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The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination
Stuart A. Reid
4.44
728 ratings113 reviews
A spellbinding work of history that reads like a Cold War spy thriller—about the US-sanctioned plot to assassinate the democratically elected leader of the newly independent Congo
It was supposed to be a moment of great optimism, a cause for jubilation. Congo was at last being set free from Belgium—one of seventeen countries to gain independence in 1960 from ruling European powers. Just days after the handover, however, Congo’s new army mutinied, Belgian forces intervened, and its leader Patrice Lumumba turned to the United Nations for help in saving his newborn nation from what the press was already calling “the Congo Crisis.” Dag Hammarskjold, the tidy Swede who was serving as UN secretary-general, quickly arranged the organization’s biggest peacekeeping mission to date. But chaos was still spreading. Frustrated with the fecklessness of the UN, Lumumba then approached the Soviets for help—an appeal that set off alarm bells at the CIA. To forestall the spread of communism in Africa, the US sent word to the CIA station chief in Leopoldville, Larry Devlin: Lumumba had to go.
Within a year, everything would unravel. The CIA plot to murder Lumumba would fizzle, but he would be deposed in a CIA-backed coup and shot dead by Congolese assassins. Hammarskjold, too, would die, in a mysterious plane crash, en route to negotiate a ceasefire with Congo’s rebellious southeast. And a young, ambitious military officer named Joseph Mobutu, who had once sworn fealty to Lumumba, would seize power in Congo with U.S. help and misrule the country for more than three decades. For the Congolese people, the events of 1960–61 represented the opening chapter of a long horror story. For the U.S. government, however, they provided a playbook for future interventions.
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640 pages, Hardcover
First published October 3, 2023
Original title
The Lumumba Plot: The Inside Story of a CIA Assassination
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640 pages, Hardcover
Published
October 3, 2023 by Knopf
ISBN
9781524748814 (ISBN10: 1524748811)
Language
English
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Kindle EditionKnopf2023
Audible Audio2023
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 113 reviews
Megan
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January 5, 2024
This exhaustive piece of investigative journalism, predicated around the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s movement for independence in 1959-1960, read more like a page turning spy thriller, rather than a well-researched book covering the history of one country’s tumultuous break from colonial rule.
In The Lumumba Plot, Stuart Reid takes on an ambitious goal in trying to definitively answer a nearly 65-year-old question: who exactly was responsible for the murder of the country’s first democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, how did it happen, what was done or not done by different powers (the Belgians, the UN, the US, and the Congolese themselves) to cause or prevent this reprehensible assassination?
It’s a story of a charismatic young black man, who, from a very young age, embarked on a journey to live a better life than the one he was born into. Along the way and through his studies, this young man - Patrice Lumumba - came to want the same good things and equality for all of his fellow countrymen and African nations as a whole.
His impassioned and gifted oratorical skills helped him to become one of his city’s évolués - a privileged position among native Congolese whom were the “poster children of colonialism’s civilizing mission” - men infused with European mannerisms, and thus afforded special legal status and privileges unknown to their uneducated families back home.
It is simultaneously fascinating and utterly horrifying to read the chaotic events that played out following Lumumba’s run and victory for the first prime ministership of the free Congo.
Lumumba may have been able to draw large crowds and massive support with his fiery words and larger-than-life presence, but he soon found out just how difficult the job would be that he so desperately wanted. He had little formal education outside of a high school diploma, being mostly self-taught in languages, politics and history by reading copious amounts of books.
What was worse, however, was his inability to understand just how difficult it would be to govern such a large and divided country (thanks largely to arbitrary African lines drawn by European powers who had no knowledge of the people they were grouping together, nor of tribal/ethnic conflict).
Given the whole “Red Scare” going on at the time, and the United States’s desire to implement its own policies abroad (out of sheer hubris and little regard for the different needs of different cultures) they fabricated many falsehoods about Lumumba. Believing he was a potential Soviet puppet (or could become one), the US and CIA started in the Congo what would become their playbook for many other nations throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s - assassinate or overthrow a democratically elected leader of a newly independent country.
They would then replace this dismissed leader with a despotic ruler that would take American bribes and answer to the United States in exchange for mostly unlimited power and rule over their subjects - in the Congo’s case, Lumumba’s onetime childhood friend and political ally, Joseph Mobutu.
Mobutu wavered in the beginning over betraying his friend, but seeing how overwhelmed and frustrated Lumumba was - very often to the degree of downright disrespectful and unprofessional, in Mobutu’s opinion - decided to use his sway over the Congolese army to grab the presidency from Lumumba in a CIA-backed coup, disposing of his old friend in a torturous and unceremonious death to rule the country for 32 bloody and terrifying years.
It really makes you furious with the so-called “civilized” nations and their interference with foreign countries, whose business they had no right to intervene in. It also makes you wonder if the Congo might be very different place from the country it is today, were Lumumba kept in charge to keep foreign influence out.
Would the Congolese people live better lives than the ones they live now - as mostly subjugated and exploited peoples to wealthier foreign interests and corrupt government officials - dirt poor, starving, illiterate, prone to illness without adequate medical care? It’s hard to say. It’s also hard to argue that it could be much worse for them. All that’s left is to wonder what might have been.
An excellent read… recommend to all history fans or those wanting to learn how certain governments came together to rule in the way they do today. I can’t believe how quickly I sped through it. It’s truly that fascinating.
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Shahin Keusch
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January 5, 2024
Amazing read. Was so detailed, full of information, but still so easy to read. It never got borning. I guess it helps that the topic is just so interesting.
For anyone wanting to learn about the history of modern Congo (DRC), its first PM Patrice Lumumba and his tragic fate, Dag Hammerssköld (UN General secretary and his tragic fate), Mobutu, the CIA, etc.
Important read for anyone wanting to understand modern Congo. Highly recommended
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Book.Mountain
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August 22, 2023
I loved this book. It details the end of Belgian colonialism in the Congo, the subsequent rise to power of Patrice Lumumba, his swift and tragic decline, lots of behind the scenes dealings and movements of government agencies and how the Congo was caught in the middle of a cold war struggle leading to disastrous consequences. The story of Patrice Lumumba is an event that I’ve only heard of briefly mentioned in other books and when I saw that this was coming out, it instantly became one of my most anticipated books of the year. I’ve got pretty limited knowledge of African history and politics but this book was easily accessible and would be enjoyable for anyone with an interest in the subject whether you’re well versed or not. Coming in at over 600 pages, it’s a hefty book but held my intrigue throughout. If you’re interested in the behind the scenes workings/meddlings of the CIA, UN this book whets the appetite. A compelling piece of investigative reporting, it reads like a John LeCarre spy novel and I can’t recommend it enough. 5 stars. Thank you to the author, publisher, and Netgalley for an advanced digital copy of the book.
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Jyotsna
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April 4, 2024
Read as a jury for the Booktube prize
My Ranking - 1st out of the 6 books (Best book out of the list!)
Rating - 5 stars
NPS - 10 (promoter)
American ignorance often went hand in hand with racist attitudes toward the Congolese people and their leaders. U.S. and UN cable traffic during the Congo crisis is rife with paternalism and exasperation with the “children” running the newly independent country, including the “little boy” Lumumba. What the Congolese needed, they seemed to suggest, was supervision and control.
This is one of my best political non-fiction that I have read in a long time. This page-turner of a read is a step-by-step elaboration of the disaster Congo had to face with the announcement of their Independence from Belgium.
The book explores the racism, the Cold War and the history of the Congo from pre-1960 to 1961 and the decolonization of a depraved country at the hands of white colonisers.
A brilliant read, well-written and researched, and I must say, this should be on your list of reads this year.
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Dan
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March 25, 2024
The Lumumba Plot
Kudos to Stuart A. Reid for an excellent and well balanced history. This is a long book both because the author develops a lot of the historical backstories for many of the main characters and because it is impeccably researched.
This new history covers the brief Patrice Lumumba era of Congo's independence movement around 1960. This revolutionary period followed nearly one hundred years of Belgian Colonialism and the horror that was brought by King Leopold II.
Eisenhower, Dulles and the CIA all played a role in Lumumba's demise. The tragedy of Dag Hammarskjold the UN secretary and his questionable role in arming UN forces in the Congo are also covered deftly. Of course there are many more characters including Mobutu who was Lumumba's protege and betrayer. Joseph Mobutu went on to rule as a dictator for 35 years with the U.S. blessing. Or at least he had the CIA's backing in the critical early years.
The CIA's complicity in the revolution is disturbing to be sure and I don't want to minimize it. But in the midst of the Cold War era, there was no plausible communist threat to U.S. The CIA had no prior trade or relationship with the Belgian Congo but they were spooked when Lumumba went to the Russians for weapons. Anyway the parts of this book outside the CIA and Larry Devin the station chief are more interesting in my opinion.
So I can highly recommend this book for anyone who is interested in the story of 20th century Congo. If you enjoyed Leopold's Ghost and are okay with some very heavy topics, I think you'll like this one too.
5 stars
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Khasai
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January 5, 2024
very well written and researched, i felt it was missing the Congolese perspective. Like the CIA think Lumumba is a demagogue, uneducated, APE!!, but what do the Congolese think, why was he so popular? what were his ideas and not just he was a persuasive speaker because he sold beers. I left disappointed with the colonial perspective that this ironically portrayed because then the Congolese are painted as an uneducated mass following whoever when that can't be true?! where is their autonomy? what is driving the secession, what's happening in the military?! maybe the point was for the audience to see Lumumba through a colonizers eyes? i felt like Lumumba was so minimized and one-dimensional. Same with Kasavubu, Mobutu was better. Overall, I think I was not the intended audience for this book. But I did learn a lot and it was easy to read too. Just some things tickled my pet peeves. The next time I see "Congo a country of vast wealth- their natural resources" I may puke!
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Anlan
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January 6, 2024
Reid covers it all in this thrilling (and chilling) tale of a notorious political assassination. The author walks the reader through seemingly every detail behind the assassination of Congo Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in the early years of the Cold War. Of particular note is his exhumation of the United Nations presence during this time -- including background on Dag Hammarskjöld -- as an analysis of the organization's early days (and early failures). Despite being lengthy, it was no difficulty to keep reading; each page beckoned like the one before.
I read an advanced reader's copy of this book given to me by the publisher through a Goodreads giveaway.
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Rosa Angelone
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February 4, 2024
I've known the bones of the Lumumba Plot a while..it is difficult to not run into such a salacious story at some point. poison! toothpaste! the CIA being nefarious!
I didn't feel like I needed to subject myself to a book outlining how destructive American blundering can be. All I have to do for that is turn on the news. BUT I heard an interview with the author on a podcast. He was calm and level headed and made a point that his book didn't just focus on the Americans. He wanted to take Lumumba out of the realm of myth and give context to his life and his country and how the world reacted, especially The U.N.
I am so glad I read this book. It made me feel comfortable in an unfamiliar setting and gave me confidence making connections with our larger history. For example: why the U.N needed a new President ,how the situation was different from the Suez Crisis, why the Belgian Congo was even more stratified than other colonized places, why Eisenhower was tired and uninterested in Africa and how Kennedy took advantage of that. And why a unified Congo was such a difficult thing to organize.
If you have the slightest interest in learning about the past to understand where we are today this book is a must read.
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Raghu
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January 2, 2024
1960 was called ‘the Year of Africa’ because it was a tumultuous and dramatic year in modern Africa’s history. Seventeen African colonies became independent nations that year, freeing themselves from France, Britain and Belgium. Ghana, which was independent already, abolished its monarchy and became a republic. The brutal Sharpeville massacre happened in South Africa, giving impetus to the anti-apartheid movement. Congo achieved independence from Belgium and its charismatic and temperamental leader, Patrice Lumumba, became the prime minister on June 30, 1960. Just seven months later, in January 1961, his Congolese political opponents murdered him. But many players hatched and aided the plot to murder him. They included his onetime friend and ally, Joseph Mobutu, and Joseph Kasavubu, the president of Congo. Many Belgian advisors of the rebel Katanga province, the CIA and the Eisenhower administration, and a passive United Nations also played their part. Congo descended further into crisis, and Mobutu's dictatorship lasted for decades, as did his allegiance to the West. This book by Stuart Reid is a spellbinding account of the seven months’ rule of Lumumba and Congo’s divisive politics in 1960-61. It covers Belgium’s perfidy and sabotage of Congo’s unity, and the role of the CIA and the Eisenhower administration in conspiring to assassinate a democratically elected leader of Africa.
Three mercurial figures, Patrice Lumumba, Moise Tshombe, and Joseph Mobutu, led Congo’s fight for independence. Patrice Lumumba was born in 1925 in the Kasai province of Belgian Congo, but grew up in Stanleyville (aka Kisangani). He didn’t go to university but was an auto-didact, studying French philosophers like Rousseau and Voltaire, and spoke French and at least four African languages. In the 1950s, Lumumba admired European civilization and nudged the Belgian rulers to educate the Congolese. He promised loyalty and collaboration in return, preferring limited freedom, in a federation with Belgium and the Belgian king as the head. After authorities arrested him for embezzling $2500 in his post office job and sentenced him to prison, his views changed. In prison, he experienced how badly the Belgian rulers treated the black people. On release, he moved to Leopoldville and spoke out against colonial rule and freeing Africans from the chains of European paternalism. With his charisma and oratory skills, Lumumba traveled the Congo and spoke about overcoming tribal division and forging a Congolese identity. The spirit of freedom was blowing across colonial Africa, with independence movements in many countries.
The province of Katanga in the south was mineral rich, and the Belgians coveted it. Katanga’s most popular leader was Moise Tshombe, who was wealthy, well-connected, and favored by Belgium. Tshombe exploited the Katangese prejudices against the Congolese who came to work their mines. He pushed for autonomy for his province and stood against a Congo ruled remotely from Leopoldville because he feared the other provinces might appropriate the wealth of Katanga. The Belgians backed him with finance and military.
Joseph Mobutu was Lumumba’s friend and colleague in the independence movement. But he was also a secret agent for the Belgians, passing information about Lumumba and others to the colonial authorities. Mobutu was influential in the army, and the soldiers respected him. After Congo achieved independence on June 30, 1960, Lumumba, as prime minister, made him his military chief.
Congo descended into crisis soon after independence. Belgians fled the country, leaving the remaining Belgians more insecure. Katangese also revolted and soon Tshombe declared Katanga’s independence with Belgian support. A month after Congo’s independence, Belgian soldiers marched into the capital, capturing all the airfields in the country. They advanced the need to protect remaining Belgians in the country as the excuse. Lumumba appealed to the UN to send UN soldiers to support his government as the legitimate power in the country. Dag Hammerskjoeld, the UN secretary general, was liberal in outlook, but he shared many of the prejudices of the era that prevailed in the West about Africa. To them, peace in Africa meant protecting the white population in the newly independent nations. The Western powers did not want to weaken Belgium in Congo and Hammerskjoeld followed the line by visiting Tshombe first on arrival in Congo. Protocol demanded that he meet with the prime minister Lumumba first. Hammerskjoeld viewed Lumumba as ignorant, inept, and unreliable. The United States was watching with interest, but President Eisenhower had a dim view of African politics and a prejudice against Lumumba as a communist sympathizer. When Lumumba visited Washington, DC, Eisenhower did not care to meet him.
Meanwhile, the mineral-rich Kasai province too revolted, seeking secession. Lumumba’s army unleashed violence on the revolt, killing thousands of people. It made ethnic minorities even more suspicious of Lumumba’s central government. Finding himself beleaguered by ethnic revolts, Belgian aggression and UN passivity, Lumumba appealed to the US for help. But the CIA and the administration preferred the removal of Lumumba from power. In desperation, Lumumba appealed to the Soviet Union, but they too were lukewarm in support. Khrushchev felt Kasavubu was a better bet than Lumumba. However, his appeal to the Soviets made the Americans edgy into believing he was a communist. In a crucial meeting in the White House on August 18, 1960, Robert Johnson was the official note taker for the meeting. He recalled that president Eisenhower told the CIA director Allen Dulles something that came across to him as an order to assassinate Lumumba.
Galvanized by this ‘order’, the CIA station in Congo set about making plans to ‘remove’ Lumumba by asking Kasavubu to fire him, which he can do as a president. In addition, they came up with other plans to poison Lumumba. On September 5, 1960, Kasavubu used his presidential powers and Lumumba’s tenure as PM for sixty-seven days ended. Lumumba was popular in some parts of the Congo. But the UN, the US, the Belgians, president Kasavubu, defence chief Mobutu and rebel leader, Tshombe breathed a sigh of relief at his departure.
Tragedy unfolded over the next months. Soon, Mobutu emerged as the supreme arbiter and power-broker and arrested Lumumba and kept him under house arrest. Lumumba escaped and headed to his home base of Stanleyville, but Mobutu’s forces captured him and housed him in Thysville, near the capital. Late on January 17, 1961, his Congolese enemies took him away on the pretext of transporting him to Katanga. On the way, they murdered Lumumba and his compatriots, Maurice Mpolo, and Joseph Okito. Author Reid says Lumumba had remained dignified till the end, despite torture and persecution. The authorities in Leopoldville hired Gerard Soete, a Belgian police commissioner, to make Lumumba’s remains ‘disappear’. Soete buried Lumumba’s body multiple times in different places, but found it unsatisfactory. Then, he used sulphuric acid to turn Lumumba’s body into a mass of mucus. After the acid ran out, Soete doused the remaining body parts with gasoline and set them aflame. The bones and teeth survived. Soete collected one of Lumumba’s fingers and a pair of his gold-capped molars as souvenirs, according to his daughter. Months later, Dag Hammerskjoeld died in a plane crash and Congo fell into a decades-long dictatorship of Joseph Mobutu.
By 1975, America acknowledged its regrettable conduct on the world stage during the 1960s. The Church committee in that year, chaired by the senator of Idaho, Frank Church, investigated many illegal overreaches by the US government. It covered FBI’s surveillance of left-wing groups, CIA’s mail-interception program, mind-control experiments, and alleged assassination plots against foreign leaders. Despite the committee's exoneration of the CIA on the ultimate death of Lumumba, author Reid highlights the US's accountability in it. The CIA played a role in every event leading up to Lumumba’s downfall and death. Five weeks after Lumumba became PM, the CIA urged Kasavubu to remove him from power and funded protests and propaganda, which made it easier for Kasavubu to do it. It encouraged Mobutu to assume power the same month by financing him. The CIA also recommended to Mobutu to organize for Lumumba’s ‘permanent disposal’ and prevented any compromise to let Lumumba return to power. When Lumumba escaped from his house arrest, the CIA helped Mobutu capture him and did nothing to stop their inhuman treatment of Lumumba. Last, when Lumumba was facing death, the CIA offered no dissent to its Congolese power brokers in going ahead. It kept Washington uninformed to prevent them from saving Lumumba.
The Congo had natural resources, but its most valuable resources were also present in greater quantities in North America. In 1960, it held no economic or political importance, was geographically isolated from the US and the USSR, and seen as a backwater. It represented no strategic threat to the US, housed no significant US commercial interests and few US citizens lived there. Nor was it contiguous to US territory. What made Congo so significant for US involvement at this level? Author Reid suggests the following reasons. One reason is the arrogance of power in the 1950s and 60s. America’s might gave it the right to remake foreign societies and governments in its own image. A second reason is the ‘domino theory’, which held that if one country fell to the communists, its neighbours would follow one by one. Though this theory lacked evidence in reality, it became an article of faith among US policy wonks. Once the US decided Congo was important, they assumed that the Soviets also considered it vital. Soviet archives after 1991 show that Moscow considered the Congo only of peripheral concern and Lumumba a doubtful ally. The obsession with communism made the US misjudge Lumumba. As leader of a poor third-world nation, he was just playing both sides of the cold war for his survival. Thomas Kanza, Congo’s ambassador to the UN, clarified it when he said, “The Americans believed Lumumba was a communist because the Belgians said so. They had little idea who Lumumba was”.
This is one of the best books I have read in recent times. With his pulsating narrative, Stuart Reid brings a real-life African national tragedy to life, sixty years after the event. It is gripping and narrated in the thrilling style of a Ben Macintyre work. Lumumba was a complex personality and Reid brings him to life in all his avatars, but we end up feeling for his death, despite his flaws. A deeper reflection on this book urges us to apply its lessons to many similar events in the contemporary world.
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Liam Ostermann
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Want to readNovember 13, 2023
I haven't read this book yet, it doesn't have a UK publisher yet, but I reproduce below a review by Isaac Chotiner from the New Yorker which is well worth reading:
'“It is now up to you, gentlemen, to show that we were right to trust you.” So King Baudouin, of Belgium, declared in the Congolese capital of Léopoldville (present-day Kinshasa) on June 30, 1960. It was a handover ceremony: the Belgian Congo would henceforth belong to the Congolese people. Decades later, Baudouin’s condescension remains startling. His great-great-uncle Leopold II had overseen what was then called the Congo Free State as his personal fiefdom—and established a system of exploitation that was monstrous even by colonial standards. But by 1960 the Belgian government could no longer ignore the wave of anti-imperialist movements that had swept much of the continent. Now the twenty-nine-year-old monarch told the crowd—made up of new Congolese citizens, Belgian officials, and dignitaries from around the world—that independence would be “achieved not through the immediate satisfaction of simple pleasures but through work.”
'Baudouin was followed in the speaking order by Joseph Kasavubu—independent Congo’s President, a relatively ceremonial role—though nobody really remembers what he said. It was Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s Prime Minister, who left an impression when he rose to speak next. A slim, enigmatic man, Lumumba was the most important politician in the country, and the one whom the Belgians were most concerned about. Lumumba’s remarks were clearly a direct reply to Baudouin’s. He ticked through the daily humiliations of life for Black Africans in the Belgian Congo, and recalled the violence visited upon his people. And then, his voice rising, he told his countrymen, “We who suffered in our bodies and hearts from colonialist oppression, we say to you out loud: from now on, all that is over.”
'Seven months later, Lumumba was murdered, brought down by a combination of Congolese politicians and Belgian “advisers,” with the tacit support of the United States and the malign neglect of the United Nations. The crisis that then engulfed Congo—impossibly complex, increasingly brutal—ended with the three-decade rule of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, a onetime Lumumba ally who went on to govern as a ruthless Western client. Mobutu’s bloody final months, in the nineteen-nineties, were followed by an even more brutal war between Congo and its neighbors, which left millions dead. The death of Lumumba was a signal moment of both the Cold War and decolonization, two defining events of the post-1945 world. His story is the story of how they became inseparable.
'The Congo catastrophe may have seemed inevitable, but the geopolitics of the era were by no means straightforward. In the fall of 1956, an Anglo-French-Israeli military operation against Egypt and its President, Gamal Abdel Nasser, prompted by his decision to nationalize (sic) the Suez Canal, ended in humiliating failure after the Eisenhower Administration made clear that it would not support such a venture. The larger subtext was that the days of colonialism—at least European colonialism—were over. Eisenhower was angry about the Suez operation. The attack on Egypt would make the Western side in the Cold War look hypocritical, and help the Soviets gain ground in the Arab world. More pressing, it was a distraction from the concurrent Soviet invasion of Hungary. (Meanwhile, the United States was engaging in subversion in countries as far afield as Iran and Guatemala.)
'After the Suez debacle hastened the end of Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s government in Britain, his successor, Harold Macmillan, travelled to Cape Town, in February, 1960, and invoked “the wind of change” blowing across the continent, in effect accepting decolonization (sic). By then, France had suffered an embarrassing military defeat in Indochina, which was followed by the decisions to grant independence to Morocco and Tunisia. Charles de Gaulle had used the ongoing war in Algeria, whose conclusion he later helped negotiate, to leverage his way into power. Europe was grudgingly making strides toward discarding its empires, while still attempting to maintain some influence. Washington was eager to have a presence in these new markets.
'One of the virtues of Stuart A. Reid’s “The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination” (Knopf) is that it shows how Congolese independence was never given a chance. Reid is interested not only in how external forces arrayed themselves to bring about a calamity but also in how the personalities of Lumumba, Mobutu, and the separatist leader Moïse Tshombe made finding a solution more difficult.
'Lumumba, Reid’s central figure, had left his home province of Kasai, where he was born in 1925, and settled in Stanleyville (now Kisangani) in the mid-nineteen-forties. Intent on becoming a part of the Belgian Congo’s Black middle class, Lumumba, a fanatical reader of French classics and political philosophy, immersed himself in Stanleyville’s civic life. By the early fifties, according to Reid, Lumumba had held leadership positions in seven different civic groups in the city. During much of this period, he sounded like someone of whom Baudouin would have approved. Lumumba viewed himself as an évolué. He urged the Belgians to provide wider access to education in Congo and to promote racial equality, but did so in the gentlest possible terms. In 1952, he wrote, “We promise docility, loyal and sincere collaboration to all those who want to help us achieve, in union with them, the element that is beyond us: civilization.”
'This reverential tone garnered him the attention of Belgian colonial officials, and even an audience with Baudouin, when the King visited Congo in 1955. But when Lumumba was found to have embezzled money at a postal-service job he held, he was sent to the Stanleyville Central Prison for fourteen months. Comments he made about the conditions there—including food that, he wrote, “a European would never serve to his dog”—suggest a sharpening political consciousness. (Even so, while in prison he wrote that political rights were not meant for “people who were unfit to use them,” such as “dull-witted illiterates.”) After his release, he moved to Léopoldville and began to speak out more aggressively against imperial rule, calling for Congo to “free itself from the chains of paternalism.”
'It wasn’t just the conditions in his country that changed his thinking; much of Africa was forging a route to independence. It was Congo’s time. Owing in part to his magnetic speaking skills, and to his following in Léopoldville—and even to the gusto with which he took up a new job as a beer salesman—he became the dominant figure in the political party that secured the most parliamentary seats in elections determining Congo’s first democratic government. Lumumba, still in his early thirties, had now travelled across the whole country, and he believed that an independent state should unite Congolese divided by ethnic and regional loyalties.
'Regional conflicts in Congo were particularly combustible because the Belgians were determined to shape the new state to their liking and, in particular, to keep control of the mineral-rich southern province of Katanga. (Congo currently has nearly half the world’s reserves of cobalt, which is essential for cell phones and a variety of batteries and alloys.) The province had held a special protected status since Leopold II ran Congo as a personal possession, from 1885 to 1908; before independence, it was effectively governed by mining interests, which maintained their own army. On the eve of independence, a single mining company provided half the colony’s tax revenue.
'Tshombe, the most important politician in Katanga, came from a wealthy family in the province, and was close to the Belgian settlers there. Long before Malcolm X referred to him as “the worst African ever born,” Tshombe became known for his foreign suits and foreign bank account, courtesy of his Belgian allies. He also projected some of the resentment that native Katangese felt toward other Congolese, which often stemmed from a dislike of the laborers who had come to work the mines. (Lumumba’s party scored zero victories in Katanga during the 1960 election.) But Tshombe’s biggest concern about the new state—one shared by his Belgian allies—was pecuniary: he feared that the new government in Léopoldville would take control of the mining profits.
'And so, where once the Belgians had favored centralization, they now favored federalism. Reid, an editor at Foreign Affairs, quotes a U.S. Embassy memorandum summarizing Belgian attitudes. Émile Janssens, the notorious Belgian leader of the Force Publique, the Congolese army, “would presumably take his orders from the President of the new Congolese republic,” it reads. “But if these orders were of a destructive nature, the Belgian government would hope that he would use his common sense and not follow them.”
'The third crucial figure of Reid’s book is Mobutu, who was a soldier before transitioning to journalism in the mid-nineteen-fifties; Lumumba befriended him after coming to know his byline. Cagey about his opinions, Mobutu—like many people in the Congolese political class—was almost surely passing intelligence to the Belgians before independence. Lumumba eventually began to distrust him, but by then he had already made him a top military aide, in part because of the support Mobutu had among soldiers.
'With the stage set, Reid turns to detailing how quickly the country collapsed. On July 5th, the African rank and file of the Force Publique were growing restless; for one thing, despite independence, no Congolese soldier had been promoted above the level of first sergeant major. Janssens, in response, gathered soldiers under his command, took out a piece of chalk, and wrote on a blackboard, “Before independence = after independence.” This assertion of authority backfired, and large-scale rioting and attacks on white officers followed. In a calculated response, Belgian troops, welcomed by Tshombe, landed in Katanga, ostensibly to protect their countrymen. In short order, Tshombe and his Belgian minders declared Katanga an independent state. Within a month of Congo’s independence, Belgian soldiers advanced on the capital; they controlled airfields across the country, and gave Lumumba orders about where he was allowed to travel. One night, in an incident that could have been straight out of Evelyn Waugh, a Belgian soldier shot at a correspondent for Time, and then apologized, saying, “In the dark I thought you were an African.”
'Lumumba requested U.N. assistance in the form of international troops to support the Congolese government and keep the peace, thus paving the way for the Belgians to leave. The U.N. was led by the Swedish diplomat Dag Hammarskjöld, and today, when few people can name the organization’s head, it is hard to comprehend how large a figure he was. The son of a Swedish Prime Minister, he was cool and cerebral and difficult to read, and he commanded international respect. Largely liberal in outlook, he was clearly upset by the Belgian intervention, and saw the importance of newly independent states developing into truly sovereign countries. “I must do this,” Hammarskjöld said upon hearing of Lumumba’s request. “God knows where it will lead this organization and where it will lead me.”
'But Hammarskjöld, who held many of the prejudices typical of his background and his era, took an immediate dislike to Lumumba. Conor Cruise O’Brien, the Irish diplomat and writer who led later U.N. operations in Congo—Hammarskjöld picked him for the job after reading a book of his essays on Catholic writers—once wrote that Hammarskjöld shared the “sometimes unconscious European assumptions that order in Africa is primarily a matter of safeguarding European lives and property.���
'The U.N. ended up limiting Lumumba’s options. Its forces dithered about entering Katanga, causing Tshombe’s breakaway regime to further establish itself with Belgian help. Hammarskjöld wrote that it was critical to insure that U.N. troops would not be used by Lumumba to subdue Katanga, Reid explains. When Hammarskjöld visited Congo, he passed through the capital without meeting Lumumba, and went directly to see Tshombe. Lumumba was stunned and enraged. We’re accustomed to stories about an ineffectual U.N., of course, but Reid attributes its conduct to the preferences of major Western powers—they didn’t want an aggressive U.N. deployment that would appear directed against Belgium—and of Hammarskjöld himself.
'Even before independence, Eisenhower regarded Congo’s prospects as dim, and a trip that Lumumba made to America, in July, 1960, had been a disaster: he was not afforded a high-level reception, and failed to garner the military assistance he sought. Lumumba could mobilize crowds with his radio speeches, but, Reid notes, his efforts at face-to-face diplomacy tended to alienate the people he was negotiating with. In the meantime, the American Ambassador to Congo was known to make jokes about Lumumba being a cannibal, while the C.I.A. on the ground was raising concerns about “Commie influence.” As Reid and many others have established, Lumumba was not a Communist; Hammarskjöld, for his part, considered Lumumba an “ignorant pawn” but too “erratic and inept” for the Soviets to find useful.
'Around this time, Lumumba gave the go-ahead to Mobutu’s plan to put down a second secession, in South Kasai, another mineral-heavy province. Congolese troops went on a rampage and murdered many South Kasai civilians, further entrenching the idea that the central government could not be trusted. Feeling abandoned by both the United States and the U.N., Lumumba appealed to the Soviets for military aid. They eventually agreed, but what they offered was meagre.
By August of 1960, the White House, galvanized by Lumumba’s turn to the Soviets, had authorized a secret C.I.A. scheme to “replace the Lumumba Government by constitutional means,” whatever that meant. The same month, at a Cabinet meeting, Eisenhower made comments that some interpreted as a call for assassination. (Lumumba, Reid notes, “offended his sense of decorum.”) C.I.A.-sponsored protests started disrupting Lumumba’s speeches, and then the agency began scheming to kill him.
'As the situation worsened, leaders within Congo and in the West found Lumumba recalcitrant and increasingly erratic, and formed a plan, backed by President Kasavubu, to remove him. Reid presents cables from Hammarskjöld indicating that the U.N. had no objections to Lumumba’s ouster; its officials on the ground prevented Lumumba from going on the radio.
'The next several months played out as a tragedy. Lumumba’s wife was denied access to medical care and gave birth prematurely to a daughter, who died. Lumumba was arrested twice by Mobutu, who sided with Kasavubu before asserting himself—with C.I.A. backing—as the country’s preëminent power broker. Lumumba escaped, but was caught, with U.N. soldiers looking on while he was beaten. As O’Brien later wrote, “The United Nations displayed a concern for legal punctilio when it was a question of rescuing Lumumba which was quite absent from their very uninhibited phase of activity when it was a question of bringing about Lumumba’s political destruction.”
'The final days were gruesome: on January 17, 1961, Mobutu flew a captive Lumumba to Katanga, where Tshombe and his associates—with Belgian officials and mercenaries in attendance—beat him for hours. Tshombe was covered in Lumumba’s blood by the time they were done. Lumumba was then driven to a remote area and murdered, along with two members of his political party. Reid describes this in vivid detail. “You’re going to kill us?” Lumumba asked; Frans Verscheure, a local police commissioner, simply answered, “Yes.” After the men were dead, the killers poured sulfuric acid on the bodies. One of the Belgians present, Gerard Soete, brought home Lumumba’s molars and a finger as trophies.
'The fighting among different factions over the next four years became increasingly vicious, but for a brief moment it appeared that the U.N. could force a solution. Reid coolly notes, “For all the recriminations against the UN and the West, in a strange way Lumumba’s death made international agreement on the Congo easier.” After his murder, the U.N.—in operations led by O’Brien—did try to end the Katanga secession. The attempts initially failed, and Hammarskjöld, under pressure, flew to meet with Tshombe in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), but his plane went down, killing everyone on board, in circumstances that remain murky. (Reid seems skeptical of the conspiracy theories.)
'Reid’s narrative doesn’t extend much beyond the assassination; its particular focus is the role of the United States, and especially the Eisenhower Administration, in this period of chaos. (Reid may underplay the degree to which an independent Katanga was always a Belgian project, even as the U.S. and Great Britain coveted the region’s minerals.) The eventual assassination plot was different from the one the Americans had planned, but Washington’s desires were clear to people on the ground. When Larry Devlin, who was running C.I.A. operations in Congo, heard that Lumumba was being flown to Katanga, he chose not to alert his superiors, or to intercede with Mobutu, with whom he had
developed a close relationship. Still, even if Devlin could have persuaded Mobutu to spare Lumumba’s life, the situation had reached a breaking point. This was the result of months of Western policy choices characterized by shortsightedness, carelessness, and, as Reid makes plain, a fear of the Soviet Union, which, in reality, had little interest in Congo beyond the public-relations wound the West had inflicted upon itself.
'Tshombe fled Congo in 1963, after the secession was finally ended by the U.N. He was enticed back to become Prime Minister, in part because Mobutu and Kasavubu knew that he had Belgian support, and, indeed, soon afterward, Belgian and American intervention helped put down another quixotic rebellion, which had, famously, been joined by Che Guevara. Tshombe went into exile again after Mobutu seized power in 1965; he died in 1969 in Algerian custody, despite the attempts of various American anti-Communists, including William F. Buckley, Jr., to get him released. (Buckley lauded Tshombe, upon his death, for understanding that progress would come for Congo only with “the aid of white expertise and capital.”)...'
I can reproduce no more - it's almost all the entire review, the rest can be found in the New Yorker of October 30, 2023.
not-yet-published-available
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