On the centenary of his birth, Casa África has published a book that reveals the short and intense life of this fighter for the freedom of the Congo who was assassinated by those who wanted to continue controlling the minerals of his country.
I was 16 years old and studying the Pre-University Course (PREU) at the Instituto de Bachillerato de La Laguna, in Tenerife, when I was shocked to hear the news of Patricio Lumumba's assassination. Months earlier, international news had kept us all on the lookout for the Cuban revolution, through an exceptional series of interviews and articles that the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci broadcast from Sierra Maestra, introducing us to the figures of Camilo Cienfuegos, Fidel Castro and Ché Guevara.
Lumumba also caught my attention. In the Congo, little more than a year after independence was proclaimed for the country that was the 'private orchard' of King Leopold II of Belgium (in fact, in practice, the Berlin Conference gave the whole vast area to the King, not the country), those of us who liked to read the newspaper knew about Lumumba, the young prime minister who made a historic speech to King Baudouin in which he demanded something as simple as that the Congolese should own and be in charge of the destiny of their own natural resources.
At the time, we knew little about the Congo, but the violent death of Lumumba, mercilessly executed with Belgian complicity, made me aware of how geopolitical interests could shape the fate of a distant country.
This year, on the 100th anniversary of the birth of the ill-fated Congolese politician, at Casa África we thought it was necessary to add to the scarce (practically non-existent) biography on Lumumba in Spanish with a book on his figure. Two young university professors from the very Africanist University of Valladolid, Pablo Arconada and Jara Cuadrado, took on the challenge of documenting and showing us in an academic but as didactic work as possible who Patrice Lumumba was, how he lived and how he died.
Pablo and Jara were at Casa África this week presenting the book. Reading it has personally revived that memory of my youth, and I hope that the initiative to publish the book is a contribution to keep alive the historical memory of who he was, how he lived and what Patrice Lumumba fought for.
The young Pan-Africanist lived only 31 years, but his legacy is immense. Jara and Pablo's work avoids mythification and allows us to get to know the character in all his lights and also his shadows. Born in a rural and humble environment, he rose to become part of the so-called évolués (the evolved), a privileged group of educated Congolese who were acquiring certain privileges and qualified jobs. Lumumba became president of the association of the 'evolved' Congolese, but for various reasons his thinking gradually shifted towards Congolese nationalism and Pan-Africanism, committed to the real independence of the Congo and total disengagement from the colonial power. His vision of a united, free and resource-owning country raised eyebrows and clashed head-on with the interests of Belgium (which hoped to impose a gradual and light independence that would allow it to maintain economic control of the country) and with those of other Western powers, including the United States.
He was the first minister of the independent Congo, but his firmness and reproachful speech against the cruelty of Belgian colonialism cost him dearly: he was dismissed, arrested, kidnapped and assassinated on 17 January 1961, in an operation involving Belgian and American secret services.
The book, which I recommend (Ediciones La Catarata, Casa África collection), is a fundamental contribution to understanding not only the character, but also the complex history of the Congo and the mechanisms of both colonialism and later neo-colonialism.
For it is obvious that the assassination was the result of his efforts to secure Congo's economic sovereignty, in a context that made the country the first theatre of the Cold War on African soil.
His fiery talk of the need for a united Congo and various nods to the Soviet Union caused Belgium and the US to see their control over mineral resources threatened, especially in the rich Katanga area (which Belgium had used to declare its own independence from the Congo, leading to a civil war that Lumumba had to crack down hard on as prime minister).
And this is where the short-circuit occurs, i.e. the feeling that 60 years later, little or nothing has changed in what is now called the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). I was reading a recent Deutsche Welle report this week about how so-called critical minerals (coltan, cobalt or tungsten, for example) continue to fuel armed conflicts in Africa and especially in the DRC.
The DRC is currently Africa's leading producer of coltan, a critical mineral from which tantalum is derived. Together with tin (cassiterite) and tungsten (wolframite), they form the so-called "3Ts", metals in high demand for the manufacture of consumer electronics such as laptops and smartphones.
Disputes over the right to exploit the DRC's coltan wealth have contributed to three decades of instability in the east of the country, as the plunder of these resources has become increasingly lucrative for armed groups and their international backers.
A key example of the current impact is the insurgency by the paramilitary group M23, which has formed a coalition called the Congo River Alliance (CRA). This group is believed to be supported by Rwanda. The fight for control of mines and stopping smuggling has intensified the conflict for the DRC government. In April 2024, the AFC took control of the Rubaya mine site, which produces between 20% and 30% of the coltan used worldwide, demonstrating the direct threat to the Congolese economy and global supply.
This conflict and the associated smuggling represent what the UN has described as "the largest contamination of mineral supply chains in the Great Lakes region to date". The conflicts between Rwanda and the DRC are notably linked to coltan mining.
And just so you can see that things have not changed that much, I remind you that the Trump administration continues to sell the announcement of a peace agreement between the Congolese government and the aforementioned M23 as a success for the American president (without any cessation of violence to date)... in exchange for guaranteeing the United States access to these minerals.
Geopolitics plays a strong role in the region today, just as it did after Congo's independence, to the point of executing and trying to make Lumumba fall into oblivion. They did not succeed in that second part, and today Lumumba is, for Africans, a myth of pan-Africanist vindication and of the struggle against the other colonisation that still persists, the economic one.
Read the book and you will learn a lot, from the fact that the uranium used for the US atomic bomb (the Manhattan Project) came from the Congo to the fact that the cruel and ruthless dictator who ruled the Congo after a coup d'état, the terrible Mobutu Sese Seko, wanted to appropriate the figure of Lumumba years later to try to ingratiate himself with his people and legitimise his own regime, supported in the shadows by the United States. Lumumba became a symbol of the anti-colonial struggle and a source of inspiration for liberation and social justice movements. His memory lives on, reminding us that, as he wrote in his powerful last farewell letter to his wife, history will eventually tell the truth:
"The day will come when history will speak. But it will not be the history that is taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations. It will be the history that is taught in the countries that freed themselves from colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history, and in the North as in the South it will be a history of glory and dignity".
Patrice Lumumba
