The Murder Of Patrice Lumumba

The first legally elected prime minister of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, was executed by Congolese troops under the order of Belgium army officers.

Patrice Lumumba, the independence leader, was arrested, tortured and executed just months after becoming the first democratically prime minister of the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo) in 1960.

A university professor, Philippe Raxhon, told the Lumumba commission that “there is no doubt that Lumumba was executed".

Lumumba was born on July 2, 1925, in the province of Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), in the village near him, Lumumba was able to hone his love for literature and learning by attending missionary school and borrowing books there to read. After having establishing

himself as a leader in organizing unions, Lumumba help established the Congolese National Movement in 1958. He inspired people for countrywide unity, bringing freedom from colonial atrocities.
Lumumba was fighting for Congo to
have complete independents, America and the Belgian government did not want that for Congo yet because of all the natural resources that laid there that they used and also were worried Lumumba was a communist alongside with the Soviet Union. For 126 years, the US and Belgium were key roles in shaping Congo's future. When the cold war broke out, it was unavoidable that the US and its western allies would not be prepared to let Africans have complete control over the natural resources that lie there, or to risk the chance of the resources falling in the hands of their enemies, the Soviet Union. It is in this regard that Lumumba's determination to achieve complete independence and to have total control over Congo's resources in order to use them to improve the conditions of our people was a threat to west. To challenge Lumumba, the US and Belgium used all of their resources available to them, including the United Nations secretariat, under Dag Hammarskjöld and Ralph Bunche, to buy the support of Lumumba's Congolese rivals , and hired killers.
Lumumba was captured just 7 months after independents in Congo, tortured by soldiers, then Executed, sparking the harsh brutality done to many Congolese in the coming decades.