Patrice Lumumba, President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, was assassinated by Moise Tshombe’s mercenaries on this day in 1961. Tshombe did the dirty work, but a conspiracy of Western powers eager to plunder the natural resources of the Congo was ultimately responsible 1/

Lumumba believed that the Congo should be fully independent and its natural resources used for the benefit of the people. He spoke truth to power from the very beginning of his tenure (excerpt from Lumumba’s Independence Day Speech, June 30, 1960): 2/

“This was our fate for 80 years of a colonial regime; our wounds are too fresh and too painful still for us to drive them from our memory. We have known harassing work, exacted in exchange for salaries which did not permit us to eat enough to drive away hunger, 3/

or to clothe ourselves, or to house ourselves decently, or to raise our children as creatures dear to us.

We have known ironies, insults, blows that we endured morning, noon and evening, because we are Negroes. 4/

Who will forget that to a Black one said “tu”, certainly not as to a friend, but because the more honorable “vous” was reserved for whites alone?

We have seen our lands seized in the name of allegedly legal laws, which in fact recognized only that might is right. 5/

We have seen that the law was not the same for a white and for a Black — accommodating for the first, cruel and inhuman for the other. 6/

We have witnessed atrocious sufferings of those condemned for their political opinions or religious beliefs, exiled in their own country, their fate truly worse than death itself. 7/

We have seen that in the towns there were magnificent houses for the whites and crumbling shanties for the Blacks; that a Black was not admitted in the motion-picture houses, in the restaurants, in the stores of the Europeans; 8/

that a Black traveled in the holds, at the feet of the whites in their luxury cabins.

Who will ever forget the massacres where so many of our brothers perished, the cells into which those who refused to submit to a regime of oppression and exploitation were thrown?” 9/

Breathtaking words themselves...now consider the context. Although Patrice Lumumba was the first Prime Minister of the newly free DRC, he was NOT. EVEN. SCHEDULED. TO. SPEAK at Independence Day ceremonies. His extemporaneous oratory was a response to Belgian King Baudoin 10/

In his own speech, the Belgian King offered a version of “white man’s burden” by asserting that the end of colonial rule meant that the “civilizing mission” begun by his predecessor Leopold II was a success 11/

Far from “civilizing,” King Leopold II was in fact a monster who ravaged the Congo. Mark Twain’s 1905 satire, “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” captured his reign of terror: “They have told how for twenty years I have ruled the Congo State not as a trustee of the Powers, an agent, 12/

a subordinate, a foreman, but as a sovereign— sovereign over a fruitful domain four times as large as the German Empire —sovereign absolute, irresponsible, above all law; trampling the Berlin-made Congo charter under foot; 13/

barring out all foreign traders but myself; restricting commerce to myself, through concessionaires who are my creatures and confederates; seizing and holding the State as my personal property, the whole of its vast revenues as my private swag— mine, solely mine—  14/

claiming and holding its millions of people as my private property, my serfs, my slaves; their labor mine, with or without wage; the food they raise not their property but mine; the rubber, the ivory and all the other riches of the land mine— mine solely—  15/

and gathered for me by the men, the women and the little children under compulsion of lash and bullet, fire, starvation, mutilation and the halter.” 16/

Almost 60 years after Lumumba’s assassination, global powers (now including China) continue to plunder the Congo’s natural resources & foment unrest among warring factions. Things could have been so different. #RIPPatriceLumumba https://ghionjournal.com/congo-and-cobalt/