Patrice Lumumba

Patrice Émery Lumumba was born in Onalua, in the Kasaï province of the Belgian Congo, on the second of July 1925. A postal clerk in Stanleyville with a self-taught command of French and an unmatched gift for oratory, he co-founded in 1958 the Mouvement National Congolais — the first nationalist movement in the Congo to organize across ethnic and provincial lines and to demand full and immediate independence rather than the gradual association the Belgian state was prepared to permit.

On the thirtieth of June 1960, before the Belgian King Baudouin, the assembled diplomatic corps, and Congolese officials gathered for the ceremonial transfer of sovereignty, Lumumba delivered an unscheduled speech. It was four minutes long. He spoke of "the humiliating slavery which was imposed on us by force," of children whose parents had been worked to death in the rubber concessions, of the "ironies, insults and blows which we had to suffer morning, noon and night because we were Negroes." Across the room, King Baudouin's face went white. The European press never forgave him. The decision, by the highest councils of the United States government and the Belgian state, to remove Lumumba was made within weeks.

He was Prime Minister for ten weeks. He was arrested by his own armed forces, with Belgian and CIA logistical support, in December 1960, transported to the secessionist province of Katanga under Belgian escort, beaten with rifle butts in front of foreign journalists, and shot by a firing squad on the night of the seventeenth of January 1961, three weeks before he would have turned thirty-six. His body was dissolved in acid by a Belgian police commissioner. A single gold tooth — preserved by the commissioner as a trophy — was returned to Lumumba's children in Brussels in 2022.

In his final letter to his wife Pauline, written from prison, he wrote: "Do not weep for me, my dear wife. 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!"

He is honored here as the statesman who, for ten weeks, refused.