April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

century, Mandela and Lumumba representing the two ends of the pole that
swung within the axis that marked the fulcrum of the struggle. The two
men represent the beacon of light that shines sharply to bring absolute
clarity into the evaluation of a history that is often mired in obfuscation
and mendacity.
To those who say, ‘How wonderful it was to see in Mandela, the issue of
oppression so peacefully resolved’, we need only point to that picture of
Patrice Lumumba, a torturer’s hand in his hair, as he was brutalised in a
truck by black Kantangese soldiers at Elizabethville (now Kisangani).
In that picture of Lumumba, serious students can espy unseen hands,
steered by a ‘heart of darkness’, bribing, mixing poisons, assembling rifles
with telescopic sights, and finally propping an elected prime minister
against a tree in the bush and riddling his body with bullets.
And then - could even Joseph Conrad, in his worst nightmarish ramblings,
have imagined this? - first burying Lumumba’s body, then exhuming it a
day later because the burial ground was too close to a road, and then
hacking it to pieces, and shoving the pieces into a barrel filled with
sulphuric acid, to dissolve it.
And could Joseph Conrad have been able to picture the murderer making
sure to break off two front teeth from Lumumba’s jaw, to keep as a
memento to show off to the grand-children in Brussels in years to come? As
well as one of the bullets that killed him? If Shakespeare could write black
comedy, we might have got dialogue like this:
‘Grandpa, what didst thou do in the Congo?’
‘I exterminated Lumumba - and mark thee, that’s why I live in comfortable
retirement and, never ye forget this - that’s wherefore ye went to such
expensive schools. Here - see? Two of his very teeth that I broke off and
brought home! And this - the bullet that finished the job!’
A Belgian, nearly 60 years after Conrad published his ‘Heart of Darkness’
and 57 years after Roger Casement and E. D. Morel had made what they
hoped was a definitive exposure of the crimes King Leopold The Second of
Belgium had committed against the Congolese people could still engage in
such barbarities against a leader elected on the basis of a constitution
signed into law by Leopold The Second’s own grandson, King Baudoin the
first.
That sordid crime in the bush near Elizabethville 50 years ago was the
logical conclusion of a bitter and vigorous campaign that Belgium, aided by
the United States, waged in the Congo in 1960 to ensure that Patrice
Lumumba would never get a chance to rule the country that elected him
to be its leader. Because of the action of Belgium and the United States,
we actually do not know whether Lumumba would have made a good ruler
or not. Which makes him even more important to history: for he was not
assassinated merely as a person, but as an idea. What was that idea?
It was the idea of a Congo that was fully independent, non-aligned, and
committed to African unity. Lumumba’s party, the Mouvement National
Congolais (MNC), was the only one in the Congo to organise itself
successfully as a party that saw the Congo as one country, not as a
conglomeration of ethnic groups. Thus, it gained 33 out of the 137 seats in
the Congolese Parliament. From this relatively strong base, Lumumba was
able to inspire others with his vision and thereby to hatch alliances that
enabled the MNC to command an overall majority of seats in the Congolese