adminAS eulogies continue to pour in for the late Nelson Mandela, one is inclined to wonder if his former captors are not, as Wole Soyinka said, dyeing their mourning weeds a deeper indigo than the bereaved. Other African heroes have been deliberately ostracised, maligned and caricatured by the same institutions deifying Madiba.
In Patrice Lumumba’s case, a sitting prime minister of an independent African nation was disgraced, tortured, disfigured, shot, burnt, had his body fat used as fertiliser and his gold teeth taken as war booty.
The story of Lumumba is a chilling reminder of the double standards and the evil nature of the West’s dealings with Third World countries.
Death Colonial Style, a 2010 documentary on the premeditated assassination of Lumumba, is a miniature account of the West’s one-size-fits-all imperialist crusade and its destabilising trail in Africa.
The political assassination, facilitated by the joint conspiracy of the United Nations, the United States of America and Belgium, and the subsequent destabilisation of Lumumba’s country, signifies how capitalism has been amplified out of proportion to deny Third World countries self-actualisation.
At the high tide of African decolonisation, Congo was perceived to be the land of promise by virtue of its immense natural wealth, population and strategic situation at the centre of the continent.
More than 50 years on, Lumumba’s rhetorically titled book Is Congo the Land of the Future Threatened? has been answered in the affirmative.
To date the DRC is riven by foreign meddling and civil wars, whose body count stands at 5,4 million.
Congo, like the rest of Africa, stands threatened by unbridled imperialist interests.
Africa’s people, wealth, and vast potential have been wrested into a vassal extension of other nations who have no regard for our own aspirations.
The independence of Congo in 1960 coincided with the Cold War which partitioned the world into a bi-polar geopolitical map consisting of the capitalist West and the socialist East, with the rest subjugated one side or the other.
The emerging nation became the object of attention pending its choice of conscription.
Lumumba did the unexpected by maintaining neutrality in pursuit of the sovereign interests of his country, untainted by borrowed, artificial “isms”.
“A new face has emerged amongst the regular portrait gallery of political fame. The face of someone who is politically neutral is the face of a dead man,” a foreboding voice-over prefigures Lumumba’s fate at the outset of the Death Colonial Style documentary. The rest is history.
Kwame Nkrumah similarly pushed for a homegrown blueprint for Africa captured in his words: “We face neither East nor West, we face forward.” He too was disgraced and silenced.
Lumumba’s killers are not only known but self-confessed yet not one of them has had a day in court. One would be forgiven, watching his murderers affirm the authenticity of their cause, that imperialism is still alive and kicking, if not in the former colonies, then, at least, in the minds of its architects.
His vision of an Africa outlined not by the peace of guns and bayonets but by a peace of the heart and the will is still obstructed by far-flung imperialist tentacles in the continent.
Online Reporter