Image source: forbesafrica.com

Patrice Lumumba’s assassination in Congo

Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the independent Congo, was brutally murdered on January 17, 1961.

He was shot dead with two of his ministers, Joseph Okito and Maurice Mpolo.

Lumumba led the Democratic Republic of Congo to independence on June 30, 1960, after the country was passed on from King Leopold II, who took control of it as his private property in the 1880s, to Belgium in 1908 as a colony.

Lumumba was inspired by the independence movement of Africa after attending the All-African Peoples’ Conference in Ghana in 1958. This spurred him on to organize nationalist rallies in his country resulting in deadly protests that got him arrested and later released to negotiate Congo’s independence.

A strong ally of Belgium, the United States had a stake in Congo’s uranium. The United States is suspected to have planned Lumumba’s assassination as disclosed by a source in the book, Death in the Congo, written by Emmanuel Gerard and published in 2015.

In 2002, former colonial power Belgium admitted responsibility for its part in the killing, however, the US has never explained its role despite long-held suspicions.

US President Dwight D Eisenhower, concerned about communism, was worried about Congo following a similar path to Cuba.

According to a source quoted in Death in the Congo, President Eisenhower gave “an order for the assassination of Lumumba. There was no discussion; the [National Security Council] meeting simply moved on”.

However, a CIA plan to lace Lumumba’s toothpaste with poison was never carried out, Lawrence Devlin, who was a station chief in Congo at the time, told the BBC in 2000.

A survey of declassified US government documents from the era notes that the CIA “initially focused on removing Lumumba, not only through assassination if necessary but also with an array of non-lethal undertakings”.