By Fausto Giudice, July 2, 2025
Workers World thanks Fausto Giudice of Tlaxcala for this tribute to Patrice Lumumba and for combining it with a tribute to his contemporary African revolutionary, Algeria’s Frantz Fanon, and for including a poem by Langston Hughes. For readers unaware of this important event in African history, a look at the 2024 documentary “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” is a useful source. To the extent possible at the time, Workers World Party supported the movement for independence in the country now called The Democratic Republic of Congo. (U.N. plots with Belgium, Workers World, August 1960)
They were born in the same month of the same year and died in the same year, eleven months apart. These were not their only similarities. Both were African freedom fighters who fought for decolonization. And both left an indelible mark on the long memory of their peoples. Patrice Emery Lumumba was born on July 2, 1925, in the Congo, while Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique on July 20.
Patrice Lumumba
The former, the short-lived Prime Minister of the newly independent Congo, had signed his own death warrant with his inaugural speech in the presence of King Baudouin. He was kidnapped, tortured and executed by a gang of Katangese, Belgian and French killers with the blessing of the CIA on January 17, 1961.
The second, Frantz Ibrahim Omar Fanon, died of leukemia in December 1961. The two men had met (in 1958 in Ghana and in 1960 in Congo) and liked each other. Above all, they shared the conviction that the African peoples could only truly emancipate themselves by uniting and coordinating against their common enemy.
Frantz Fanon, who made a decisive contribution to the pan-Africanist dimension of the Algerian FLN, wrote the powerful and admirable text below, published a month after Lumumba’s death in Afrique Action, the weekly newspaper created a few months earlier in Tunis by Béchir Ben Yahmed, which would later become Jeune Afrique.
After this text, we offer you a poem by Langston Hughes, the great poet of the Harlem Renaissance, and two songs, the first by Congolese singer Franco and his band OK Jazz and the second by Cuban Carlos Pueblo. This is our way of marking the centenary of Lumumba’s birth.
Lumumba’s Death: Could We Do Otherwise?
Frantz Fanon
[Written by Frantz Fanon in 1961 a month after Lumumba’s assassination.]
Observers who happened to be in African capitals during the month of June 1960 could take note of a certain number of things. Strange personages who had come from a Congo which had just barely made its appearance on the international scene would turn up in ever greater numbers.
What did these Congolese have to say? They said whatever came into their heads. That [Premier Patrice] Lumumba had sold out to the Ghanaians. That [Vice-Premier Antoine] Gizenga had been bought by the Guineans, [Minister of Information Anicet] Kashamura by the Yugoslavs. That the Belgian civilizers were leaving too soon, etc.
But if one took it into one’s head to get one of these Congolese into a corner, to question him, then one discovered that something very serious was being plotted against Congo’s independence and against Africa.
Congolese senators and deputies, immediately after the independence celebrations, would flee from the Congo and head for … the United States. Others would settle down for several weeks in Brazzaville. Trade unionists were invited to New York. Here, too, if one buttonholed one of these deputies or senators and questioned him, it became clear that a whole very precise procedure was about to be put into motion.
Already, before July 1, 1960, the Katanga operation had been launched. Its objective? To safeguard the Union Minière, to be sure. But beyond this operation, it was Belgian interests that were being defended. A unified Congo, with a central government, went counter to Belgian interests. To support the slogans demanding the decentralization of the various provinces, to provoke these demands, to stir them into flame — such was the Belgian policy before independence.
The Belgians were aided in their task by the authorities of the Rhodesia-Nyasaland Federation. We know today, and Mr. [Dag] Hammarskjold [United Nations secretary general] knows it better than anyone, that before June 30, 1960, a Salisbury-Elizabethville airlift supplied Katanga with arms. Lumumba had once proclaimed that the liberation of the Congo would be the first phase of the complete independence of Central and Southern Africa, and he had set his next objectives very precisely: support of the nationalist movements in Rhodesia, in Angola, in South Africa.
A unified Congo having at its head a militant anticolonialist constituted a real danger for South Africa, that very deep-South Africa before which the rest of the world veils its face. Or rather, before which the rest of the world is content to weep, as at Sharpeville, or to perform stylistic exercises on the occasion of anti-colonialist day celebrations. Lumumba, because he was the chief of the first country in this region to obtain independence, because he knew concretely the weight of colonialism, had pledged in the name of his people to contribute physically to the death of that Africa.
That the authorities of Katanga and those of Portugal have used every means to sabotage Congo’s independence does not surprise us. That they have reinforced the action of the Belgians and increased the thrust of the centrifugal forces of the Congo is a fact. But this fact does not explain the deterioration that has progressively spread through the Congo; this fact does not explain the coldly planned, coldly executed murder of Lumumba. This colonialist collaboration is insufficient to explain why, in February 1961, Africa is about to experience its first great crisis over the Congo.
Which way for Africa?
Africa’s first great crisis, for she will have to decide whether to go forward or backward. She must understand that it is no longer possible to advance by regions, that, like a great body that refuses any mutilation, she must advance in totality, that there will not be one Africa that fights against colonialism and another that attempts to make arrangements with colonialism.
Africa, that is to say the Africans, must understand that there is never any greatness in procrastination and that there is never any dishonor in saying what one is and what one wants and that in reality the cleverness of the colonized can in the last analysis only be his courage, the lucid consciousness of his objectives and of his alliances, the tenacity that he brings to his liberation.
Lumumba believed in his mission. He had an exaggerated confidence in the people. The people, for him, not only could not deceive themselves but could not be deceived. And in fact everything seemed to prove him right. Every time, for example, that the enemies of the Congo succeeded in arousing public opinion against him in a certain region, he only needed to appear, to explain, to denounce, for the situation again to become normal. He only forgot that he could not be everywhere at once and that the miracle of the explanation was less the truth of what he set forth than the truth of his person.
Lumumba had lost the battle for the presidency of the Republic. But because he embodied the confidence that the Congolese people had placed in him, because the African peoples had confusedly understood that he alone was concerned with the dignity of his country, Lumumba nonetheless continued to express Congolese patriotism and African nationalism in their most rigorous and noblest sense.
Patrice Lumumba
Then other countries much more important than Belgium or Portugal decided to take a direct interest in the question. Lumumba was contacted, questioned. After his trip to the United States, the decision was reached: Lumumba must go.
Why? Because the enemies of Africa had understood. They had realized quite clearly that Lumumba was sold — sold to Africa, of course. In other words, he was no longer to be bought.
The enemies of Africa realized with a certain fear and trembling that if Lumumba should succeed, in the very heart of the colonialist empire, with a French Africa becoming transformed into a renovated community, an Angola as a “Portuguese province,” and finally Eastern Africa, it was all up with “their” Africa, for which they had very precise plans.
The great success of the enemies of Africa is to have compromised the Africans themselves. It is true that these Africans were directly interested in the murder of Lumumba. Chiefs of puppet governments, in the midst of a puppet independence, facing day after day the wholesale opposition of their peoples, it did not take them long to convince themselves that the real independence of the Congo would put them personally in danger.
And there were other Africans, not altogether puppets, but who are frightened the moment the question of disengaging Africa from the West comes up. One has the impression that these African Chiefs of State are always afraid of facing Africa. They too, less actively, but consciously, have contributed to the deterioration of the situation in Congo. Little by little, agreement was reached in the West that it was necessary to intervene in Congo, that things could not be allowed to evolve at such a rate.
Two mistakes
Little by little the idea of an intervention of the U.N. took shape. Then we can say today that two mistakes were simultaneously committed by the Africans.
First of all by Lumumba himself when he asked for the intervention of the U.N. It was wrong to appeal to the U.N. The U.N. has never been capable of validly settling a single one of the problems raised before the conscience of man by colonialism, and every time it has intervened, it was in order to come concretely to the rescue of the colonialist power of the oppressing country.
Look at Cameroon. What peace do Mr. Ahidjo’s subjects enjoy, held in check by a French expeditionary force which, in large part, had its first fighting experience in Algeria? Yet the U.N. controlled the self-determination of Cameroon and the French government has set up a “provisional executive” there.
Look at Vietnam. Look at Laos.
It is not true to say that the U.N. fails because the cases are difficult.
U.N. serves imperialist interests
In reality the U.N. is the legal card used by the imperialist interests when the card of brute force has failed.
The partitions, the controlled joint commissions, the trusteeship arrangements are international legal means of torturing, of crushing the will to independence of people, of cultivating anarchy, banditry and wretchedness.
For after all, before the arrival of the U.N., there were no massacres in the Congo. After the hallucinating rumors deliberately propagated in connection with the departure of the Belgians, only some ten dead were to be counted. But since the arrival of the U.N., we have grown used to learning every morning that the Congolese were mutually massacring one another by the hundreds.
We are told today that the repeated provocations were created by Belgians disguised as soldiers of the United Nations. It is revealed to us today that civilian functionaries of the U.N. had in fact set up a new government on the third day of Lumumba’s investiture. Now we understand much better what has been called Lumumba’s violence, rigidity and susceptibility.
Everything in fact shows that Lumumba was abnormally calm.
The heads of the U.N. mission made contact with Lumumba’s enemies and with them made decisions by which the State of the Congo was committed. How should a head of government react in such a case? The aim sought and achieved is the following: to manifest the absence of authority, to prove the bankruptcy of the state.
In other words, to motivate the sequestering of the Congo. Lumumba’s mistake was then, in a first period, to believe in the U.N.’s friendly impartiality. He forgot that the U.N. in its present state is only a reserve assembly, set up by the Great, to continue between two armed conflicts the “peaceful struggle” for the division of the world.
If Mr. Ileo in August 1960 was telling anyone who would listen that Lumumba must be hanged, if the members of the Lumumba cabinet did not know what to do with the dollars which, at this period, began to invade Leopoldville, and finally if Mobutu went every evening to Brazzaville to do and hear what we can more readily guess today, why then turn with such sincerity, such absence of reserve, to the U.N.?
Africans must remember this lesson. If we need outside aid, let us call our friends. They alone can really and totally help us achieve our objectives because, precisely, the friendship that links us is a friendship of combat.
But the African countries for their part committed a mistake by their willingness to send their troops under the cover of the U.N. In fact, they were permitting themselves to be neutralized and, without suspecting it, they were allowing others to do their work.
They should have sent troops to Lumumba, to be sure, but not within the framework of the U.N. Directly. From one friendly country to another friendly country. The African troops in the Congo have suffered a historic moral defeat. With arms at the ready, they watched without reacting (because they were U.N. troops) the disintegration of a state and a nation that all Africa had saluted and sung. A shame.
The enemy never withdraws sincerely
Our mistake, the mistake we Africans made, was to have forgotten that the enemy never withdraws sincerely. He never understands. He capitulates, but he does not become converted. Our mistake is to have believed that the enemy had lost his combativeness and his harmfulness. If Lumumba is in the way, Lumumba disappears. Hesitation in murder has never characterized imperialism.
Look at [the martyred Algerian revolutionary Mohamed Larbi] Ben M’hidi, look at [Cameroonian anti-colonialist Félix-Roland] Moumié, look at Lumumba. Our mistake is to have been slightly confused in what we did. It is a fact that in Africa, today, traitors exist. They should have been denounced and fought. The fact that this is hard after the magnificent dream of an Africa gathered together unto itself and subject to the same requirements of true independence does not alter facts.
Africans have endorsed the imperialist police in the Congo, have served as intermediaries, have sponsored the activities and the odd silences of the U.N. in the Congo.
Today they are afraid. They vie with one another in shedding crocodile tears round the tomb of Lumumba. Let us not be fooled; they are expressing the fear of their principals. The imperialists too are afraid. And they are right, for many Africans, many Afro-Asians have understood. The imperialists are going to pause for a while. They are going to wait for “the righteous indignation” to calm. We must take advantage of this brief respite to abandon our fearful approaches and decide to save the Congo and Africa.
The imperialists decided to do away with Lumumba. They have done so. They decided to raise legions of volunteers. These are already on the spot.
The Katanga air force, under orders from South African and Belgian pilots, has in the last few days begun machine gunning on the ground. From Brazzaville, foreign planes arrive crowded with volunteers and parachute officers who have come to the rescue of a certain Congo.
If we decide to support [Antoine] Gizenga, we must do so resolutely.
For no one knows the name of the next Lumumba. There is in Africa a certain tendency represented by certain men. It is this tendency, dangerous for imperialism, which is at issue. Let us be sure never to forget it: the fate of all of us is at stake in the Congo.
LUMUMBA’S GRAVE
By Langston Hughes
Lumumba was black
And he didn’t trust
The whores all powdered
With uranium dust.
Lumumba was black
And he didn’t believe
The lies thieves shook
Through their « freedom » sieve.
Lumumba was black.
His blood was red —
And for being a man
They killed him dead.
They buried Lumumba
In an unmarked grave.
But he needs no marker —
For air is his grave.
Sun is his grave,
Moon is, stars are,
Space is his grave.
My heart’s his grave,
And it’s marked there.
Tomorrow will mark
It everywhere.