“Africa will write its own history, and it will be, to the north and to the south of the Sahara, a history of glory and dignity.”
-- Patrice Lumumba
Amid all this mumbo jumbo, the real Lumumba has been almost forgotten. He was, of course, a violent, often eloquent anticolonialist, and an infectiously fanatic orator. At the 1960 independence ceremony, he seized the microphone to tell Belgium's King Baudouin that "from today, we are no longer your monkeys." He was also the first Congolese politician to think beyond tribal boundaries, the founder (in 1959) of the Congo's first semi-national political movement, its first real pan-African nationalist—and its first Prime Minister. But at the time of his death, most of his countrymen had either never heard of him or hated him.
He was, among other things, a convicted embezzler (of some $2,500 in postal funds), a monumental drunkard, an almost compulsive liar, and an addicted hemp smoker. More important, he was a disaster as Prime Minister. Although his party barely controlled less than one-fourth of the seats in Parliament, he refused to make the political compromises necessary to form a working coalition government, quickly alienated almost every important power base in the Congo. Headstrong, unstable and perpetually frenzied, Lumumba never even tried to govern. His army rebelled less than a week after he took office; his Belgian civil servants fled in terror; vital provinces tried to secede; and the land, neither administered nor policed, reverted to darkness. Howling all the while about white imperialism, Patrice Lumumba himself did not hesitate to sell the exploitation rights to the Congo's vast resources to a fast-talking American promoter.
Time Magazine
Friday Dec. 25, 1964
