The Congo: Death of Lumumba–& After

At the height of her husband’s power, 28-year-old Pauline Lumumba wore diamonds and high heels and Paris frocks. Last week she bared her breasts in the Congo’s traditional sign of mourning, and led a wailing procession of other bare-breasted women through the streets of Léopoldville. Coldly and without regrets, her husband’s archfoes in far-off Katanga province had just proclaimed that Patrice Lumumba was dead and buried deep.

The Katangese, who defied world opinion for weeks in hanging onto Lumumba, finished the affair with a flourish. “I will speak frankly,” said Katanga Interior Minister Godefroid Munongo. “If people accuse us of killing Lumumba, I will reply: ‘Prove it.’ ”

Last Look. The last time Patrice Lumumba was seen alive by anyone but his captors was Jan. 17. It was the low point in the career of a man who had dreamed of bossing a united Congo in the grand style of the man whom he admired, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah. He had failed, but as a Western diplomat put it, “being the best demagogue around, he kept anybody else from running it either.” Taken from a military prison in Thysville, where in typical fashion he had almost fast-talked his guards into mutiny, Lumumba was flown to Elisabethville, hauled out and savagely beaten by Katangese soldiers, then driven off to jail, his hands bound behind his back with rope. Most Congo experts are now convinced that the Katangese, aware that Lumumba was gaining followers even while in prison, shot him the very next morning.

The elaborate tale told by Minister Munongo last week did little to change anybody’s mind. Lumumba, as Munongo told it, had escaped by stolen car from a farmhouse prison near the Portuguese Angola border, along with his Minister of Youth, Maurice Mpolo, and Senate Vice President Joseph Okito. The car ran out of gas. was found overturned in a ditch 45 miles away. Three days later, fleeing on foot, all three were “massacred by the inhabitants of a small village.” The villagers “may have acted somewhat precipitously, though excusably,” conceded Munongo, but he would pay them the $8,000 bounty that he had posted for Lumumba’s head. He would not name the village because of the possibility of “eventual reprisals” nor say where the three bodies were buried for fear of later “pilgrimages to the scene.”

The Katangese solemnly produced steel spikes that Lumumba supposedly used to tunnel through a wall in the farmhouse and sticks of firewood with which the prisoners slugged the guards. But a photographer allowed to take pictures of the farmhouse reported “no signs of recent habitation,” except for a bar of soap and pictures of the Matterhorn on the wall. Dr. G. E. Pieters, a Belgian who signed the death certificates, had no doubts about the identity of the principal victim (“You’d recognize that goatee and those bulging eyes anywhere”). Asked how the men had died, he replied: “What happened between my entry into the bush and my return is a medical secret. The code of the doctor forbids me to speak.” But he admitted to a reporter, “The bodies were not fresh.”

Closed Case. To the Katangese, that closed the case. “I forbid the United Nations to take positions in this matter,”said Munongo, adding by way of explanation that the U.N. had never concerned itself about Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, Caryl Chessman, Draja Mikhailovich or King Feisal. As for any J.K. investigation, Katanga President Moise Tshombe snapped: “I couldn’t give a damn.”

While the world outside burst into uproar, the Congo itself received the news with sluggish calm, as if Lumumba’s death was to be expected. There was some scattered violence—but not the widely predicted blood bath. In Léopoldville, Lumumba fans rioted for a night, and somebody cut a man in half. In Bukavu, drunken Congolese soldiers seized a Roman Catholic priest, cut off his ears and then beheaded him.

The Congo’s squabbling politicians seemed more concerned about the line of succession. Almost to a man they found at least qualified praise for the man they had fought. They called days of mourning and turned out for Requiem Masses.

Among the mourners: President Joseph Kasavubu’s government, which observed a minute of silent tribute for “a sincere patriot who got involved with bad foreigners”—though it was the Kasavubu government that turned Lumumba over to Katanga after he got too hot to handle in the Thysville prison.

Success Unpredictable. Chief aspirant to Lumumba’s mantle is Antoine Gizenga, 39, a onetime schoolteacher and an all-out proCommunist. Gizenga founded a small anticolonialist party in a Léopoldville saloon two years ago, later flitted off to Prague’s Institute for African Studies. His party won 13 Parliament seats in last year’s election. He tossed them to Lumumba, and Lumumba made him Vice Premier. Since shortly after his boss’s arrest last December, Gizenga has run the show from the Eastern province river capital of Stanleyville (and to one recent visitor, he remarked that he saw “no reason for a change” even if Lumumba were released). He keeps Lumumba’s younger brother Louis close by for prestige purposes, but his closest ties are to the Communists.

In disorderly Stanleyville, a city of about 130,000, the Congolese soldiers are so unpredictable in their loyalty that Gizenga has three times asked for U.N. protection from his own army. Jungle mold grows thick on factory walls, and unemployment is almost total. The troops and officials have drunk up the stocks of imported cognac at the best hotels and are now reduced to palm beer. Gasoline and munitions are in short supply.

Conditions are even worse in nearby Kivu province, where Lumumba’s old Communist-lining Information Minister Anicet Kashamura took over as boss two months ago. On hearing of Lumumba’s death, Gizenga sent soldiers to Kivu, where they arrested and beat up Kashamura. But pro-Kashamura troops then beat up the captors and released their man, leaving the situation confused and Lumumba’s heirs bitterly split.

Gizenga has sent out an urgent appeal for help. Last week nine Communist-bloc countries and seven left-leaning neutrals lined up to extend him diplomatic recognition as the “legitimate” government of the Congo. But even if Gizenga gets support from abroad, he is a poor stand-in for Lumumba as a national leader. He has little political presence, is a faltering orator who does not even speak the Eastern province’s Swahili.

New Support. In Léopoldville, stolid President Joseph Kasavubu and his new Premier Joseph Ileo picked up new support. Last week the U.N.’s Conciliation Commission, composed of eleven Afro-Asian countries that sent troops to the Congo, advised that Ileo might be able to bring peace with a broad-based government, and they recommended convening a “summit” meeting to bring the Congo’s assorted factional leaders to agreement.

With Lumumba gone, the strongest man around is the man responsible for his death: Katanga’s cold-blooded President Moise Tshombe. But Tshombe runs only one province, and is heartily disliked outside it. Last week his well-equipped army, led by 400 Belgian officers, struck into northern Katanga, easily pushed back pro-Lumumba Baluba tribesmen as far as the Lualaba River. Tshombe, wearing a Homburg, helicoptered to the front to congratulate his men. At Elisabethville airport, a Boeing Stratocruiser arrived, carrying in its hold three twin-jet Fouga Magisters, advertised as trainers but equipped for firing rockets.*

Tshombe is backed in his province by a humming economy still run by the Belgians. Despite all of the Congo’s troubles, the copper mines of Katanga’s Belgian-owned Union Minière set production records last year, paid $50 million in taxes into Katanga’s treasury. With his Belgian adviser, Colonel Guy Weber, always at his shoulder, Tshombe has launched an offensive to clear his province of Gizenga’s invading soldiers. In partnership with the Léopoldville military boss, Major General Joseph Mobutu, Tshombe would like to go after Gizenga himself—if the U.N. were not in the way. “If others will leave us alone,” he growled, “we will solve our problems. Both East and West must keep their noses out of our affairs.”

As for the limber, goateed adventurer who in a few dizzy years had skyrocketed from postal clerk to world figure, Tshombe had only a terse epitaph: “The fuss over this evil man will soon die down. The people have no memories here. C’est fini.”

* The planes probably came from the Belgians, who pay no more attention than does the U.A.R. to the U.N. ban on “unilateral” aid. But the delivery was clouded with mystery. Katangese officials said that they had meant to cancel the order and that delivery of the planes at this time was “a terrible mistake.” The Stratocruiser was unmarked except for its serial number, which traced back to a New York charter outfit called Seven Seas Airlines, Inc. The company denied that it owned the Boeing, said it was engaged only in a food airlift to the Congo.