CIA AND LUMUMBA’S ASSASSINATION

The US-sponsored plot to kill Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the DRC and the country’s independence hero, took place 63 years ago today, on 17 January 1961. The gruesome murder was a culmination of multiple assassination plots by the American, British and Belgian governments, which used paid Congolese accomplices and a Belgian execution squad to carry out the hit. Declassified CIA documents revealed the American government’s desire to assassinate Lumumba even before the country’s independence, and the director of the CIA had called him “worse than Castro”.

The straight-talking pan-Africanist maintained that his interests were those of the Congolese people and described himself as a nationalist. He wanted full independence and full control over natural resources to better the lives of the Congolese people - and that irked imperialists. While discussing the Congo crisis with Lord Home, Britain’s foreign secretary, US President Dwight Eisenhower said he wished “Lumumba would fall into a river full of crocodiles.”

After failed attempts to use a Georgian hitman and a poison expert to spike Lumumba’s toothpaste, the CIA pulled strings behind the scenes through the country’s political situation following independence to paint Lumumba as a “Commie”. During the height of the Cold War in the 1960s, Congo was and still is geopolitically strategic. The Congo was another chess piece in the U.S. Cold War fight against Communism, and the CIA was determined to ensure Western loyalty even though, in terms of the Cold War, Lumumba was determined to stay neutral.

Lumumba and two of his associates were executed by firing squad. Their bodies were hacked to pieces and dissolved in sulphuric acid. Here’s a reminder of the chilling details surrounding the assassination, one of the most significant in the 20th century.