Patrice Lumumba

Patrice Lumumba led the Congolese National Movement to victory in the elections that preceded the Belgian Congo's independence and became the new country's first prime minister in June 1960. Within weeks his government was overwhelmed by an army mutiny, Belgian intervention and the secession of Katanga, and by September he had been dismissed and placed under guard. In January 1961 he was killed in Katanga, an act in which Belgian officials were later found to share responsibility. He is widely remembered as a martyr of African liberation.

Lumumba was born on 2 July 1925 at Onalua, in the Kasai region of the Belgian Congo, into the Tetela people; his birth name was Isaïe Tasumbu Tawosa. Educated at Protestant and Catholic mission schools and a post office training school, he read widely in French literature. He worked as a postal clerk in Stanleyville and as a travelling beer salesman in Léopoldville. In 1957 he was convicted of embezzling post office funds and served a prison term.

After his release Lumumba helped found the Congolese National Movement (MNC) in 1958 and soon led it. Unlike most Congolese parties, it did not rest on a single ethnic group, and it called for independence, a unitary state and neutrality abroad. At the All-African Peoples' Conference in Accra in December 1958 he met Kwame Nkrumah, who became a model and ally. Arrested after a riot in Stanleyville in October 1959 in which some 30 people died, he was released in January 1960 to join the Brussels conference that set independence for 30 June.

The MNC won the largest share of seats in the May 1960 elections, and after much manoeuvring Lumumba formed a broad coalition government, with his rival Joseph Kasa-Vubu as president. At the independence ceremony he answered King Baudouin's praise of colonial rule with an unscheduled speech recalling the humiliations Congolese had suffered, which shocked many Europeans. Days later the army mutinied against its Belgian officers. Lumumba Africanised the command, making Joseph Mobutu chief of staff, but Belgium sent troops on 10 July and on 11 July Moïse Tshombe declared Katanga independent with Belgian and mining-company backing. Lumumba appealed to the United Nations, whose peacekeepers arrived but would not suppress the secession, and he turned increasingly to the Soviet Union for help.

In August Congolese troops sent against the secessionist state of South Kasai committed massacres of Luba civilians. On 5 September Kasa-Vubu dismissed Lumumba, who in turn declared the president deposed; parliament backed Lumumba. On 14 September Mobutu seized power in a coup, and UN peacekeepers and Mobutu's soldiers ringed Lumumba's residence. At the end of November he slipped away to join his supporters in Stanleyville, but on 1 December he was captured at the Sankuru River after turning back for his wife and child.

Held at the army camp at Thysville, Lumumba was flown on 17 January 1961 to Élisabethville in Katanga with two associates, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito. According to a later Belgian parliamentary inquiry, they were beaten and that night shot by firing squads under Belgian officers, on the orders of Katangan leaders and with Tshombe present. Days later a Belgian police officer and others dug up and destroyed the remains with acid. Katanga claimed in February that villagers had killed him after an escape, a story that sparked protests across the world.

A commission of historians appointed by the Belgian parliament concluded in 2001 that the Belgian government had sought his arrest and supported his transfer to Katanga without ruling out his execution, and in 2002 Belgium acknowledged moral responsibility. In September 1960 President Eisenhower had authorised a CIA plan to poison him, though it was never carried out, and British officials also discussed removing him. In 2022 Belgium returned a tooth, his only known remains, to his family, and the prime minister apologised.

Our 1945 map shows the Belgian colony in which he grew up, and the 1960 map shows the newly independent Congo in the year of his premiership and the Congo Crisis.