Summary
The West feared that [Patrice Lumumba] would expropriate foreign capitalists and attempt to use the Congo's tremendous natural wealth for the benefit of its people. And when, at the height of the crisis in the summer of 1960, Lumumba asked for Soviet military support and received it, well, that was the last straw. The CIA had drawn up assassination plans of its own, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had discussed the need to get rid of Lumumba. Belgian industrialists and the Belgian government were also both separately backing anti-Lumumba forces. The full story of this sordid imperial subterfuge is laid out in Ludo De Witte's The Assassination of Lumumba.
In 1965, Che Guevara and 150 Cuban volunteers joined [Laurent Kabila] on the western shores of central Africa's Lake Tanganyika. Che's diaries from that "lost year" offer a bizarre tale: He came for socialist revolution and found petty warlords, witchcraft and peasants largely detached from the world's capitalist system. Che described Kabila as "cordial but aloof Kabila's men were thuggish and lazy. Their adversaries, mercenaries led by Mike Hoare, the infamous Anglo-Irish marauder and former British military captain, were thuggish and not lazy."[Joseph Desire Mobutu] thought that Lumumba was bad," [George Ningo Toleka] says, "but in my view, he was a good leader." He continued: "In Opala, about a two days ride from here, there is a group that believes in Lumumba."See the full content of this document
Extract
In Search of Lumumba
KINSHASA LIES ON THE flat banks of the River Congo like a dissolute mistress in repose-slow and haggard, but with a dignity and washedout beauty. Most of the city is made up of "le Cite," the huge slum metropolis that makes up almost two-thirds of this city of 7 million. The landscape is an alternately dusty and muddy sprawl of dense shanties that seem to stretch forever. Here, grubby white egrets and lizards-rather than pigeons and rats-dominate the smoldering trash heaps.
However, on the tree-lined boulevards of the crumbling downtown, one feels the essence of modern Congolese history. It's a story of brutally uneven development that, after the optimistic moment of African de-colonization that began with Ghana's indepe...See the full content of this document
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