History of Congo: Forbidden to be Independent

 

By Eduardo Galeano (Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone)

In the middle of 1960, the Congo, until then a Belgian colony, celebrated its independence.

Speech followed speech, and the audience was melting from heat and boredom. Belgium, a strict teacher, warned of the dangers of freedom. The Congo, grateful pupil, promised to behave.

Then Patrice Lumumba's speech exploded and ruined the party. He spoke out against the "empire of silence," and through him the silenced found a voice. He paid homage to the fathers of independence, the murdered, the imprisoned, the tortured, and the exiled, who throughout so many years had fought "to bring to an end the humiliating slavery imposed on us by force."

His words, received in icy silence by the Europeans present, were interrupted eight times by ovations from the Africans in the audience.

That speech sealed his fate.

Lumumba, recently released from prison, had won the first free election in the Congo's history, and headed up its first government. But the Belgian press called him a "delirious and illiterate thief." In Belgian intelligence cables, Lumumba was dubbed Satan. The director of the CIA, Alan Dulles, sent instruction to his agents: "The removal of Lumumba must be an urgent objective."

Dwight Eisenhower, president of the US, told British Foreign Secretary Lord Alec Douglas-Home: "I wish Lumumba would fall into a river full of crocodiles."

Lord Douglas-Home took a week to replay: "Now is the time to get rid of Lumumba."

And the minister for African affairs of the Belgian government, Harold d'Aspremont Lynden, offered his own opinion: "Lumumba must be eliminated once and for all."

 

At the beginning of 1961, a firing squad of eight soldiers and nine policemen commanded by Belgian officers shot him along with his two closed collaborators.

Fearing a popular uprising, the Belgian government and its Congolese tools, Mobuto Sese Seko and Moise Tshombe, covered up the crime.

Two weeks later, the new president of the US, John Kennedy, announced: "We will not allow Lumumba to return to the government."

And Lumumba, who by then had already been killed and dissolved in a barrel of sulfuric acid, did not return to the government.

Resurrection of Lumumba

The assassination of Lumumba was an act of colonial reconquest.

The Congo's mineral wealth, copper, cobalt, diamonds, gold, uranium, oil, gave the orders from the depths of the earth.

The sentence was carried out with the complicity of the United Nations. Lumumba had a good reason to mistrust the officers of troops that claimed to be international, and he denounced "the racism and paternalism of people whose only vision of Africa is lion hunting, slave markets, and colonial conquest. Naturally the would understand the Belgians. They have the same history, the same lust for our wealth."

Mobutu, the free-world hero who trapped Lumumba and had him crushed, held power for more than 30 years. The international financial institutions recognized his merits and showered him with generosity. [US President George H. W. Bush called Mobutu 'family'.] By the time he died, his personal fortune was nearly equal to the foreign debt of the country to which he had devoted his best energies.

But Lumumba had announced: "History will one day have its say. It will  not be the history taught in the United Nations, Washington, Paris or Brussels. Africa will write its own history."

The tree where Lumumba was executed still stands in the wood of Mwadingusha. Riddled with bullets. Like him.