Patrice Lumumba led the newly independent Congo for barely three months
In June 1960 Patrice Lumumba became the first prime minister of an independent Congo. By September he had been dismissed, and within months he was killed by Katangan separatists working alongside Belgian mercenaries. Belgium apologised in 2002, admitting moral responsibility, and in 2022 returned one of his teeth to his family.
Born Isaïe Tasumbu Tawosa on 2 July 1925 in Onalua, in the Kasaï province of the Belgian Congo, Lumumba belonged to the Tetela people. Raised Catholic, he attended Protestant and Catholic schools and then a post office training course, which he passed with distinction. A precocious student who corrected his teachers in public, he read Rousseau, Voltaire and Victor Hugo, wrote anti-imperialist poetry and spoke Tetela, French, Lingala, Swahili and Tshiluba. He worked as a beer salesman in Léopoldville and for eleven years as a postal clerk in Stanleyville, where he also joined civic associations and the Liberal Party of Belgium. In 1956 he was convicted of embezzling from the post office and later jailed.
In 1958 he helped found the Congolese National Movement, the MNC, and soon led it. Unusually, it drew on no single ethnic base, calling for independence, gradual Africanisation of government, state-led development and neutrality abroad. That December he represented it at the All-African Peoples' Conference in Accra. Arrested in 1959 for inciting a Stanleyville riot, he was freed under pressure to attend the Brussels Round Table, which fixed independence for 30 June 1960.
The MNC won a plurality in the May 1960 vote. After tense manoeuvring with Joseph Kasa-Vubu, who became president, Lumumba took office as prime minister. Within days an army mutiny began the Congo Crisis, and the provinces of Katanga and South Kasai declared independence. When Lumumba sent troops against the secessions, Kasa-Vubu dismissed him, and Mobutu Sese Seko seized power in a coup.
Trying to reach supporters in Stanleyville, Lumumba was captured by Mobutu's forces and handed to Moïse Tshombe's Katangan authorities, who executed him on 17 January 1961. He is widely remembered as a martyr of anti-colonial liberation and the pan-African cause.
Source: Patrice Lumumba
