Africa: Patrice Lumumba

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Sunday September 21, 2014 · 1:39 PM PDT

2014/09/21 · 13:39

Patrice Lumumba was a leader of the independence struggle in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as the country’s first democratically elected prime minister. After a meteoric rise in the colonial civil service and the African political elite, he became a major figure in the decolonization movement of the 1950s. Lumumba’s short tenure as prime minister (19601961) was marked by an uncompromising defense of Congolese national interests against pressure from international mining companies and the Western governments that orchestrated his eventual demise.
.... Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja’s short and concise book provides a contemporary analysis of Lumumba’s life and work, examining both his strengths and his weaknesses as a political leader. It also surveys the national, continental, and international contexts of Lumumba’s political ascent and his swift elimination by the interests threatened by his ideas and practical reforms.

Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja's book, Patrice Lumumba, is coming out on November 15 of this year under the auspices of Ohio University Press.

Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was assassinated 50 years ago today, on 17 January, 1961. This heinous crime was a culmination of two inter-related assassination plots by American and Belgian governments, which used Congolese accomplices and a Belgian execution squad to carry out the deed.

Coups d'état, assassinations: Mohammad Mosaddegh, democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, taken out by a coup in 1953 (Eisenhower and the Dulles thugs); Patrice Lumumba, democratically elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, assassinated 17 January 1961 (Eisenhower and the Dulles thugs); Salvador Allende, democratically elected president of Chile through open elections, 1973 coup d'état, 11 September 1973 death in uncertain and controversial circumstances -- can you say "assassination", boys and girls? (Nixon and Henry Kissinger).

Ah, yes, Henry Kissinger. The pyramid of Cambodian skulls belonging to Pol Pot (can you say the word "genocide", boys and girls?).

Getting psychopathically graphic about the Dulles legacy in Congo: my youngest daughter was actually in the Congo in the not too distant past and brought back a story of Congolese women who had been brutally raped in the aftermath of the ensuing and continuing chaos in the Congo -- and the finally coup de cruelty delivered by the psychopaths was to hack off the breasts of the raped women so that they could not even suckle the infants of rape they were forced to give birth to.

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Africa: Patrice Lumumba

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