11RXNdQ

The Political Thought of Patrice Lumumba* 109
it has, provided that it is repeated a thousand times, first by the chiefs, then the activists,
and then, on the ground, by the rank and file. Lumumba was alone, absolutely alone.
Each time the plane took off, silence would be restored in the small town he had just left,
people returned to their immediate concerns, their prejudices, their tribal or socioprofessional
groups; nothing remained, not even a seed in a heart. However, the tyrant
circled in the air; when he landed, the poor white settlers insulted him; he had to accept
the humiliating – and one suspects largely ineffectual – protection of the Belgian military,
of the colonial troops whose action he had denounced in Parliament and whose expulsion
from Africa by the UN he had demanded. He even tried to land in Katanga, but the
Belgian officers who controlled the airfield informed him that they would arrest him as
soon as he landed. Lumumba wanted to carry on regardless, but the Belgians – it was
night-time – extinguished all the lights and blocked air-traffic control. He was dissuaded
from what was little short of suicide. Finally, he gave up, the aeroplane climbed and
circled. The free Congo was circling, a prisoner of the skies, being shifted from place to
place like a game of pass the parcel. For at that moment, the Congo, centralized, united
by independence, identified with Lumumba alone. Les jeux sont faits: the appeal to the
United Nations; the dispatch of the Blue Berets; Kasavubu’s military coup; the
pronunciamiento of Mobutu, that cop under Belgian orders who headed the Force
Publique – that is, armed bands without pay who resorted to holding passers-by to
ransom; Hammarskjöld’s abject partiality; the intrigues of Youlou who was manipulated
by the French government. All these well-known episodes were nothing more than the
stations of an inevitable Calvary. The Belgians, the French, the English, the large
companies and Mr. H … had Lumumba murdered by their hired hands – Kasavubu,
Mobutu, Tschombe, Munongo – while puritanical North America looked away to avoid
seeing the blood. Why so much determination? Was it really necessary for
neocolonialism to be established in the Congo by this blatant murder? This tall, thin,
energetic black man, a tireless worker and a magnificent orator, had lost his power: the
real fact of the atomization of the Congo, the indisputable result of 80 years of
‘paternalistic’ colonialism and six months of Machiavellianism, radically contradicted the
prime minister’s Jacobin dream: he had lost his power except perhaps in Stanleyville,
where, rather than supporters, he had a clientele. If he had gone there, what more could
he have done than Gizenga, who, after some lightning victories, was betrayed a little later
by his Chief of Staff, Lumumba’s uncle, who preferred the restored unity of the only
effective power – the black army – to the unitarianism of the politicians. Imperialism
does not care about human lives, but since it was assured of victory, could it not have
spared itself the scandal? In truth it could not; that was the secret of this sordid trickery:
Lumumba was the man of the transfer of power; immediately afterwards, he had to
disappear.
The reason was that, alive, he represented the rigorous rejection of the neocolonialist
solution. This basically consists of buying the new masters, the bourgeoisie of the new
countries, as classic colonialism bought the chiefs, the emirs, the sorcerers. Imperialism
needs a governing class which is sufficiently aware of its precarious situation to link its
class interests with those of the large Western companies. From this angle, the national
Army, symbol to the naive of sovereignty, becomes the instrument of a twofold
exploitation: that of the working classes by the ‘elite’ and, through them, that of the