OPINION:
Patrice Lumumba was an inspirational hero to millions of his countrymen. In the eyes of U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, the Congolese nationalist was erratic, inept, and “an ignorant pawn” of the Soviet Union. Lumumba was a mesmerizing orator and galvanizing politician. His critics thought him impulsive, naive and frivolous.
Like any influential figure who has found himself under global scrutiny, Lumumba meant different things to different interlocutors. The historical record is definitive, though, regarding the issue that mattered most to the United States.
Patrice Lumumba was not a communist. He had no desire to turn the Congo into a Soviet vassal. In the crucible of the Cold War, however, the Eisenhower administration consistently misjudged Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister.
In his page-turning narrative history, Stuart Reid, an executive editor at Foreign Affairs, tells the story of Lumumba’s meteoric rise and tragic demise at a critical Cold War juncture. In 1960, the winds of change blew across Africa. Seventeen nations achieved independence from European colonizers in that year alone. Belgium belatedly understood it would have to let go of its prized possession.
This ideological question of which Cold War camp these new nations might join drove Washington’s interest in faraway Congo.
It was also a transformative period for the United Nations as it prepared to welcome new member states to its General Assembly and it was called upon for the first time to deploy a large peacekeeping force to a country coming apart at the seams. And the Congo crisis opened a dark chapter in the history of the CIA. The agency for the first time would attempt to assassinate a world leader on the order of an American president.
Lumumba’s background hardly recommended him for national leadership. In 1956, he was convicted for embezzling funds from the post office. After prison, he became a beer salesman. But the bookworm had always been interested in ideas, and as he grew more active in the politics of nascent Congolese nationalism, he articulated an increasingly militant program of independence from Belgium.
By the spring of 1960, Patrice Lumumba was the country’s most recognizable voice for a unitary Congolese state free of outside interference. National elections were held in May. Now prime minister, he formed his first (and only) government on June 24, 1960. Formal independence came six days later.
Almost as soon as Lumumba delivered a rousing address bidding Congo’s colonial masters good riddance, the country started falling apart. The army rebelled. Two economically critical regions — South Kasai and Katanga — seceded. The Belgians did everything they could to undercut Lumumba’s moves to unify the country, including sending military units to Katanga.
Lumumba begged the U.N. to restore order. But Hammarskjold’s peacekeeping force was placed under strict instructions not to take sides among the rival military and political factions.
An engaging and clever storyteller, Mr. Reid ably guides us from events in Leopoldville and Stanleyville to deliberations in New York, Washington and Brussels. The reader can sense how the Congo’s rippling chaos beset decision-makers thousands of miles away.
The strength of “The Lumumba Plot” lies in Mr. Reid’s treatment of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s and the CIA’s culpability in this largely forgotten coup d’etat. The Congo crisis was front-page news in 1960. But what was not clear at the time was the CIA’s decisive role in persuading Col. Joseph Mobutu to orchestrate a coup on Sept. 14. Lumumba’s time in office lasted a mere 67 days.
The month before, in what must be considered the most shameful chapter of his presidency, Eisenhower ordered the CIA to kill Lumumba. The aging president and his closest advisers held racist disdain for the prime minister and African independence movements more generally. Thanks to his research in formerly top-secret CIA and State Department cables and memos, among other sources, Mr. Reid settles any dispute over whether the U.S. government plotted Lumumba’s death.
The assigned assassins — three in total — never pulled it off. For instance, a scheme to inject poison in the prime minister’s toothpaste went nowhere. One hired rogue turned out to be comically inept and even too bizarre-looking for the gig. The CIA provided him with new dentures, toupee, and a nose job so he’d blend in with his new surroundings.
In the event, Patrice Lumumba, 35 years old, was murdered by his Congolese rivals with Belgian assistance in early 1961, three days before John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. As a candidate, Kennedy had promised a new approach as Africa threw off the yoke of colonialism, but he would betray the promise of his stirring inaugural address.
“To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny,” Kennedy declared on Jan. 20, 1961. A little more than two years later, Kennedy welcomed Mobuto on his visit to Washington. Thanks to U.S. support, Mobuto Sese Seko would rule Congo, later renamed Zaire, with an iron fist for 32 years.
Stuart Reid saves his analytical writing for a superb epilogue. “It’s tempting to imagine what could have been” had the U.S. backed rather than destroyed Patrice Lumumba. If this what-if should now weigh on our collective conscience, one can easily surmise how it sits with the victims of Mobutu’s cruel, corrupt regime and the bloody civil war that followed.
• Martin Di Caro is the host of the Washington Times podcast “History As It Happens.”
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The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination
by Stuart Reid
616 pages; Knopf, Oct. 17, $29.99
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