I
CAN STILL REMEMBER IT LIKE YES- TERDAY – the day, 50 solid years ago, when Ghana’s president, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, made a special broadcast to announce solemnly to the nation
that he had “received information” that Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of Congo, had been assassinated. Lumumba had been arrested, first
by Mobutu’s troops, and then sent to Katanga province, where his worst en- emy, Moise Tshombe, and his secessionist forces reigned supreme, despite the pres- ence of United Nations troops in the area. President Nkrumah did not disclose his sources, of course, but anyone who knew that he had excellent contacts with the USSR, whose intelligence services at the time were second to none, would have been a fool to doubt that his information was absolutely reliable. Nkrumah went as far as to say that a
“Belgian policeman” had been in charge of the deed. Tis was an incredible bit of prescience: it was not until the 2001 pub- lication in Belgium of Te Assassination of Patrice Lumumba by Ludo De Witte, that the exact circumstances of the as- sassination became widely known. And they tallied exactly with the information Nkrumah gave his countrymen nearly half a century earlier. Ghanaians were stunned. For
Nkrumah had involved the whole na- tion in trying to save Lumumba and his country from the machinations of the Belgians. As will be seen later, Ghana- ian troops were sent to Congo – the first time soldiers from an independent Afri- can country had gone to the service of another independent African country. But more than that, all sorts of skilled Ghanaians also went to Congo – doctors, artisans, even journalists. (Edward Armah, a veteran of the Ghana Broadcasting Cor- poration, was attached to the Ghanaian contingent to enable the soldiers to send messages to their families back home, and his colleagues in Accra contacted some of the families to send messages back to the soldiers. Special, powerful transmissions – “interactive transmissions” – were carried out to enable this to occur.) How did Lumumba, an obscure politi-
cian, who made his public outing on the international scene only when he attended the All-African People’s Conference in Ac- cra in December 1958, become an African
icon, whose place in history is at the very top of the tree on which African heroes perch, where he will stay for ever? Indeed, Lumumba is next only to
Nelson Mandela in terms of being the all- time unblemished figure who most readily comes to mind when Africa is discussed in relation to struggle. Even Mandela had lesser enemies to contend with: Lumumba was chased around by both the CIA and its Belgian subsidiary, with whom it co- operated through NATO! Not only that – Mandela suffered tre-
mendously. But he won. Lumumba, on the other hand, lost – he lost power, he lost his country, and in the end, he lost his
20th century, Mandela and Lumumba represent different ends of the spectrum of activity. We can say too that the two men represent the beacon of light that shines sharply to bring absolute clar- ity into the evaluation of a history of- ten mired in obfuscation and mendacity. To those who say, “How wonderful it was to see in Mandela, the issue of oppression so peacefully resolved”, we need only point to that picture of Patrice Lumumba, a torturer’s hand in his hair, as he was bru- talised in a truck by black Kantangese sol- diers at Elizabethville (now Lubumbashi). In that picture of Lumumba, serious stu- dents can spy unseen hands, steered by
“Lumumba was not
assassinated only as a person but as an idea – the idea of a Congo that was independent, non- aligned, and committed to African unity.”
life. All were forcibly taken from him by a combination of forces that were probably the most powerful ever deployed against a single individual in history. In his book, Ludo De Witte calls Lu-
mumba’s murder “the most important political assassination in the 20th century.” Te amazing thing is that Lumumba had done absolutely nothing against those who wanted his blood! Tey just saw him as a threat to their interests; interests narrowly defined to mean, “His country has got resources. We want them. He might not give them to us. So let’s get him.” I submit, though, that he should not be seen only as a victim of forces too powerful for him to contend with. On the contrary, he should be seen as someone who fully recognised the power of the forces ranged against him and fought valiantly with every ounce of breath in his body and with great intelli- gence to try and save his country. If Lumumba’s fate contrasts with that
of Mandela, who was imprisoned for tan- gible acts against South Africa’s apart- heid regime, we see that, in the history of the African people’s struggle in the
Moise Tshombe, Lumumba’s worst enemy, was president of Katanga province where Lumumba was taken prior to his assassination
a “heart of darkness”, bribing, mixing poisons, assembling rifles with telescop- ic sights, and finally propping an elect- ed prime minister against a tree in the bush and riddling his body with bullets. And then – could even Joseph Conrad, in his worst nightmarish ramblings, have imagined this? First, burying Lumum- ba’s body, then exhuming it a day later because the burial ground was too close
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