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Under the Ne em Tre e Cameron Duodu Lumumba – imperial


amorality in its crassest state


Hardly was the ink dry on my articles on Patrice Lumumba (NA, April & May) when I was invited to a film screening in North London in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Lumumba’s death. And what a film it was!


T


he Congo, Lumumba’s country, was never a British colony. Yet people in England had remembered him and organised a film screening to mark the dastardly murder through which he was removed from this earth. I had written,


without fear of contradiction, in my NA articles that Lumumba had been transmogrified into an idea and that as such, he could never be eliminated. If any Doubting Thomases had thumbed their noses at my claim, here was the proof to them that I had not been making an idle boast when I placed Lumumba on such a high pedestal. Colonial oppression of the type practised by Belgium, creates revulsion in many decent people. And cold-blooded political assas- sination, aimed at preventing elected lead- ers from fulfilling the promises they have made to their people, arouses rage in all decent people. The film that was shown to us on 18 April


“democracy” around the world. Lumumba’s case should have been understood by the Ameri-


“Here in this film was the proof that I was not making an idle boast when I placed Lumumba on such a high pedestal.”


2011, was a brilliant one, entitled Political Assassination Colonial Style. It sketched the background to the conspiracy that led, on 17 January 1961, to the murder of Lumumba. To know the basic facts about Lumumba’s murder is one thing, but to see him alive and being taken to the place where he was to be slaughtered was something else. Again, it shows the callousness of the Belgians and their Katangese agents that they did not care one fig whether Lumumba’s final hours were filmed or not. We were shown the place where the foul deed was done, and


heard from the lips of the murderers themselves how they did it. We saw the bullet holes in the tree that served as the execution block: it was a very surreal experience. The film enabled one to fully comprehend the utter cruelty


with which the Belgians ruled over the Congo for 100 years before independence in 1960. And it also exposed the emptiness of the avowals of the United States, when it claims to be a promoter of


78 | June 2011 New African


cans if they cared about “democracy” – the Belgians wanted to reimpose colonialism on Lumumba’s country only days after it had been proclaimed independent. To achieve their objective, the Belgians had, wittingly and unwittingly, provoked a mutiny in the Congolese army, the Force Publique. To quell the mutiny, the Belgians had flown in paratroopers who were bent on preventing the Congolese government from functioning. Naively believing that because the Americans had fought against Great Britain, a European power, for its own independence, achieved in 1776, the USA was “sympathetic” to the struggle of the African people too, to rid themselves of European imperialism, Lumumba appealed to the USA to send troops to expel the Belgians from the Congo.


But, of course, the USA, as leader of NATO, of which Belgium


was a member, could not stab its ally, Belgium, in the back, and rejected Lumumba’s appeal out of hand. It advised him, instead, to turn to the United Nations for assistance. Now, the UN never moves fast in any situation. Yet, in the


meantime, the Belgian paratroopers who had been flown into the Congo were controlling the country and threatening the physical safety of Lumumba and members of his government. Thus it was that Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union and asked for assist- ance, not to fight the Belgians or expel them – as he had asked the USA – but merely to give him planes to ferry troops from those Congolese provinces sympathetic to him, to the capital, Leopoldville (now Kinshasa), where his enemies were strong. The Soviet Union agreed and sent Lumumba a handful of


planes. But Lawrence Devlin, the CIA station chief in Leopoldville, sent alarming reports to Washington, claiming that Lumumba


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