The political life of the dead Lumumba: Cold War histories and the Congolese student left

Abstract

This article examines Patrice Lumumba's afterlife among Congolese students in the 1960s. Mobilizing oral histories, it also interrogates the stakes of remembering Lumumba at different moments in Congo's postcolonial history. It shows how Lumumba's assassination became a collective and personal landmark in the biographies of a generation of student activists and clearly helped facilitate a turn towards the left in 1961 and in the years that followed. Overlooked by Cold War histories, this political process was nonetheless also a by-product of the internationalization of the Congo crisis and proved central to the historical imagination of a generation of educated Congolese. The dead Lumumba pushed young educated Congolese to revisit the meaning of decolonization. The article argues that the students’ extroverted political imagination was an important explanation for Lumumba's posthumous popularity in Congolese universities. Through their affiliation with the figure of Lumumba, young Congolese could expect to receive support and attention from real and imagined allies around the world. The international communion around Lumumba's name was sometimes the result of productive misunderstandings; nonetheless, his legacy played a crucial role in transnational mediation throughout the 1960s and made possible the circulation of new political repertoires among Congolese students.

Nationalists with no nation: oral history, ZANU(PF) and the meanings of Rhodesian student activism in Zimbabwe

“…Student protest was politically significant during this period, as many scholars have shown, in large part because of its role as a ‘modern’ process of elite formation. Through this lens, scholars have explored the antagonistic relations between students and independence-era African nationalist leaders, who themselves reified university education as an important form of political authority in their own nation-building projects (Barkan 1975; Burawoy 1976; Melchiorre 2019; Monaville 2019; Smirnova 2019). In contrast to these independence contexts, in Rhodesia white-settler leaders placed little value on educated ‘intellectuals’ in their own racially segregated nation-building project.…”

MOVEMENT 4. BREATH SIGH TEMPEST: On the Temporal Dimensions of Re‐arrangements

“…The event itself: the day dawned in red hues of blood as Patrice Lumumba, the charismatic prime minister of Congo, was apprehended and then assassinated by imperialist agents. Historian Pedro Monaville (2019) has argued that the birth of the ‘global Sixties’—much revered and maligned as the last age of revolution—was inaugurated by the blood of Patrice Lumumba in February 1961 1 . His murder sent a shiver of upheaval around the world, kindling the flames of anti‐colonial, anti‐capitalist and anti‐authoritarian movements.…”

“…It electrified the civil rights activists in the United States—heard emblematically in clashes along the streets of Harlem and in front of the headquarters of the United Nations. It energized internationalist revolutionary movements in Latin America, black intellectuals in the Caribbean and Great Britain, and empowered youth movements across all continents (Jewsiewicki, 1999; Ali, 2015; Monaville, 2019).…”

Congo Style

“…He was murdered shortly afterward by Katanga soldiers and two Belgian police officers. His death, announced on February 10, greatly affected Congolese student movements, which empathized with Lumumba's unitarian vision (Monaville 2019). It is widely understood today that the murder was orchestrated by the Belgian secret service but that the United States encouraged it (Gondola 2002: 125).…”