Death in the Congo: murdering Patrice Lumumba. By Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick

Abstract

Death in the Congo captures a striking portrait of an international crisis in the early Cold War caused by one post-colonial nationalist's rise to power. It meticulously details the way Patrice Lumumba was subsequently ousted and how his murder was encouraged by western powers. In many ways, it is a character study of the political leaders who instigated and backed Lumumba's murder and the men in the lower ranks who carried it out. The surprising ignorance of the key decision-makers and the amateurishness of much of their plotting is well documented. In a moving end to the book, the former Prime Minister and two comrades are handed over Pontius Pilate-style to his separatist enemies and clumsily killed by a mixed firing squad of Belgian and Congolese security men. Much of the book's narrative relies on documentary sources and witness testimony recorded during a Belgian investigation into the murder in 2001 and by the Church Committee's investigation of American intelligence activities in 1975–6. Thanks to these, there is a strong beginning and ending to the book, with detailed coverage of Lumumba's rise to power, the chaotic decolonization of the Congo and of the cover-up in the aftermath of the assassination. The authors have also drawn some detailed character portraits of famous contemporary international leaders. Figures captured in the book include a callow young King Baudouin, an ageing and grumpy President Eisenhower and a humanitarian but cunning UN Secretary General in Dag Hammarskjöld, who was to meet his own suspicious end in the Congo shortly after Lumumba's death. The personage of a young Joseph Mobutu lurks in the background, but in the end he is not central to the Prime Minister's cruel fate.