allAfrica.com: Africa: 50 Years After Lumumba Horace Campbell
20 January 2011 analysis It wasn't just Patrice Lumumba his assassins wanted to kill, it was the genuine self-determination, dreams and aspirations of African people, writes Horace Campbell, reflecting on the murder of the DRC's (Democratic Republic of Congo) first prime minister on 17 January 1961. In the experiences of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and of Africa, the iterations of assassinations were meant to kill the genuine self-determination of the African peoples. Of these crimes, the murder and cover up of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba continues to reverberate across Africa, crying out for a break from the recursive patterns of genocidal politics and economics. Patrice Lumumba was the first democratically elected prime minister of the Congo. The DRC won its independence in June 1960, but the wishes of the Belgian colonialists were that the conditions after independence should not be different from that of the colonial era. In the Congo, Belgium - a small divided society in Europe - had worked to get a seat at the table of imperial overlords. In the eyes of the Belgians, the crime of Patrice Lumumba was that he refuted the speech of the King of Belgium at the independence celebration in June 1960. Lumumba refused to accept the representation of the Belgian mission as one of civilising and modernising the Congolese peoples. Lumumba was removed from office less than two months after independence. He was placed under house arrest; he escaped but recaptured, beaten, tortured and eventually eliminated. This pattern of murder, torture and destruction continues today, 50 years after the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.
From the time of the assassination of Lumumba, almost every African
leader who sought to chart a course for genuine independence was assassinated, whether it was Eduardo Mondlane, Amilcar Cabral, Herbert Chitepo, Samora Machel, Thomas Sankara, Felix Moumie, Chris Hani or Steve Biko. Violence against leaders was accompanied by the intimidation and assassination of journalists, students, opposition leaders and any social force that challenged oppression of Africans and the plunder of their resources. This nested loop of genocidal thinking, genocidal economics and genocidal politics has generated 11 wars in the Congo since 1960, and all of these wars have had implications for almost all the regions of Africa in relation to genocide, militarism, dictatorship, economic plunder and patriarchal models of liberation. The task of reconstruction and the recovery of the dignity of the Congo and of Africa is a challenge that requires a decisive and revolutionary break with the ideas, organisations and the modes of political and economic practices that dehumanises Africans. The youth of Africa are everywhere calling for an elaboration of their humanity, and are challenging the devaluation of life. From Tunisia and Egypt in the North to South Africa and Zimbabwe in the South, the youths are seeking new organisations and ideas that can break from the centuries of oppression. The celebration of Lumumba should be accompanied by the spirit of healing and reconstruction and calls on the peoples of Africa to draw from the determination of Patrice Lumumba to continue the struggles for emancipation and unity. PATRICE LUMUMBA AND THE BURDEN OF HISTORY Despite the history of European plunder, looting and savagery in the Congo from the period of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the present, the intellectual culture of the West represents the peoples of the Congo and Africa as uncivilised, open to atavistic violence and awaiting modernisation projects from Europeans. In November, I attended a session of the African Studies Association meeting in San Francisco, USA, where there were some young scholars making a presentation on Eastern Congo. In the main, the quality of the work was so shallow and devoid of historical context that one Congolese scholar in the back of the room asked if the presenters were aware that there were Congolese scholars who have been doing scholarly work on reconstruction and peace in the Congo. This question is very pertinent in the present moment in so far as many of the scholars and researchers from Turkey, India, Brazil, China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan turn to the work of European and US conservative scholars to orient their 'humanitarian' projects in Africa. Jacques Depelchin, Nzongola Ntalaja and countless others have documented the horrors of the forced labour, brutality and the genocide of over ten million Africans by the Belgians but their brand of scholarship and activist intervention was marginalised by the dominant Western intellectual institutions. The documentation of Western atrocities in the Congo has also been brought to a wider audience by the writer Adam Hochschild, whose book, 'King Leopold's Ghost', has reached a wider community than that which was accessible to African researchers and scholars. Hochschild built upon the work of Mark Twain in bringing to a larger audience the plunder and murder of the colonial enterprise. In his day, Malcolm X challenged mainstream historians and linked the history of genocide in the pan-African world to the murder of Lumumba and the search for self-determination by the peoples of the Congo. Scholars trained in African studies centres of the West could not write clearly about the iterations of assassinations because of the ways in which the academy had been polluted by the modernising discourse that was supposed to depoliticise Africans. Malcolm X challenged US scholars to detail the massacres in the Congo. In a well-publicised exchange at Brooklyn College on 24 November 1964, the professors told Malcolm X that he was an alarmist and that Leopold civilised the Africans in a humanitarian campaign. It was in this intellectual climate that Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the US House of Representatives was reared. Gingrich wrote his doctoral thesis at Tulane University on the civilising role of the Belgians in the Congo. In some academic centres, such as the African Studies Center at the University of Wisconsin Madison, there were specialists on politics in the Congo. The students of these professors have dominated the US bureaucracy and academia for the past 40 years, reproducing modernisation theories and the failings of the 'tribal' African. Malcolm X himself was assassinated in February 1965 when he articulated a clear understanding of the linkages between racism and oppression in the United States and massacres and murders in Africa. His famous dictum, 'You cannot understand what is going on in Mississippi if you do not understand what is going on in the Congo' is as true today as it was when he uttered these words. The current military crisis in the DRC (especially in the Eastern regions) brings out the need for activists to grasp the burden of history in order to understand the present and chart a new course for the future. These utterances by Malcolm X were part of his work as a mobiliser and truth teller. Malcolm X met with Abdurrahman Babu and Che Guevara in 1964 after the Johnson administration supported mercenaries to abort the second independence struggle in the Congo. Their meeting had agreed on a strategy to move beyond political mobilising to put in place a plan for liberation in the Congo and in the Americas. Four months after this historic meeting between three great freedom fighters, Malcolm X was gunned down in Harlem and the CIA hunted down and murdered Che Guevara. (See details in the book by Karl Evanzz, 'The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X'). Professor Manning Marable is also working on a new book that exposes the conspiracy to murder and cover up. The iterations of assassinations had taken their own roller coaster ride so that not even the president of the United States was immune to this mindset of killing and murder. John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963 by the forces of the military industrial complex and the intelligence agencies that continue to promote death tendencies all over the world. James Douglass, in his book, 'JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters', has documented in extensive detail how the cover-up of the assassination has been even more elaborate and meticulous than the actual assassination. This same cover-up continues in the cases of Martin Luther King Jr and hundreds of freedom fighters whose lives have been snuffed out at an early age. COLLUSION BETWEEN INTELLECTUALS IN USA AND WESTERN EUROPE Since the murder of Lumumba, mainstream intellectual work inside Europe and North America has covered up and distorted the conditions under which Lumumba was assassinated. Former officials of the United Nations have written a number of books on the influence of the United States over the decision making processes in international bodies dealing with the Congo at this time. The record has been established by various authorities on the manipulation of the major international institutions in order to cover up murder. More News on allAfrica.com AllAfrica - All the Time -- http://allafrica.com/stories/201101210696.html Via InstaFetch -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
