Patrice Lumumba: Africa’s Lost Leader
by Leo Zeilig
Haus Publishing, £9.99
FEW names in African history are as evocative as that of Patrice Lumumba, who helped wrench the Congo from Belgian colonialism only to see the mineral-rich country torn apart by Western powers. After Lumumba’s execution in 1961, a Belgian police officer dug up his body from its shallow grave, chopped it to pieces and dissolved it with acid. When there was no acid remaining, the body parts were burnt.
The brutality of the murder is reminiscent of the horrors wrought on the country by King Léopold’s regime, which cost more than 10 million lives at the turn of the 20th century. But it also says something of the power of Lumumba’s message that the Belgians wished to destroy all traces of a figure embodying such hopes for Congolese independence.
In this well-researched, readable but brief biography, Leo Zeilig, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Sociological Research at the University of Johannesburg, places Lumumba’s personal journey in the context of the continent during the dying days of colonialism. He uses interviews with Lumumba’s family and offers a useful assessment of the failures of his leadership.
By all accounts, Lumumba was a remarkable man. From the Catholic mission school of his home village he took a job as a postal clerk and rose to become one of the country’s most educated Congolese, writing about the difficulties facing minor colonial officials like himself.
While imprisoned for embezzlement in 1956, he started a process of radicalisation and began to examine the contradictions inherent in the racist society around him. He was soon president of the Mouvement National Congolais which in 1960 threw out the colonial order and founded an independent Congo with Lumumba as Prime Minister. Unfortunately, the new state was beset by problems, not least a Belgian-backed secessionist movement. The country fragmented, allowing the CIA-backed military commander Joseph Mobutu to seize power. (Following a second coup d’état in 1965, he ruled for more than three decades.) Lumumba was captured and killed.
Despite huge popularity, his regime was destroyed within a year of independence. Zeilig argues a major problem was the lack of organisation among the MNC’s supporters – especially trade unionists and the urban poor – meaning Lumumba could not mobilise these potentially powerful forces as his regime was tested. He instead relied on “the power of the spoken word” and believed parliament and then the UN would come to his aid. Instead, it vacillated wildly, pulled between the interests of competing colonial powers.
Although wrongly labelled a communist by Western powers, Lumumba developed over time into a left-wing nationalist who understood that without economic independence, political power is meaningless. That is the clearest lesson from this story of hope descending into tragedy.
Sam Southgate
