11RXNdQ

The Political Thought of Patrice Lumumba* 113
amazing thing is that it was caught out at its own game and considered this évolué, the
son of a Catholic, with a Catholic marriage, and the father of Catholics, to be a secret
agent of the Kremlin. If one wishes to judge the situation better, one should compare the
desperate appeal of this Jacobin ‘without an economic option’ with what Castro was able
to do on an island stuck on the side of America. And let us make no mistake: Castro’s
victory was due precisely to the fact that he took the leadership of a socialist revolution:
the failure of this Congolese, the title ‘communist’ with which people imagined they were
blackening him, is all simply due to the fact that he did not want to commit himself to
reworking the infrastructure of the country. Africa has understood: when an independent
head of government asks for help from the Soviets, Westerners dismiss him. Neutrality
will remain an empty declaration of principle so long as the various states of the black
continent do not unite to impose it.
The alive and captive Lumumba was the shame and the rage of an entire continent: he
was present for everyone as a demand which they could neither fulfil nor remove; in him,
everyone recognized the power and the ferocity of neocolonial trickery. He therefore had
to be dealt with as quickly as possible; imperialism kept its hands clean; it was in the
interest of its two main representatives, Kasavubu and the pathetic Mobutu, not to have
spilt this blood in front of their people. Tschombe did the killing: in any case, the Union
Minière and the colonists had compromised him so much, and he had invested so much
zeal in selling himself that it would soon be necessary to liquidate him as well. They
wiped out a black who had been made prime minister and who took his mission
seriously; Kasavubu was again asked to form a cabinet. I suppose they thought that the
dead man would be less of an embarrassment than the living: we forget the deceased.
What can be done for him? With him? The overexcited Africans would be deprived of
any reason to call their brothers to a liberating crusade by the single bayonet thrust which,
so they say, Munongo took upon himself to administer. That, at any rate, was the
calculation. As we know, it was wrong.
The dead Lumumba ceased to be a person and became Africa in its entirety, with its
unitary will, the multiplicity of its social and political systems, its divisions, its
disagreements, its power and its impotence: he was not, nor could he be, the hero of pan-
Africanism: he was its martyr. His story has highlighted for everyone the profound link
between independence, unity and the struggle against the multi-national corporations. His
death – I remember that Fanon in Rome was devastated by it – was a cry of alarm; in
him, the whole continent died and was resurrected. The African Nations have understood:
what Accra was saying, Addis-Ababa is about to do: they will put in place a shared
mechanism which will allow them to support revolutionary struggles in countries that
have not yet gained independence. Unity is war; influenced by Algeria, some are
understanding better and better that it is also the socialist revolution.
The Congo has lost only a battle. With the protection of the National Congolese Army
(ANC), the Congolese bourgeoisie, that group of venal traitors, will complete its work
and form an exploitative class. Capitalist concentration will gradually overcome the
feudal divisions and unite the exploited; all the conditions for Castroism will be in place.
The Cubans, however, honour the memory of Martí who died at the end of the last