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On January 20, a court in Brussels, Belgium, convened a procedural hearing in the long-running case concerning the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The hearing did not revisit the full history of the killing, but was limited to determining whether the case should proceed under Belgian law.
At the centre of the proceedings stands Etienne Davignon, a 93-year-old former Belgian diplomat and senior state official. Federal prosecutors are seeking to prosecute Davignon on charges linked to Lumumba’s unlawful detention and degrading treatment in the months preceding his execution, allegations he denies. The case follows Belgium’s acknowledgement of moral responsibility for Lumumba’s death, and represents an incomplete, belated attempt to reckon with colonial violence through legal means.
That such a reckoning is taking place at all, however limited, raises a more uncomfortable question. While a former colonial power is revisiting aspects of its role in Lumumba’s killing, much of postcolonial Africa is still failing to confront the political vision for which he was eliminated. Lumumba’s assassination is mourned, but his analysis is rarely taken seriously. His name is invoked, but his demands are quietly set aside.
Lumumba is often remembered as an anti-colonial martyr and periodically rediscovered across Africa, but the substance of his political thought is rarely engaged. The questions he raised at the moment of independence, about sovereignty, land and the limits of political freedom in postcolonial Africa, remain largely unresolved.
That neglect is not accidental.
Many post-colonial African leaders have not honoured Lumumba’s legacy precisely because of the radical clarity of his critique, and what it would demand of those in power today, including governing coalitions that have learned to profit from the systems he sought to dismantle. To understand why his ideas still unsettle so many in Africa and abroad, it is necessary to return to the speech that announced his politics publicly, and to the reactions it provoked at the time.
On June 30, 1960, at the Palais de la Nation in Leopoldville, now Kinshasa, Lumumba addressed the official independence ceremony in the presence of Belgium’s King Baudouin. The speech has since been recognised as one of the most consequential political interventions of Africa’s decolonisation era. At the time, however, it was treated by much of the Western press as an act of provocation.
Writing the next day in The New York Times, foreign correspondent Harry Gilroy described Lumumba’s address as “militant” and claimed it had “marred” an occasion meant to celebrate independence in a spirit of colonial goodwill. Gilroy contrasted Lumumba unfavourably with a conciliatory address by President Joseph Kasa-Vubu, observed that “the Soviet diplomats present seemed to be enjoying the occasion”, and framed the moment through a Cold War lens that cast Lumumba as erratic and ideologically suspect. This framing was not incidental, but part of a broader Western media reflex that treated uncompromising anti-colonial speech as a threat to order rather than an assertion of political agency.
A special report by The Guardian on July 1, 1960, was equally revealing, if more detailed. The British paper described Lumumba’s speech as “pugnacious” and disruptive to royal dignity. Much attention was paid to etiquette, to the king’s discomfort, to the delay in the official programme and to the supposed embarrassment caused to Belgium on what was meant to be a ceremonial handover.
According to contemporaneous reporting, Baudouin nearly abandoned the independence ceremony altogether as officials scrambled to contain the fallout. What went largely unexamined in the West was the accuracy of Lumumba’s account and how it came into being.
Lumumba revised and expanded his remarks while seated inside the Palais de la Nation, after listening to Baudouin’s address, and without having been scheduled to speak at all. His address was not part of the official programme.
It was a response.
The gulf between the king’s self-congratulatory narrative and Lumumba’s prophetic speech could not have been clearer. Baudouin praised the “genius” of King Leopold II, under whose personal rule an estimated 10 million or so Congolese died through forced labour, violence and famine in the pursuit of rubber and ivory. He spoke of Belgium’s so-called civilising mission and presented independence as benevolent stewardship, without acknowledging the racial terror, dispossession or mass death it caused.
Lumumba rejected that framing outright.
“We have known ironies, insults and blows,” he said, speaking of a system that reduced Africans to subjects rather than citizens. He described land seized through racially discriminatory laws, political prisoners exiled within their own country and forced labour paid at wages that could not sustain human life. Independence, he insisted, was not a gift but the outcome of struggle, and it would be meaningless without dignity, equality and control over national wealth.
What unsettled Western observers was not that Lumumba was inaccurate. It was that he spoke plainly, in public, and in the presence of European power. Colonial self-vindication was acceptable. Anti-colonial truth-telling was not. Lumumba paid with his life for naming realities that others would later learn to manage, soften and profit from. The fixation on his tone, timing and supposed militancy functioned as an early delegitimisation of African political agency.
History would prove Lumumba’s diagnosis correct.
One of the central demands of his speech was that “the lands of our native country truly benefit its children”.
More than six decades later, the contradiction persists.
The DRC holds some of the world’s most strategic mineral reserves, including those essential to global energy transitions. Yet around three-quarters of the population lives in poverty, while mining revenues are dominated by foreign corporations. In the DRC, World Bank-backed reforms and liberalisation programmes, particularly from the 1980s onwards and formalised in the early 2000s, dismantled state control over mining, driving privatisation that returned cobalt and copper to foreign companies and weakened national control over strategic resources.
Resource extraction has continued alongside displacement, conflict, and environmental degradation, particularly in the east.
The same pattern is visible elsewhere.
In Nigeria, crude oil exports have generated hundreds of billions of dollars since the 1970s, yet more than 133 million Nigerians live in multidimensional poverty. Different national contexts, similar outcomes: political independence without economic sovereignty. Communities in the Niger Delta endure chronic pollution, underdevelopment and violence, while wealth flows outward.
Lumumba also spoke directly to political freedom.
He pledged to “stop the persecution of free thought” and to ensure that “all citizens enjoy to the fullest extent the basic freedoms provided for by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”.
This, too, was not lofty speechmaking.
It was a warning.
Across the continent, elementary democratic commitments have been repeatedly broken through violence, repression and deeply compromised electoral processes, including in Uganda, Tanzania and Eritrea.
Militarisation has become a default mode of politics, with wars, coups and power struggles now recurrent features across the continent, from protracted conflicts in the Horn of Africa to repeated military takeovers elsewhere.
Lumumba cautioned explicitly against rule by force in Africa. “We shall institute in the country a peace resting not on guns and bayonets,” he said, “but on concord and goodwill.”
That vision has been steadily abandoned.
Africa is independent in form, not substance.
Corruption, repression and neocolonial systems continue to hollow it out.
The African Union estimates that Africa loses around $89bn annually through illicit financial flows, while CFA franc controls and debt conditionalities continue to impede socioeconomic progress. Courts can examine individual acts, but history judges systems, and the systems Lumumba warned against remain firmly in place. That is why the case unfolding in Belgium matters beyond its legal scope.
The Belgian courtroom process revisits the mechanics of Lumumba’s death, but it cannot resolve the deeper historical and political injury his killing represented.
Lumumba’s family, the DRC, and the continent are owed full accountability for his assassination, just as Africans deserve reparations for slavery and colonialism.
However, justice for the past is inseparable from responsibility in the present.
His legacy requires more than statues and memorials.
Continued failure to meet the standard Lumumba articulated has produced not stability or dignity, but extraction, inequality and recurring cycles of violence.
That remains the unfinished business of Patrice Lumumba’s life and death.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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