How Lumumba’s murder prompted unspeakable trauma

Congo's first prime minister Patrice Emery Lumumba

Congo's first prime minister Patrice Emery Lumumba in this photo taken in New York on August 2, 1960. He was assassinated in January 1961. PHOTO | FILE

What you need to know:

  • “Mr Lumumba – Congo’s first prime minister in 1960 – was murdered a year later in a military coup. Western powers are said to have done little to intervene after he asked the USSR to help put down rebels.”

Dear reader, do you share any past trauma? The dictionary describes two kinds – physical injury, or a distressing experience.

Which brings us to a photograph of four children. Now in their 60s. Shown on Page 10 of London’s Metro (free daily newspaper) on Tuesday. While still in their shorts, the four children lost a father. They might not even remember him fully when he was killed by the usual powers that slaughter unique black leaders. Patrice Lumumba was executed on January 17, 1961. Chopped into pieces and dipped like useless meat in sulphuric acid, his corpse vanished. The only “memento” his sinister killers kept were two teeth and a few body parts whose whereabouts the killer cop never revealed.

Gerard Soete, a Belgian police officer who led the assassination, later bragged that the Congolese Prime Minister had beautiful teeth. Yes, Patrice Lumumba, then aged 35, had a wonderful smile, inner charisma, energetic and was brave enough to have made a powerful speech during Congolese independence celebrations on June, 30, 1960, almost 60 years ago.

Lumumba: “Although this independence of the Congo is being proclaimed today by agreement with Belgium, an amicable country, with which we are on equal terms, no Congolese will ever forget that independence was won in struggle, a persevering and inspired struggle carried on from day to day, a struggle in which we were undaunted by privation or suffering ... It was filled with tears, fire and blood.”

The historical speech was filled with phrases like “we have not forgotten...” and “untold suffering.” Read and heard in 2022 such words are normal but in 1960, Africa was still viewed like an unexplored jungle of bananas, monkeys, half-dressed “natives” and, in the eyes of the colonial countries, a haven of fun, robbery, jokes, bullying and killing fields.

According to the Belgian academic and author Ludo De Witte, whose book The Assassination of Lumumba (Verso, 1999), no African leader had dared speaking that way in front of Europeans. They were “masters” of the universe.

These were the Cold War times. The USSR, Cuba, China and Eastern Europe on one side and America and allies on the other. To dare chide the King of Belgium and his colonial henchmen was, how do we put it? Listen to what the London Metro reported on Tuesday.

“Mr Lumumba – Congo’s first prime minister in 1960 – was murdered a year later in a military coup. Western powers are said to have done little to intervene after he asked the USSR to help put down rebels.”

The same six-paragraph news item mentions bloodshed descending after the humiliation , torture and murder of Lumumba. And this “under dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.”

If you mention Mobutu to any Congolese exiled or seeking refuge overseas, they flinch, grunt and curse. It is traumatic.

Trauma that we forget due to our love for ndombolo and exuberant Congolese music.

Joseph Mobutu was born in 1930 and died in 1997 of prostate cancer. He was a wealthy man worth over $5 billion, while Congolese people continue to suffer today. His story is a case study of how leaders (or individuals) can either suffocate the lives of many, or liberate and make them happy. Luckily, Tanzania is a good example of wise leadership.

A Congolese musician once told us how Mobutu and Lumumba used to share a flat while studying and living in Europe. This has happened a lot in history. Political heavyweights once mates or friends falling out later because of differing motives.

There is a famous photograph of those two, few moments before the 1961 assassination. A chilling photograph credited to Noir Histoire. A serious Patrice Lumumba making a speech, while beside him, slightly behind, Mobutu Sese Seko looks on with a dark, eerie expression on his face. An expression of a man who knows what we DO NOT KNOW. And it is said “Mobutu was complicit” to the brutal end, the Congolese musician, continued telling us. Several TV documentaries have pointed fingers at his selling Africa to the devil.

So then after those 62 years, the Belgian police officer Gerard Sote, now also dead, kept the two teeth. Ironically, his daughter, Godelive Soete, is said to have shared images of one of the teeth in the media after pressure from Lumumba’s children and family.

A true tale of shared trauma of children.

How does this daughter of the killer of one of Africa’s greatest heroes feel? How about the children of Lumumba, who never grew up with a dad that sacrificed himself so young? How about the children of his two assassinated colleagues, ministers Joseph Okito and Maurice Mpolo?

There was further humiliation of Lumumba’s widow, Pauline Opango, days after the execution, photographed walking half-naked in Kinshasa. Some Congolese said she was forced. Some said she was protesting. She died aged, 78, in 2014.

Trauma , trauma , trauma.