Patrice Lumumba

This is not a biography, and its own opening page says so: "This is a collection of speeches and letters by Patrice Lumumba, reminiscences of meetings with the fearless fighter for Africa's freedom, and official documents."

A short biographical sketch opens the volume; after that it is a documentary anthology in four movements - Lumumba's own speeches and correspondence, memoirs by people who met him, the United Nations inquiry into his murder, and a closing chapter of Soviet state papers. It is, in form and in feeling, a memorial: a wreath laid by Progress Publishers on the grave of a man murdered five years before the English edition appeared.

Lumumba was the first Prime Minister of the independent Congo, installed by an electoral victory in June 1960 and destroyed within weeks. Dismissed unconstitutionally in September, handed by his own army's chief of staff to the secessionists of Katanga, he was murdered on 17 January 1961 - beaten, shot, and his body dissolved in acid - with the connivance of Belgium, of the departing colonial power's business houses, of the men in Leopoldville who had risen with him and then sold him, and, as later inquiry established, of Washington. His killing is one of the defining crimes of decolonisation: a democratically installed African head of government destroyed by the empire that was supposedly handing him power.

The reason to have the book is the primary material. Lumumba's own speeches and letters are here, including the last letter to his wife written in a Katanga prison, with its refusal of the history "which will be taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations". So is the UN inquiry's account of how the crime was carried out.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.