Black History Month 2012: Review: Lumumba

Raoul Peck explores the rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba

Democratic Republic of Congo

Patrice Lumumba was the Congolese version of Malcolm X and Barack Hussein Obama.

In June 1960, the Democratic Republic of Congo was granted independence from Belgium. Patrice Lumumba became Prime Minister and ruled the Congo for six months as the country collapsed into total chaos.

After stirring up a Cold War proxy war in Central Africa between the United States and the Soviet Union, Lumumba was assassinated by a CIA and Belgian backed execution squad. President Dwight Eisenhower had personally ordered his execution and Allen Dulles funneled money to Lumumba’s political rivals to have it arranged.

Raoul Peck’s 2000 film Lumumba explores the short and eventful reign of Patrice Lumumba as Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the beginning of the six year period of anarchy that would come to be known as the “Congo Crisis.” The chaos of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the British and French abandonment of White colonials in Kenya and Algeria played a major role in instigating the secession of Rhodesia from the British Empire.

Within days of Lumumba’s rise to power, the Force Publique mutinied against its White officer corps and began to rape, torture, and murder European civilians, especially the Flemish who were particularly resented by the Congolese. Lumumba responded to the crisis by dismissing General Émile Janssens, insulting the Belgian ambassador, and by Africanizing the Force Publique which was renamed the Congolese National Army.

Belgium responded by dispatching paratroopers without Lumumba’s authorization to evacuate the Belgian and European civilians who were under attack by the Black Undertow. 26,000 of the 29,000 Europeans that were present in Congo’s three largest cities when the experiment in multiracial liberal democracy began fled the country within a month of independence.

More eventful than the rape and massacre of European civilians was the secession of Moise Tshombe’s Katanga and Albert Kalonji’s South Kasai as chaos swept across the new country under Lumumba’s erratic leadership. Katanga and South Kasai were the two richest provinces of the Congo and the epicenter of the Belgian owned mining industry which contained most of its copper, gold, uranium, and diamonds.

In 1959, Congo was producing (mostly in Katanga and South Kasai) 10 percent of the world’s copper, 50 percent of the world’s cobalt, and 70 percent of the world’s industrial diamonds. Congolese uranium was used in the Manhattan Project. The mineral wealth of the country was harnessed by Belgian corporations which produced the revenue stream which allowed the Belgian colonial government to pacify the cannibalistic savages in the country and bring peace, prosperity, and civilization to Central Africa.

The prosperity brought to Katanga was appreciated by Moise Tshombe whose region was close to the Belgians and seceded from Lumumba’s government to escape from the chaos, incompetence, and White flight brought down upon the country by this communist sympathizer. Lumumba made an ultimately fatal mistake when he requested Soviet intervention in the Congo to suppress the secessionists in Katanga and South Kasai.

Coming in the aftermath of Fidel Castro’s seizure of power in Cuba in 1959, the American government was infuriated when a Soviet airlift assisted Lumumba’s Congolese National Army in its brutal conquest of South Kasai and invasion of Katanga. Thousands of Baluba tribesmen were massacred in South Kasai and the Congolese National Army raped, murdered, and pillaged its way through Northern Katanga before it was repulsed by the Belgian-led Katangan gendarmerie.

Under American pressure, President Joseph Kasu-Vubu removed Lumumba as Prime Minister for his arbitrary and destructive leadership and for plunging the country into a civil war. In response, Lumumba denounced Kasu-Vubu before the Congolese parliament and announced he was removing him as president. The United States and Belgium sided with Kasu-Vubu while the Soviet Union sided with Lumumba and his supporters.

The Democratic Republic of Congo fractured into four disputed regions with South Kasai and Katanga in the south maintaining their independence and the supporters of Kasu-Vubu and Lumumba splitting the country into the west and the east. It was at this point that Joseph Mobutu, who Lumumba had made Chief of Staff of the Congolese National Army, stepped forward and announced that he was neutralizing all politicians and taking over the country for the rest of the year.

Mobutu placed Lumumba under house arrest for his own protection. The United Nations warned him to stay there for his own protection. Determined to reach his own Marxist supporters in Stanleyville in the Eastern Congo, Lumumba left Léopoldville hidden in the back of a Chevrolet taking his house servants home for the night. He was captured halfway there in Kasai by Mobutu’s government troops.

As Lumumba’s supporters consolidated their power in Stanleyville and the Eastern Congo, Mobutu and his American and Belgian supporters refused to release him out of the fear that he would escape to the east and set up a communist regime that would be totally dependent upon the Soviet Union and China for its survival. Ultimately, they decided to send Lumumba to Moishe Tshombe’s Katanga where like “delivering Satan to the Jews” he would be quickly executed.

After his arrival in Elisabethville, Lumumba was tortured and forced to eat his own speeches in public. He was physically beaten by Tshombe and taken out into the Katangan woods and shot by a Belgian-controlled firing squad for being a communist and an enemy of the state.

“Lumumba” closes with a scene of Mobutu Sese Seko in power as the “Great Helmsman” of Zaire. A devout and lifelong student of Machiavelli and a CIA asset for decades, Mobutu claims the memory of Lumumba and describes him as “a hero of the Congo” before the international press after ordering his execution.

While “Lumumba” falsely portrays Patrice Lumumba as a Congolese martyr and a hero, I found it to be fairly historically accurate and worth reviewing for Black History Month 2012. It can be seen as a cinematic illustration of the Iron Law of Race Relations and another instructive example of the stupidity of trying to combine the free negro with civilization and liberal democracy.

If Belgium had been encouraged to maintain white supremacy and colonialism for another fifty years by Britain and the United States, the world’s largest pocket of barbarism would still be a prosperous and civilized country, millions of people would still be alive, and the Congolese in particular would be far richer and better off.

As a result of the “Winds of Change,” +100,000 Congolese died in the “Congo Crisis” which Patrice Lumumba started by Africanizing the Force Publique and suppressing the secessionists in South Kasai and Katanga.

Note: The movie “Lumumba” can be watched in its entirety on YouTube or Netflix.




About Hunter Wallace 12390 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

26 Comments

  1. I like free YouTube movies as much as the next man, but is this really worth spending my time watching it?

    From the trailer, with the wise negro narrator over the preppy negro spiritual-esque muzak; at first glance I’d say this looks just like another Magical Negro sanctification fest on celluloid.

    Tell me I’m wrong.

  2. Glaringly absent will be any depiction or even mention of the Force Publique’s rape and murder rampage against the Belgian population after it mutinied on July 5, 1960.

  3. Here’s an excerpt from Robert Edgerton’s The Troubled Heart of Africa: A History of the Congo. Fortunately, I saved this little gem in an essay that I wrote almost 9 years ago, when I first started researching The Heart of Darkness:

    “For the first four days after independence, the cities and countryside alike were calm. Heavily armed, stern-faced, steel-helmeted troops led by white officers were watchful, well-disciplined, and in public view, there was no sign of trouble. However, on the next day, the Force Publique mutinied against its all-white officer corps, and a few days later, the men of the Gendarmerie did the same. Men of both forces inflicted shocking abuses on many of their white officers and humiliated hundreds of European civilians, especially priests and nuns. Some Europeans were tortured, and others were murdered. Scores of European women were raped. . . .

    . . .While this panicked exodus was taking place, planeloads of Belgian paratroopers were landing to secure Leopoldville’s airport and to protect the Congo’s Europeans by whatever means they found necessary. There were few left to protect. Of the twenty-nine thousand Europeans in the Congo’s three largest cities on July 1, 1960, only three thousand remained by July 10.” [5]

    “How many of the eighty thousand Europeans who were in the Congo when the violence began were harmed during the mutiny has never been determined. Most fled out of harm’s way before the violence could overtake them, but some escaping cars were fired on, and many abandoned homes were looted and burned. After the Force Publique’s officers had been disarmed, all but a few were detained under guard. Some of these officers were civilly treated, fed, and exposed to few indignities, but others were stripped of their uniforms, beaten, spat upon, and forced to do drink the urine that Congolese had deposited in tin cups. A few were shot and killed. Some European civilians suffered the same kinds of ill-treatment, Flemings being singled out as victims because they were thought to have been especially contemptuous of Congolese. Priests and nuns were particularly targeted for abuse, often being stripped of their clothing and made to parade in public in the nude. Scores of European women including nuns were raped, several of them at least twenty times. Most of them were assaulted in front of their young children. A few of those who were raped were prepubescent girls themselves.

    A Belgian government investigation took evidence from many victims of these assaults and rapes. For example, it reported that one man. .

    was imprisoned for two days without food, with his wife and three children aged less than 12, under the menace of an automatic weapon. After he was freed, he was arrested again on the 11th of July, around 3 o’clock in the afternoon. He was stripped, like the others, and hit with fists, feet and rifle butts. Two of his companions were mortally wounded. For two more days, they were deprived of food and drink. Soldiers tried to drown him in a barrel filled with water, but a sergeant prevented them.

    On the same day (11th of July), his wife was assaulted in her bedroom. She was hit with fists and rifle butts by six soldiers, who got hold of her and made deep cuts in her arms, of which the Commission has found traces. They stripped her of her underwear and raped her. Six soldiers held her tight and motionless, while an undetermined number of soldiers raped her. They stood in line while waiting for their turn. Her three children were present at the scene, crying loudly.

    Other soldiers got hold of her daughter aged less than 12 and raped her several times.

    Shortly afterwards, three soldiers again entered her room and raped Mrs. Z. . . .in turn. While one of them raped her, the two others held her motionless. Two children were again present.

    Shortly after they left, other soldiers came to the house and rapes Mrs. Z. in the same manner.

    These scenes continued from dusk til dawn. [6]

  4. Mention please, that the French, Belgian and Brits were forced by American lenders and politicians to decolonize Africa. The same assholes who busted Jim Crow broke the back of the European empires. Often just out of purblind hatred for Europeans. Other’s in the hopes of a quick buck picking up the pieces in Africa.

    Kennedy in particular was a motherfucker. Eisenhower hated the Europeans just as much. It’s inexplicable stuff really. Africa needed another century of colonial occupation and population replacement.

    When they write the history of the 20th, American pushes for European colonization will loom large in the story of the demise of civilization and the whites.

  5. The slaughter of whites in the Congo constitute IMHO the opening shots in a war we are still fighting. The Congolese Christmas Chimpout in London/Brussels 2011 (a story fit for BHM surely?) by these demonic hellspawn is just a foretaste of what they will continue to do to us.

    The Belgians should have nuked Or otherwise obliterated the blacks when they had the chance.

  6. You know, it occurs to me that places like the Congo could someday be an opportunity rather than a disaster. Imagine a future in which none of the current superpowers has the time, money, or willingness to intervene in Africa. Let’s say you are an enterprising American colonel or general with a command that is personally loyal to you. You might join forces and funds with two or three like-minded fellow officers and sort of deploy your own little army to the Congo. Assuming you used trained and blooded American, French, British, or Russian soldiers, you wouldn’t need more than a division or two to knock over the gang of hapless nignogs running the joint. As long as you didn’t have to worry about airstrikes from the EU, UN, or some other group of international busybodies, you and the fellas could straighten that place out tout de suite and start restoring civilization to Africa. The Congo is a real treasure trove — minerals, water, agriculture, the works — and could become a prosperous country again with the application of a little brute force. Just storm in, shoot the local warlords, establish martial law, enforce public order at bayonet point, and restore the colonial social system and you could have foreign investors banging at the door with clenched fistfuls of cash within six months or so.

    In the meantime you and the fellas divide up the land and locals and set yourselves up some sweet plantations. The strict discipline of plantation life plus hours of exhausting stoop labor in the tropical sun will take the fight out of the young males. Pay them, of course, but just enough so that they can support themselves and the wives and children you will force them to care for. All this done well and your white army could be self-sufficient in food within a year. All you’d need then would be cash for POL, ammo, and spare parts, which cash could be obtained by reopening the mines and selling the minerals obtained there for cold foreign cash.

    After a year or so the nations of the world would have to grudgingly accept your new order as the legitimate government. You could then rebuild the Congo that died when the Belgians pulled out and begin the re-civilization of the continent. PROTIP: this time, keep the natives in their place. If you do this, the Congo will prosper, which will lift the locals out of poverty, and make you and the other fellows rich. It’s a win for everybody! On to Zimbabwe!

  7. That would only work without a busybody priggishly anticolonial US or NATO or Russia.

    It would be a complete success though if it were left alone.

  8. @Robert Oculus III

    Unfortunately, white people do not have the luxury of entertaining juvenile fantasies about becoming the Great White Bwana of the future in far away lands. We’re at the edge as it is, just trying t hold on to what little is left of our own countries.

  9. Offense is the best defense. If all you is defend the natural result will be defeat.

    Mark Thatcher actually tried this in some African hellhole and the South Africans arrested him.

    The niggers won’t accept a white overlord. There is only a Slow motion fight to the death now.

  10. If all you do is defend the logical strategic end point is defeat.

    So hell, why not go in gangbusters into Africa and take over? It’s how the first Empire was built. See Raja Brookes. Or Rhodes himself. He just invaded and subjugated tge Matabeli. All private efforts backed up on the sly by the State. Trouble is the white man is hogtied, by well meaning, but purblind officials and busy bodies.

  11. There was yet another Congo chimpout in the Congo in 1978, in the mining district of Kolwezi, Thousands of Europeans were again menaced until the French Foreign Legion parachuted in and rescued them. All you French haters,,the Foreign Legion is now one of the world’s most elite units.

  12. The happy ending with the FFL or LE en francais, would have been Colonel Kruger thinking to himself

    “beautiful country wasted on the nogs, I shall ask the men if tgey would like to keep it.”

    and they do, living happy ever after, although it’s still tough work and all that.

  13. Robert,

    Many years ago, I wrote an alternative history essay about a world in which Europeans had conquered Southern, Central, and Eastern Africa, and systematically deported the Bantus back to West Africa.

    The United States of Africa with its capital in Johannesburg was the world’s greatest superpower. Victoria Falls was the Yellowstone of the nation.

  14. The capital would have been Durban, Salisbury or Capetown.

    If only they had gone all in. It really was there for the taking!

  15. White men need to learn what happened to our kin in africa and take steps to ensure it doesn’t happen to our families in the hear and now ( or near future.) Our children must be raised up with the same knowledge; our sons and grandsons must be raised up to do their duty when they become men. We will be out numbered. We overcome that disadvantaged with discipline, training, organization, mobility, firepower and technology.

    I know for certain I could take over the congo with a Ranger batt and 2 weeks of non-interference. I could do it with a company of Rangers and 3o days. Lest wise the parts we’d want and need. We’d never get the non-interference. We can be damn sure no matter how broke UN, NATO and the US is, they’d find a way to interfere. If not them than the various anti White marxist nations in South America would scrape together the air power to muck everything up. And that use of air power wouldn’t be the soft womanish version we see going in A-stan now. If by some miracle no one interfered, our gains would be short lived. They’d crush us long term through trade embargoes, creating and supporting resistance groups and the like. Maybe China and Iran would trade with us for a low enough price on our goods. Our exports would have to be smuggled out which drives up cost. The goods we would need imported would have to be smuggled in, driving up the price we’d pay. Basically, we’d take it in the short pants on both sides of the trade equation. Military victories are often easy enough, it’s the what comes next part that’s difficult.

    My experience in africa is limited, however I think large numbers of black africans would appreciate the regime change, and support the new regime as long as we brought peace and stability. I saw a couple of places were black africans flocked to mines, oil rigs etc owned by Western companies and protected by White PMC’s. When I asked about it, I was told they do it because it’s the safest places to live, they get to sell stuff to the White employees and find odd jobs.

  16. When I look at Lumumba’s daughter with her broad gorilla nose and assorted simian features, disguised as she is in Western womens’ clothing even though she is half-gorilla namely one hundred thousand years less developed than other non-African hominid races, I am filled with dread a feeling of hopeless despair.

    The White Man did this, to infuse in this high-self-concept creature such an historical sense of blame whitey, it’s almost a no-going-back proposition. (at this point)

    The negro is the cockroach of humanity.©

    Guess what folks: the cockroach has been around for millions of years, and no amount of Roach Motels seem to make it go away.

    If only the negro would disappear, as its allegorical cousin the cockroach does, when the lights come on.

    *sigh*

    – crimesofthetimes.com

  17. Reading these reports, you may now be getting an inkling of why I’m a genuine hater. I vaguely remember that time. I’m not sure how accurate your history is; presumably much of it has been pieced together in the ensuing years. At the time, as I recall it, Lumumba just disappeared; nobody knew what happened to him, but he was presumed to have been killed. Of course then, as now, the press reported what it chose to.

    The Katanga rebellion was a time of economic opportunity for South African mercenaries, who were eagerly recruited by Tshombe. Good money to be made there.

    Anyway, this is now the reality of my homeland. As commenters have noted, it could be fixed militarily in an afternoon, but the problem is we would then have to fight the rest of the world. These are truly dark times.

  18. What happen in Africa is what the jews of America are working to make happen in the USA, blacks and other coloreds massacring whites. The jews are well on their way to making this happen.

Comments are closed.