The Congo: Lumumba Jumbo

I am the Congo, the Congo has made me. I am making the Congo.

—Patrice Lumumba

Four years after his death, a lot of people talk as if Patrice Emergy Lumumba were still the Congo. In and out of the U.N., African leftists and their Communist backers seem determined to turn Lumumba into a martyr-saint. Bulgaria and Albania joined last week to praise the “great Congolese patriot” who symbolized the “heart of Africa” but was “brutally assassinated.” The Ethiopian and Guinean delegations compared him to Hammarskjöld, while the Mali representative went one better and compared him to Hammarskjöld and John Kennedy.

Throughout the Communist bloc and in much of Africa, Lumumba’s name, with its rhythm of jungle drums, is invoked by innumerable agitators. It is also borne by hundreds of streets, dozens of schools. Moscow has its Patrice Lumumba Friendship University for foreign students, Belgrade its Patrice Lumumba student home. In Castro Cuba, romantically inclined young workers find togetherness in Patrice Lumumba social centers. Last week in Kenya, the brand new $120,000 Lumumba Institute, built with Russian and Chinese money, opened its doors to “rehabilitate the minds of Kenyans from a colonial mentality and teach them how to sacrifice themselves for the good of the country and of Africans as a whole.”

No Longer Monkeys. Amid all this mumbo jumbo, the real Lumumba has been almost forgotten. He was, of course, a violent, often eloquent anticolonialist, and an infectiously fanatic orator. At the 1960 independence ceremony, he seized the microphone to tell Belgium’s King Baudouin that “from today, we are no longer your monkeys.” He was also the first Congolese politician to think beyond tribal boundaries, the founder (in 1959) of the Congo’s first semi-national political movement, its first real pan-African nationalist—and its first Prime Minister. But at the time of his death, most of his countrymen had either never heard of him or hated him.

He was, among other things, a convicted embezzler (of some $2,500 in postal funds), a monumental drunkard, an almost compulsive liar, and an addicted hemp smoker. More important, he was a disaster as Prime Minister. Although his party barely controlled less than one-fourth of the seats in Parliament, he refused to make the political compromises necessary to form a working coalition government, quickly alienated almost every important power base in the Congo. Headstrong, unstable and perpetually frenzied, Lumumba never even tried to govern. His army rebelled less than a week after he took office; his Belgian civil servants fled in terror; vital provinces tried to secede; and the land, neither administered nor policed, reverted to darkness. Howling all the while about white imperialism, Patrice Lumumba himself did not hesitate to sell the exploitation rights to the Congo’s vast resources to a fast-talking American promoter.

Secret Letter. Scarcely two months after he took office, his good Ghana friend Kwame Nkrumah sent him a worried letter. “Patrice,” wrote the “Redeemer,” “if you fail, you have only yourself to blame and it will be due to your unwillingness to face the facts of life.” The letter arrived too late: President Joseph Kasavubu had fired Lumumba. Lumumba’s response was typical. He tried to fire Kasavubu. But the President was supported by the army, and it was Lumumba who stayed out.

For two months Lumumba lived under the protection of a U.N. guard-and used the telephone kept open for him by the U.N. to plot his return to power. One night he ducked past his guards and drove off, alone, toward his home town of Stanleyville, where he hoped to lead a revolution against Kasavubu. He was arrested before he got there. His captors, in Congo fashion, saw to it that he was beaten up, jailed, and, at Kasavubu’s orders, eventually turned over to the personal custody of his archenemy Moise Tshombe—who either arranged to have him killed or let him die from wounds inflicted by Kasavubu’s men.

Had he been wiser, or smarter, Patrice Lumumba would have been 39 this year. And the Congo might well have become a nation with no more than the normal ration of African problems instead of a blood-spattered land of savagery, corruption and anarchy—which is largely what Lumumba helped make it.