLUSION BETWEEN INTELLECTUALS IN USA AND WESTERN EUROPE

Since the murder of Lumumba, mainstream 
intellectual work inside Europe and North America 
has covered up and distorted the conditions under 
which Lumumba was assassinated. Former officials 
of the United Nations have written a number of 
books on the influence of the United States over 
the decision making processes in international 
bodies dealing with the Congo at this time. The 
record has been established by various 
authorities on the manipulation of the major 
international institutions in order to cover up 
murder. The United States manipulated the United 
Nations on the question of the Congo so that 
Patrice Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah who had called 
for UN intervention against European mercenaries 
found that the UN was working to support the same 
mercenaries and their employers in Belgium, 
France, and the United States. When Dag 
Hammarskjöld, the secretary general of the UN, 
woke up to this manipulation, he himself was 
assassinated. Many UN operatives who were 
appalled by the callous behaviour of the US and 
the CIA have written about the sordid tale of 
Moose Tshombe (puppet leader of Katanga) and the 
secession in Katanga. Kwame Nkrumah wrote ‘The 
Challenge of the Congo’ to underline the 
centrality of this challenge for the unification and liberation of Africa.

Richard Mahoney who wrote the book, ‘JFK: Ordeal 
in Africa’ had studied the tremendous energies 
invested in the control of the Congo in the 
period when the US was implicated in the murder 
of Patrice Lumumba. Mahoney termed the whole 
thrust of the policy a story of stupidity. This 
study, the product of a doctoral dissertation at 
John Hopkins University, detailed how the Congo 
became the centrepiece of US African policy in 
the 1960s. Mahoney made the argument that the US 
foreign policy was confused in purpose and 
contradictory in execution. But he did not 
challenge the fundamental realist and 
androcentric assumptions of graduate training. 
The role of the CIA and elements of the State 
Department in building alternatives to Patrice 
Lumumba leading to the massive support for 
Mobutism has been the subject of numerous 
studies. One of these explicitly entitled, 
‘America’s Tyrant: The CIA and Mobutu of Zaire’ 
covers the whole military, economic and 
intelligence apparatus that was provided to 
enable Mobutu to rule in a tyrannical manner over 
the peoples of the Congo. President Clinton, in 
clear reference to the linkages between the US 
government and Mobutu, apologised to the people 
of Africa in Kampala, Uganda in March 1998 by 
declaring that during the Cold War, the US was 
blinded by its confrontation with the Soviet 
Union and hence supported elements such as 
Mobutu. How can the activists ensure that these 
apologies of the leader of the USA are not simple 
political gimmickry? Up to the present, there 
needs to be a clearer exposure of the US 
establishment and these assassinations. The 
attempt to poison Patrice Lumumba exposed the 
mindset of biological warfare that was to be 
later experimented in Africa. One scholar also 
opened the reality that it was in the Congo that 
the US first experimented with extraordinary rendition.

Neither the speech of the-then President Clinton 
nor policy formulations from the current National 
Security apparatus link the present policies of 
transnational corporations to the kind of 
policies that connived to perpetrate the 
elimination of Lumumba. The linkages between the 
bureaucracy and the University in the Cold War 
produced a generation of scholars who were 
steeped in the realist paradigms and went between 
the foundations, the universities, the Pentagon, 
the think tanks and the National Security 
Council. It was like a revolving door where they 
quoted each other, supported each other and 
provided a barrier to truth. From time to time, 
the production of Area Handbooks provided a basis 
for the assembling of the ideas sanctioned by 
scholars. These scholars participated in an 
elaborate exercise to provide political 
legitimacy for the US foreign policies in Africa. 
Henry Kissinger best symbolised these realists 
who could be termed organic scholars of the 
bourgeoisie. Many of his protégés staffed the 
African Bureau in the State Department and have 
left an indelible mark on the conceptualisation 
of war and politics in Africa. Noam Chomsky has 
written of the callousness and dehumanisation of 
the officials who have overseen murder and 
violence in the name of strategic minerals and 
strategic interests. He noted that, 
‘Self-righteousness comes naturally to those who 
are able to achieve their will by force. They may 
also rest confident that the doctrinal system 
will properly efface and sanitise the past, at 
least among the educated sectors who are its 
agents and, arguably, its most naïve victims.’

LET THE NEW SCHOLARSHIP ON TRUTH THRIVE AND GROW

There is now a spate of books on the role of the 
CIA and the obsession of the US government with 
the so-called communist threat. What many of 
these books did not make clear was the level of 
coordination between the US and Belgians in the 
plot to eliminate Lumumba. The book that broke 
the mould and painstakingly outlined the plot in 
the clearest terms was that of Ludo De Witte, 
‘The Assassination of Lumumba’. De Witte spent 
several years doing archival work and 
interviewing those involved in the assassination. 
It was after this book was published that the 
government of Belgium was forced to open up a 
parliamentary inquiry into the assassination. 
This parliamentary inquiry heard testimonies from 
a wide cross section of operatives in the Belgian state.

In February 2002, the government of Belgium 
accepted moral responsibility for the 
assassination of Lumumba. The Belgian Foreign 
Minister declared in February 2002 that, ‘[i]n 
light of criteria applicable today, certain 
members of the government at the time and certain 
Belgian actors of that period carry an 
irrefutable responsibility for the events that 
led to the death of Patrice Lumumba.’ (quoted 
from Thomas Turner, ‘Crimes of the West in 
Democratic Congo: Reflections on Belgian 
Acceptance of “Moral Responsibility” for the 
Death of Lumumba’, in ‘Genocide, War Crimes and The West’).

The declaration by the government of Belgium came 
after 40 years of research and writing on the 
assassination. The cables from Washington and the 
role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 
organising the plot are now well known. In 1975 
Senator Frank Church carried out investigations 
on the ‘Alleged Assassination Plots Involving 
Foreign Leaders,’ published in Senate Report 94-465, 94th Congress 1975.

Despite the record of the Church Committee and 
this parliamentary inquiry in Belgium, the 
reality is that the information on the conspiracy 
to murder Lumumba is not widely circulated. 
Belgian and European scholars continue to 
represent their work in the Congo as that of 
civilising Africans. More significant, has been 
the fact that this killing and the subsequent 
traditions left by Mobutu has poisoned the 
political culture and political life of the 
society. Mobutu’s government carried out extra 
judicial killings and murdered students and trade 
union leaders for thirty years. In 1990 there was 
an attempt to develop the basis for a national 
Palaver in a Sovereign National Conference. 
Neither the Congolese political careerists nor 
the imperial supporters in Washington, Brussels 
and Paris wanted the truth to come out. The 
genocidal wars in the Central Africa region and 
the deaths of over five million since the removal 
of Mobutu attest to the fact that once the 
politics of impunity are embedded in a society it takes generations to heal.

When Mobutu was overthrown in 1997 there were 
many discussions on the need for the US to open 
the files on the Congo. Lawrence Devlin, the 
ageing head of the CIA in Kinshasa at the time of 
the assassination of Lumumba turned up at one of 
the seminars. What was implicit in his presence 
was that there should be no revelation on the 
role of the USA in the crimes of Mobutu and that 
the ranks should be held. At the end of 1999, it 
was officially confirmed by a story in the 
Washington Post that President Eisenhower had 
given a direct order for the elimination of 
Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1960. This 
revelation confirmed what had been public 
knowledge for forty years, that President 
Eisenhower had given direct instructions to Allen 
Dulles, then director of the CIA for the 
assassination of Lumumba. Now in the aftermath of 
the Cold War, there are demands for opening the 
files so that there can be a new beginning for 
the societies that were destroyed.

In order to distort the real truth behind the 
assassination, before his death, Devlin wrote his 
own book, ‘Chief of Station’. Devlin’s book 
reproduced what had become the defining element 
of the US foreign policy, a lame attempt to 
rekindle the Cold War distortions that Lumumba 
was a communist and that the USA was acting to 
prevent the spread of communism in Africa. This 
brand of intellectual work was reinforced by 
section of the US bureaucracy that ingratiated 
itself with Mobutism and the circus of 
‘humanitarian’ actors and actresses who have 
descended on the Congo and Eastern Africa. This 
circus has been underwritten by the massive 
investment of the World Bank to perpetuate a 
‘conflict resolution’ paradigm in Africa, to 
obfuscate the iterations of assassinations. 
Throughout the misrule and oppression by Mobutu, 
the World Bank and the IMF were partners in the 
oppression. After Mobutu was removed, the Bank 
sought to link violence and warfare in the DRC to 
‘primary commodity production’. The intellectuals 
of the World Bank joined in the discourse with 
reports on the Economic Causes of Civil Conflict 
and their Implications for Policy. After decades 
of foreign aid, foreign investment and economic 
reforms, the Development Research Group of the 
World Bank noted in their publication ‘Economic 
Causes of Civil Conflict and their Implications 
for Policy’: ‘[A]s of 1995 the country with the 
highest risk of civil conflict according to our 
analysis was Zaire, with a three in four chance 
of conflict within the ensuing five years.’ What 
was most revealing from the analysis of the World 
Bank on the relationship between primary 
commodity extraction and warfare was the extent 
to which questions of democratic participation on 
the one hand and the global armaments culture on 
the other are excluded from the policy 
alternatives offered for peace. Paul Collier, 
then the director of the research group of the World Bank argued that:

‘
the most powerful risk factor is that countries 
which have a substantial share of their income 
(GDP) coming from the export of primary 
commodities are radically more at risk of 
conflict
. Thus, without primary commodity 
exports, ordinary countries are pretty safe from 
internal conflict, while when such exports are 
substantial the society is highly dangerous. 
Primary commodities are thus a major part of the conflict story.’

Collier graduated from this World Bank research 
position to establish himself as an intellectual 
entrepreneur and high priest of the enterprise of 
studying Africa. He pontificates on warfare and 
violence from the safety and comfort of Oxford, 
where he suggests military interventions and 
coups as solutions for democratic governance in 
Africa. William Reno, Christopher Clapham and 
many others have turned the study of war-lordism 
into an academic industry without linking the 
plunder, mass rape and warren that support these 
military entrepreneurs. The conflict paradigm 
without historical reference to the experiences 
of the Belgian mining companies and the role of 
foreign corporations under Mobutu is represented 
with the full authority of the name of the World 
Bank to argue that countries ‘with Congo like 
geography’ and reliance on primary exports are prone to ‘Civil Conflict.’

What was also missing was clarity on the 
differences between the wars of plunder of 
elements such as Foday Sankoy’s and Charles 
Taylor’s and the righteous struggles for 
liberation that had been initiated by Patrice 
Lumumba. In the World Bank model there is no room 
for the explanation of the struggles for African 
dignity. Without this kind of interrogation of 
the role of the World Bank, the West can continue 
to think of the World Bank as an institution that 
can formulate development plans for the 
reconstruction of the DRC for a new era.

HEALING AND RECONSTRUCTION IN A NEW ERA

In the experience of the Congo and Central 
Africa, there continues to be a distortion of the 
actual conditions that generate warfare, rape and 
plunder today. One of the outcomes of this 
distortion is that the US military can represent 
itself as a force for peace by the ideas that are 
put forward as justifications for the 
establishment of the US Africa Command (AFRICOM). 
The counterinsurgency scholarship that was 
unleashed by the Pentagon during the cover up of 
the assassination of Lumumba is now being 
refinanced through the Africa Command Social 
Science Research programme. However, this 
research agenda comes up against the new energies 
of organisations and individuals who want to make 
a break with the iterations of assassinations. 
Whether it is the lobbying groups who are opposed 
to AFRICOM or the peace and justice campaigners 
organised as Friends of the Congo, there are many 
who are using the anniversary of the 
assassination of Patrice Lumumba as a platform 
for the exposure of the crimes of US imperialism and Belgian complicity.

Lumumba’s assassination is relevant to current 
global politics and the struggles for social 
transformation in Africa. As de Witte quoted from 
Fanon who had noted that: ‘If Africa was a 
revolver and the Congo its trigger
the 
assassination of Lumumba and tens of thousands of 
other Congolese nationalists, from 1960-1965, was 
the West’s ultimate attempt to destroy the 
continent’s authentic independent development‘ 
(xxv). De Witte rightly argued that:

‘After his death, the corrupt and dictatorial 
puppet regimes that popped up throughout Africa, 
supported by Western money and weapons, 
effectively stifled African nationalism and 
independence. Attempts to cover-up the 
assassination not only dishonor an innocent man, 
but perpetuate the violence and slavery of Africa.’

It is up to us to actualize the dream of Lumumba 
for the Congo and for Africa. In a letter to his 
wife before his assassination, Patrice Lumumba wrote:
‘No brutality, mistreatment, or torture has ever 
forced me to ask for grace, for I prefer to die 
with my head high, my faith steadfast, and my 
confidence profound in the destiny of my country, 
rather than to live in submission and scorn of 
sacred principles. 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. Africa will write its own history, and 
it will be, to the north and to the south of the 
Sahara, a history of glory and dignity.’


The celebrations of the life and work of Patrice 
Lumumba draw heavily from his last statements on 
the need for Africa to make a break and move in a 
new direction. We can draw inspiration from the optimism of Lumumba, stating:

‘I write you these words without knowing if they 
will reach you, when they will reach you, or if I 
will still be living when you read them. All 
during the length of my fight for the 
independence of my country, I have never doubted 
for a single instant the final triumph of the 
sacred cause to which my companions and myself 
have consecrated our lives. But what we wish for 
our country is right to an honorable life, to a 
spotless dignity, to an independence without restrictions


‘They have corrupted certain of our fellow 
countrymen, they have contributed to distorting 
the truth and our enemies, that they will rise up 
like a single person to say no to a degrading and 
shameful colonialism and to reassume their dignity under a pure sun.

‘We are not alone. Africa, Asia, and free and 
liberated people from every corner of the world 
will always be found at the side of the 
Congolese. They will not abandon the light until 
the day comes when there are no more colonizers 
and their mercenaries in our country. To my 
children whom I leave and whom perhaps I will see 
no more, I wish that they be told that the future 
of the Congo is beautiful and that it expects for 
each Congolese, to accomplish the sacred task of 
reconstruction of our independence and our 
sovereignty; for without dignity there is no 
liberty, without justice there is no dignity, and 
without independence there are no free men.’

Even in captivity, Lumumba never wavered in his 
belief that Africa will be free from the imperial 
overlords and their puppets. He called on 
Africans to stand firm and to work for Africa’s 
emancipation. Lumumba ended the letter to his wife with these words:

‘[D]o not weep for me, my dear companion. I know 
that my country, which suffers so much, will know 
how to defend its independence and its liberty. 
Long live the Congo! Long live Africa!’

Patrice Lumuba’s words give courage to the 
current freedom fighters of Africa who should not 
mourn him but organise for the freedom and unity 
of the continent. We must also struggle to free 
Africa from African leaders who have Africanised 
the iterations of imperialist tools of oppression 
and assassination. Indeed, there must be an 
intensification of the struggle to make a break 
with the iteration of the assassination of 
African peoples’ dreams and aspirations. We must 
work harder for the kind of Africa Lumumba 
foresaw when he asserted that Africa will write 
its own history of dignity and glory. We must not 
rest until this dream is realised. This is the 
burden that history has placed on us.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Horace Campbell is a teacher and writer. 
Professor Campbell's website is 
<http://www.horacecampbell.net>www.horacecampbell.net. 
His latest book is 
'<http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745330068&>Barack 
Obama and 21st Century Politics: A Revolutionary 
Moment in the USA', published by Pluto Press.
* Please send comments to 
<mailto:editor at pambazuka.org>editor at pambazuka.org 
or comment online at <http://www.pambazuka.org/>Pambazuka News.




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