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Remembering Lumumba
Jan 26, 2011 Editorial
In this “International Year for People of African Descent”, it is more than a matter of serendipity that it is also the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.
That the United Nations in 2011 has to point out the systemic racism and discrimination that people of African descent suffer the world over, and call for governments to strengthen “national actions…for the benefit of people of African descent in relation to their full enjoyment of economic, cultural, social, civil and political rights”, is integrally related to the fact that few in Guyana, much less the rest of the world, remember who Lumumba was.
In the words of Malcolm X in 1964, Patrice Emery Lumumba was “the greatest black man who ever walked the African continent. He didn’t fear anybody. He had those people [the colonialists] so scared they had to kill him. They couldn’t buy him, they couldn’t frighten him, they couldn’t reach him.”
When Africa was divvied up late in the 19th century by the Europeans, even tiny Belgium – with 11,780 square miles – was “awarded” the Congo of 905,563 square miles – an area greater than all of Western Europe.
The quest then, as it remains today, was to control the vast mineral wealth of the Congo: massive reserves of coltan (needed for computers), diamonds, copper, zinc and cobalt. “Underdevelopment” does not begin to suggest what the Congo suffered at the hands of the Belgians: rape, pillage, looting and genocide are more like it. 20 million Congolese had been killed in 20 years for not meeting rubber quotas.
By 1955, when the 30-year-old Lumumba began organising a national political party in his country, then called Belgian Congo, there were at most 10 native university graduates. Lumumba was not one of them. With four years of primary school, he had the wisdom, however, not to organise an ethnic-based movement but a national one. Within four years, in the first general elections, his party had won the largest bloc of seats and the Belgians were forced to release him from jail to attend an “independence summit” of parties in Brussels.
The Belgians had planned to install a puppet regime under native proxies, but Lumumba outfoxed them and persuaded the delegates to demand independence which had to be promised within a year – 30th June 1960. Lumumba, as Prime Minister, appointed his chief rival as president – only to have the latter plot with the Belgians to oust him. The Belgians had also planted an ex-army man, Mobuto, in Lumumba’s inner circle, who was to be their point man.
It is now revealed that fearing Lumumba was a “communist”, US President Eisenhower had ordered the former’s assassination. They were beaten to it by the Belgians who used their proxies to stage a coup d’état on 14 September, not even three months after independence. Lumumba was beaten, tortured and dragged to the breakaway state of Katanga (organised by the Belgians) and eventually shot on January 20, 1961.
In his last letter to his wife he wrote:
‘Neither brutal assaults, nor cruel mistreatment, nor torture have ever led me to beg for mercy, for I prefer to die with my head held high, unshakable faith and the greatest confidence in the destiny of my country rather than live in slavery and contempt for sacred principles. History will one day have its say; it will not be the history taught in the United Nations, Washington, Paris, or Brussels, however, but the history taught in the countries that have rid themselves of colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history and both north and south of the Sahara it will be a history full of glory and dignity … I know that my country, now suffering so much, will be able to defend its independence and its freedom. Long live the Congo! Long live Africa!’”
As we remember the plight of Africans in 2011, reflect that the elite manipulation is not over. Look at the games being played in Haiti when a compliant ex-dictator Duvalier is allowed to return and an elected president Aristide cannot.
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