Patrice Lumumba

• 1. Introduction

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  Patrice Lumumba was born Isaïe Tasumbu Tawosa on the 2nd of July 1925 in Onalua, in the Kasaï province of the Belgian Congo. His original surname means "heir of the cursed" in Tetela, derived from words meaning heir and bewitched people who will die quickly. Few names in history have carried such a prophetic weight. He died on the 17th of January 1961, at age thirty-five, shot by a firing squad in the darkness of a Katangan night. His body was dissolved in sulfuric acid so that nothing would remain.

  In the thirty-five years between his birth and his execution, Lumumba became the Congo's first prime minister, delivered a speech that stunned a continent, and transformed himself from a postal clerk into the most feared independence leader in Africa. He made enemies of Belgium, the United States, and the United Kingdom simultaneously. He was a pan-Africanist who spoke five languages, a poet with anti-imperialist themes, and a man whose impromptu words on independence day were described by Time magazine as a "vicious attack".

  How does a beer salesman from Kasaï province become the prime minister of a new nation, and then become, within months, the target of assassination plots by multiple foreign governments? That is the question this documentary will try to answer.

• 2. Roots and Formation

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  Julienne Wamato Lomendja and her husband François Tolenga Otetshima, a farmer, raised their son in the Tetela ethnic community, where the boy was also known as Élias Okit'Asombo. His education moved across three institutions: a Protestant primary school, a Catholic missionary school, and a government post office training school, where he passed the one-year course with distinction.

  He was known even then for pointing out the errors of his teachers in front of his peers. That outspokenness was not a political pose; it was simply who he was. Outside the classroom he read Rousseau and Voltaire, was fond of Molière and Victor Hugo, and wrote poetry, much of it with anti-imperialist themes. He came to speak Tetela, French, Lingala, Swahili, and Tshiluba.

  He worked as a travelling beer salesman in Léopoldville and then as a postal clerk in Stanleyville for eleven years. In 1945, a year after arriving in Stanleyville, he married his first wife, Henriette Maletaua. That marriage ended in 1947. He married Hortense Sombosia the same year; that marriage ended in 1951. During his time with Hortense, he began an affair with Pauline Kie, which produced a son, François Lumumba. He ultimately ended that relationship to marry Pauline Opangu in 1951, who was fourteen years old at the time.

  In 1952, he was hired to work as a personal assistant for French sociologist Pierre Clément, who was conducting a study of Stanleyville. He also co-founded, and became president of, a Stanleyville chapter of the ADAPÉS alumni association that year, though he had never himself attended a Scheut school. After a study tour in Belgium in 1956, he was arrested on charges of embezzling $2500 from the post office. He was convicted and sentenced to twelve months in prison and a fine. His autobiography, written between 1956 and 1957, was published only after his death, in 1962.

• 3. Building the MNC

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  After his release from prison, Lumumba helped found the Mouvement National Congolais, the MNC, in 1958, and quickly became its leader. What distinguished the MNC from every other Congolese party forming at the time was its refusal to draw on a particular ethnic base. Its platform called for independence, gradual Africanisation of government, state-led economic development, and neutrality in foreign affairs.

  In December 1958, Lumumba was one of the delegates who represented the MNC at the All-African Peoples' Conference in Accra, Ghana. That conference was hosted by Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah, who was personally impressed by Lumumba's intelligence and ability. The Accra meeting deepened Lumumba's pan-Africanist commitments and widened his international network.

  In 1959, the MNC split into two factions: the majority MNC-L under Lumumba and the more radical, federalist MNC-K. In late October 1959, Lumumba was arrested for inciting an anti-colonial riot in Stanleyville during which thirty people were killed. He was sentenced to six months in prison. His trial was scheduled to begin on the 18th of January 1960, which happened to be the opening day of the Congolese Round Table Conference in Brussels, where the future of the Congo was being negotiated. Delegates upset by the spectacle of a trial running in parallel with independence talks applied pressure, and Lumumba was released and allowed to attend. The MNC had already won a convincing majority in the December local elections even while he was imprisoned.

• 4. Independence and Its Fractures

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  The Brussels conference concluded on the 27th of January 1960 with a declaration setting the 30th of June 1960 as independence day, with national elections to be held from the 11th to the 25th of May 1960. The MNC won a plurality. After a complicated sequence of negotiations involving Walter Ganshof van der Meersch, the Belgian Minister of African Affairs, and King Baudouin, Lumumba was eventually appointed as formateur on the 20th of June 1960. The resulting 37-strong Lumumba government was diverse in class, tribe, and political belief.

  At 22:40 on the 23rd of June 1960, the Chamber of Deputies convened to vote on the government. Of the 137 members, only 80 were present. Of those, 74 voted in favour, five against, and one abstained. The 57 absences were almost all voluntary. The Senate voted the following day: 60 in favour, 12 against, eight abstentions.

  On independence day, the 30th of June 1960, King Baudouin delivered a speech that praised developments under colonialism and referred to the "genius" of his great-granduncle Leopold II, glossing over the atrocities committed during Leopold's rule over the Congo Free State. Lumumba had not been scheduled to speak. He rose anyway and delivered an impromptu address reminding the audience that independence had not been granted magnanimously, but won through fighting: "a day-to-day fight, an ardent and idealistic fight, a fight in which we were spared neither privation nor suffering, and for which we gave our strength and our blood." European journalists were shocked. The Western media criticised him widely.

  Five days later, on the morning of the 5th of July 1960, General Émile Janssens, commander of the Force Publique, summoned all troops at Camp Léopold II and wrote "before independence = after independence" on a blackboard. That evening the Congolese soldiers sacked the canteen in protest. Mutinies spread through the country. Lumumba dismissed Janssens, promoted all Congolese soldiers one grade, and on the 8th of July renamed the Force Publique as the Armée Nationale Congolaise. He appointed Sergeant Major Victor Lundula as general and commander-in-chief, and named former soldier Joseph Mobutu as colonel and Army chief of staff, despite rumours about Mobutu's ties to Belgian and US intelligence services.

• 5. The Western Powers Move Against Him

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  Belgium intervened on the 10th of July 1960, dispatching 6,000 troops to the Congo. The same day, the State of Katanga declared independence under regional premier Moïse Tshombe, with support from the Belgian government and mining companies including Union Minière. The Belgian Navy bombarded Matadi after evacuating its citizens, killing nineteen Congolese civilians. Lumumba and President Kasa-Vubu sent a protest to the United Nations requesting Belgian withdrawal and a replacement international peacekeeping force.

  Frustrated that UN forces were not authorised to suppress the rebellion in Katanga, Lumumba reached out directly to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, asking him to monitor the situation closely. He then flew to New York City on the 22nd of July, visited Dag Hammarskjöld over three days, and travelled to Washington to appeal for financial and technical assistance. The US government said it would only offer aid through the UN. He went to Ottawa on the 29th of July; Canada also declined direct assistance. Lumumba met with the Soviet ambassador in Ottawa and discussed a donation of military equipment.

  In August 1960, Eisenhower authorised a CIA operation to assassinate Lumumba. CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb, a key figure in the plan, brought a vial of poison to the Congo in September 1960. CIA station chief Larry Devlin developed plans to place it on Lumumba's toothbrush or in his food. The plot was abandoned because Devlin's agent could not carry it out and a replacement agent refused to participate.

  On the 6th of October 1960, Belgian Minister of African Affairs Count Harold d'Aspremont Lynden sent a cable to Katanga stating that policy was now the "definitive elimination of Patrice Lumumba". A memorandum found in the archives was personally annotated by King Baudouin, agreeing that Lumumba should be "neutralized, physically if possible". The Belgian government spent the modern equivalent of 6.2 million euros supporting anti-Lumumba politicians, opposition newspapers, clandestine radio operations, and propaganda networks.

• 6. Capture and Execution

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  On the 5th of September 1960, President Kasa-Vubu announced over radio that he had dismissed Lumumba and six ministers. Lumumba went to the national radio station, was allowed in by UN guards who had been told to bar him but had no orders to use force, and declared Kasa-Vubu a traitor. The Chamber of Deputies then voted 60 to 19 to annul both leaders' declarations of dismissal. The Senate subsequently gave the government a vote of confidence, 49 to zero with seven abstentions.

  On the 14th of September, Mobutu announced a "peaceful revolution" that neutralised the President, Lumumba's government, and Parliament until the 31st of December. ANC units surrounded Lumumba's residence, but a cordon of UN peacekeepers blocked arrest. On the 27th of November, Lumumba left the capital in a convoy of nine cars with Rémy Mwamba, Pierre Mulele, his wife Pauline, and his youngest child, hoping to join Deputy Prime Minister Antoine Gizenga in Stanleyville. Rather than moving with urgency, Lumumba stopped to tour villages and talk with locals. On the 1st of December, Mobutu's troops caught up at the Sankuru River in Lodi. His wife and child were captured on the far bank. Against the advice of Mwamba and Mulele, who both feared they would never see him again and bid him farewell, Lumumba took the ferry back. Mobutu's men arrested him.

  Lumumba was sent first on the 3rd of December 1960 to the Thysville military barracks at Camp Hardy, 150 kilometres from Léopoldville, accompanied by Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito. In his last documented letter, written to Rajeshwar Dayal, head of the UN in the Congo, he wrote: "In a word, we are living amid absolutely impossible conditions; moreover, they are against the law." On the 13th of January 1961, discipline at Camp Hardy faltered; soldiers received 400,000 francs ($8,000) from the Katanga Cabinet to restore order. Harold d'Aspremont Lynden ordered that Lumumba, Mpolo, and Okito be transferred to Katanga.

  On the 17th of January 1961, Lumumba was flown to Elisabethville. On arrival, he and his associates were taken to the Brouwez House, where they were beaten and tortured by Katangan officers while Tshombe and his cabinet decided their fate. Later that night, they were driven to an isolated spot where three firing squads, commanded by Belgian contract officer Julien Gat, were assembled. Belgian Police Commissioner Frans Verscheure had overall command of the site. The execution is thought to have taken place between 21:40 and 21:43, according to a later Belgian parliamentary inquiry. Lumumba, Mpolo, and Okito were put against a tree and shot one at a time.

• 7. What Remained

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  The morning after the executions, on orders of Katangan Interior Minister Godefroid Munongo, Belgian gendarmerie officer Gerard Soete and his team dug up the three bodies, dismembered them, and dissolved them in sulfuric acid while grinding the bones and scattering them. On the 18th of January, panicked by reports that the burial had been observed, members of the execution team moved the remains to a location near the border with Northern Rhodesia. On the afternoon and evening of the 21st of January, Soete and his brother exhumed Lumumba's body a second time and dissolved it again in concentrated sulfuric acid.

  No statement was released until three weeks after the killing. Katangan Secretary of State Lucas Samalenge was among the first to reveal the death on the 18th of January, reportedly going to a bar in Élisabethville and telling everyone present that Lumumba was dead and that he had kicked the corpse. On the 13th of February, Katangan radio formally announced that Lumumba had been killed by enraged villagers after escaping from Kolatey prison farm. Protests followed in at least twenty countries, including Belgium, the United Kingdom, Ghana, China, Venezuela, and the United States. In Belgrade, protesters sacked the Belgian embassy.

  In a 1999 Belgian television interview, Soete displayed a bullet and two teeth, one gold-capped, that he claimed to have saved from Lumumba's body. A Belgian judge ruled in September 2020 that this single gold-capped tooth must be returned to the family. On the 20th of June 2022, Lumumba's children received the tooth during a ceremony at Egmont Palace in Brussels. Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo apologised: "A man was murdered for his political convictions, his words, his ideals." The burial coincided with the sixty-first anniversary of Lumumba's independence day speech. In March 2026, a Brussels court decided that Étienne Davignon, the last surviving member of a group of ten Belgians accused of complicity in Lumumba's assassination, would stand trial; Davignon died on the 18th of May 2026 before proceedings could begin.