By Edie Christian
January 17th, 2025 marked the 64th anniversary of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo; his death was a coalescence of American, Belgian, and domestic hostility towards Lumumba’s pan-African ideology. As a proxy conflict between the US and USSR during the Cold War, the assassination of Lumumba was as much an indicator of the growth of economic and neocolonialism as it was reminiscent of the initial European colonisation of Africa.
The rapid economic growth of European powers and discovery of African natural resources following the Second Industrial Revolution drove them to colonial expansion. This period of hurried colonisation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been dubbed the ‘Scramble for Africa’; the 1884 Berlin Conference, attended by thirteen European powers and the United States, regulated the terms by which Africa could be colonised. By 1914, Liberia and Ethiopia were the only remaining independent African states, and new divisions were decided with no consideration given to existing geographic or tribal boundaries. King Leopold II of Belgium occupied the Congo due to its rich mineral deposits, particularly within the Katanga province; he renamed it the Congo Free State in 1885. The subsequent exploitation and mistreatment of the indigenous Congolese resulted in the Belgian state taking official control and creating the Belgian Congo in 1908. However, this exponential growth was unsustainable; the onset of two world wars jeopardised the European empires, leading most African colonies to gain independence as a result of international and domestic pressure. Although they were forced to rapidly decolonise due to post-war debt, European powers often played one last card; by withdrawing so quickly from their economies, newly independent states were unable to support themselves and became reliant in an unofficial capacity. For instance, Belgium continued to control roughly seventy per cent of the Congolese economy after their independence in 1960, primarily through the investment bank Société Générale de Belgique.
The Congolese National Movement (MNC) party was founded in 1958; Patrice Lumumba’s popular following and charisma quickly solidified him as the organisation’s leader. Growing international pressure, along with the widespread support for the party’s demand for independence, resulted in the declaration of Congolese independence at the Round Table Conference in Brussels on 27th January 1960. Lumumba had been imprisoned for allegedly inciting a riot in which thirty people died, but he was released due to pressure from the delegates in order to attend the conference. On 30th June 1960, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was declared independent, with Lumumba as its prime minister; he gave an unscheduled speech unequivocally condemning colonialism and its legacy. International civil rights leaders praised his address, but panic began to spread in western countries at the rise of a magnetic pan-African leader. These fears were consolidated by the exponential growth of United Nations (UN) membership as a result of the decolonisation of African states in the 1960s. The threat of an African bloc of around fifty votes, combined with the popularity of pan-African ideology, worried western leaders greatly about the influence of African unity in a newly liberated continent.
All of this was taking place within the wider context of the Cold War between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR). Lumumba’s political opponents consistently presented him as a communist in an attempt to vilify him – he discounted this as a “propagandist trick…they look upon me as a Communist because I refused to be bribed by the imperialists”. These tensions were exacerbated by the secession of Katanga (the most mineral-rich province of the DRC) in July 1960, which was partly motivated by disagreements over wealth and resource distribution. Although Belgian troops were ostensibly there to protect Belgian nationals, they ended up supporting the secessionist regime in return for access to Katanga’s resources. Lumumba eventually turned to the USSR for assistance following an inadequate response from the UN. This instilled such anxiety within the US government that they launched a covert political programme in August 1960, lasting almost seven years; it had the principal aim of removing Lumumba and instating a new, pro-western leader. The US had a murky history with Katangan resources, with the Shinkolobwe mine being the source for nearly all of the uranium used to construct the atomic bombs during WWII; fears surrounding the ownership of this atomic power led the US to drain and stockpile the mine’s resources. Such measures as these can be viewed as forerunners to neocolonialism – the indirect economic, political, and cultural control of ostensibly independent states that emerged alongside decolonisation in the 1960s, Despite living in one of the most resource-rich countries in the world, seventy two per cent of the population was living in extreme poverty (less than $1.90 a day) in 2018; the covert political and economic exploitation of post-colonial states such as the DRC keeps the Congolese people in poverty whilst funnelling money into the west.
The influence of western power – worsened by anxieties surrounding communism – culminated in the execution of Lumumba on January 17th, 1961, alongside two of his associates. They had been captured by the Katangan forces of Congolese Colonel Joseph Mobutu a month previously and were executed under Belgian supervision. Mobutu had deposed Lumumba’s elected government in a CIA-backed coup d’état. The exact details surrounding the assassination were covered up for a long time, with news of Lumumba’s death mostly spreading through rumour; both Belgium and the US, under the command of President Eisenhower, had plots ready to assassinate Lumumba, and speculation is still rife. Mobutu continued to lead the armed forces of the Congo until he took power directly in a second coup in 1965, renaming the DRC to Zaire in 1971.
Lumumba is often thought of as a martyr for the pan-African cause and a symbol of Congolese national unity. His assassination is often viewed in Congolese collective memory as a watershed moment in which the west has been able to determine the future of the Congo and other African nations. It has undoubtedly set a dangerous precedent for the spread of neocolonialism in an ostensibly postcolonial world. The United States in particular have been accused of neocolonial intervention in nations such as Cuba, Egypt, and Iraq under the guise of American exceptionalism; this attempt to establish western hegemony has continued into the twenty-first century. The intrinsically covert nature of these campaigns means that the true extent of neocolonialism – and thereby the legacy of Lumumba’s assassination – will likely never be understood.
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