This is not a biography. Its own opening page says what it is: "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 the book is a documentary anthology in four movements — Lumumba's own speeches and correspondence ("Lumumba Speaks for the Congo"), memoirs by those who met him ("An Unforgettable Personality"), the United Nations inquiry into his murder ("How the Crime Was Perpetrated"), and a closing chapter of Soviet state papers, "Soviet Union, True Friend of the Congo." 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.
And here, unusually for this series, the plain duty of an introduction is to endorse most of what the book contains before it questions any of it. Patrice 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 Léopoldville who had risen with him and then sold him, and (as later inquiry would establish, though this book could not yet know it) 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. On all of this the Soviet Union stood, in 1960–61, on the right side — against the murderers. That must be said without a shadow of irony, because it is true, and because the point of a critical introduction is not to manufacture an even-handedness the facts do not support.
The spine reads 1966; the book was "translated from the Russian." But the latest event anywhere in its pages is the Soviet Government's statement of 14 February 1961 and Khrushchev's condolence telegram to Lumumba's widow of the same date, which close the volume. Nothing datable inside it is later than February 1961. The years 1962, 1963, 1964 and 1965 do not occur in the text at all. Its documents — Lumumba's speeches of 1960, his prison letters, the UN Commission report of November 1961, the Soviet notes of 1960–61 — belong entirely to the ten months of the Congo crisis and its immediate aftermath. This is a book assembled at the hour of Lumumba's death and issued, in English, five years later.
That gap matters, because of what fell into it. When the Russian material was gathered, Lumumba's murder was raw and the Lumumbist cause looked open: his deputy Antoine Gizenga held a rival government in Stanleyville, and the Soviet statement printed here could still promise that his blood "will rouse new national-liberation forces." By the time the English edition reached its readers in 1966, the sequel had been written. The Stanleyville regime had collapsed; the great Lumumbist rebellions of 1964 in Kwilu and the east had been crushed with Belgian paratroops and American aircraft; and in November 1965 Colonel — by then General — Joseph Mobutu, the officer who in September 1960 had seized power and delivered Lumumba to his captors, had made himself absolute master of the Congo. The book cannot be faulted for failing to describe events that had not happened when its material was compiled; a reader should not mistake the absence of 1964 or 1965 for evasion. But the editorial decision to export this 1961 memorial unchanged in 1966 — to keep it frozen at the graveside while the man who dug the grave sat in the presidential palace — is itself a choice, and it keeps the volume pure as martyrology precisely by declining to look at the five years since.
The core of the book is Lumumba's own voice, and its first virtue is that it does not curate that voice into a Soviet ventriloquist's dummy. Test the volume by the one measure that matters for an anthology — does it give the man's words in full, or trim them to fit? — and it largely passes.
The centrepiece is the independence-day speech of 30 June 1960, retitled here, blandly, "My Government Serves the People." It is printed complete. It is one of the great documents of African liberation, and the book lets it run: the eighty years of colonial rule "filled with tears, fire and blood"; the daily humiliation remembered in a single grammatical wound — "the black was addressed as tu, not because he was a friend, but because the polite vous was reserved for the white man"; the forced labour, the seized lands, the law "never the same for the white and the black." A more cynical editor would have stopped there. This one prints the passages that cut against the Cold-War frame too — Lumumba's conciliatory hand to the former ruler ("Even Belgium, which has finally learned the lessons of history, has no grounds for opposing our independence"), his pledge to protect foreign residents, his appeal to accept co-operation from "numerous foreign states" without naming any. The speech is left as Lumumba gave it, and that is to the book's credit.
What the book supplies around the speech, however, is nothing. The reader is not told the scene: that this address was Lumumba's unscheduled reply, from the floor, to King Baudouin, who had just praised the "genius" of Leopold II and the civilising work of Belgian colonialism to the faces of the Congolese it had ruled. The drama that made the speech immortal — a subject people's leader answering a king's condescension to his face — is absent. Baudouin appears in the book only in the biographical sketch and the memoirs, never as the man Lumumba was rebuking. The words are preserved; the confrontation that gave them their edge is quietly removed, and with it the sense that Lumumba's defiance was aimed not only at colonialism in the abstract but at the departing sovereign in the room.
The same generosity governs the rest of the anthology. It prints Lumumba's letters to the UN Secretary-General and even Hammarskjöld's chilly replies; his secret letter from Thysville prison, written "on bad paper," cataloguing his starvation and the thirty-five days his clothes had gone unwashed; his address to Congolese youth; his last message on the radio. And it prints, complete, the letter that is the book's true climax — the "Will," the letter to his wife Pauline written from prison in the certainty of death. It is beyond any commentary a critic could add:
"My dear wife, I am writing these words to you, not knowing whether they will ever reach you, or whether I shall be alive when you read them."
"The day will come when history will speak. But it will not be the history which will be taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations. It will be the history that will be taught in the countries which have won freedom from colonialism and its puppets."
"Do not weep for me. I know that my tormented country will be able to defend its freedom and its independence."
A book that prints that letter in full has earned the right to be called a memorial to Lumumba rather than a mere instrument. Whatever else is said here, this remains: Progress put these documents into English and kept them in the world, and they are worth having.
The instrumental element is real, but it lies in the framing, not in any falsification of Lumumba's words — and it is important to locate it precisely, because the shared cause here is genuine and the temptation to overstate the critique should be resisted.
The frame is the fifth chapter, "Soviet Union, True Friend of the Congo," and the running insistence, throughout, that the decisive external fact of the Congo crisis was Soviet friendship. The reminiscences that "re-create his unforgettable personality" are written substantially by Soviet visitors — the publicist Yuri Zhukov foremost — and they return, again and again, to the Soviet aircraft bringing food, the Soviet lorries landing at Matadi, the gift consignments. The closing chapter frames the USSR as "the first country" to the Republic's defence and "a sincere and selfless friend."
Two things need saying about this. First, Moscow's solidarity was not invented. Lumumba himself, in an interview reproduced here, calls the Soviet Union "the only Great Power whose stand conformed to our people's will and desire" — and in the summer of 1960, with the United States backing his enemies and the UN operation turning against him, that was simply accurate. The USSR did recognise the Republic, did denounce the Belgian aggression, did send food and vehicles, did offer scholarships. A murdered anti-colonial leader was honoured in Moscow when the West was arranging his destruction; the Peoples' Friendship University in Moscow was renamed for him within days of the news of his death. The solidarity was genuine and it was honourable.
Second, it was also thin, and the book's own documents quietly say so. What the Soviet Union actually delivered, on the evidence gathered here, was moral and diplomatic support, food, and a "consignment of motor vehicles and equipment" — real, welcome, and wholly insufficient to alter the balance of force in a country garrisoned by Belgian officers and policed by a UN operation hostile to its Prime Minister. When the crisis came, Moscow could protest and it could mourn; it could not save him. The most striking admission is in the Soviet Government's own statement of 14 February 1961, which the book prints as its indictment of the West: "Everyone knows that a word from these governments to their retainer Hammarskjéld would have sufficed to turn the course of events in the Congo and save the life of the Congolese national hero." Read closely, that sentence concedes everything. The power to save Lumumba lay entirely with Washington, Brussels and the UN; the statement nowhere claims that the Soviet Union could have done it and was thwarted. The frame displaces all agency onto the enemy — which is honest about Soviet impotence even as it is silent about the reasons for it. Moscow would not risk a distant confrontation over the Congo, and did not.
So the appropriation is not a lie about what the USSR did. It is the quieter operation of converting a murdered non-aligned nationalist into a trophy of Soviet friendship — of making the story of Lumumba a chapter in the story of the Soviet Union's benevolence toward Africa. And the book's own contents resist this, if the reader lets them. The Lumumba of these pages is not a communist and not a Soviet client. He is a radical nationalist who stretched out his hand, in Zhukov's own reminiscence, "to everybody who desires such co-operation, to the Americans and to the Russians, to the French and the British, and even to the Belgians, if they are prepared to stop their intervention." His creed was national independence and pan-African unity, not the class struggle; his tragedy was that non-alignment offered no protection against a determined empire. The frame would make him Moscow's man. His words, printed here, show a man who wanted to be no great power's man at all — and this is worth stating in 1966, at the height of the Sino-Soviet competition for African allegiance, when a dead Lumumba was an asset both Moscow and Peking wished to claim.
The one place where the book's framing and Lumumba's own convictions genuinely converge is the United Nations — and even here the convergence is worth examining, because the volume's handling of the UN is not single but double.
There is no omission of the UN to complain of; on the contrary, Hammarskjöld's ONUC operation is the villain of the piece, arraigned by Lumumba and by Moscow alike. Lumumba's grievance was concrete and, on the record, largely just: he had called in UN forces to expel the Belgians and end the Katanga secession, and Hammarskjöld's men had instead treated with the secessionist Tshombe, declined to place their troops at the legal government's disposal, and stood by — or worse — as that government was overthrown. Lumumba's letters here document the quarrel in his own hand; his Will names "some highly placed officials of the United Nations, the body upon which we placed all our hope," among those who betrayed him. The Soviet statement is harsher still, calling Hammarskjöld's conduct "a foul betrayal" and demanding his removal — which was Soviet policy, the "troika" campaign to replace the Secretary-General with a three-man body, and which the book advances without disclosing that this was a broader Soviet institutional offensive against the office itself.
But set beside this is Chapter IV, and here the book performs a manoeuvre it does not acknowledge. To document the murder, it reprints — "in abridged form" — the report of the UN's own Commission of Investigation of November 1961, and introduces it by calling the Commission's work "undoubtedly conscientious and impartial." So the United Nations is, within one volume, both the treacherous instrument of the colonialists and the impartial tribunal whose findings establish the crime. The reconciliation is never stated, because it cannot be stated without admitting the criterion: the UN is conscientious when it indicts Belgium and the West, and a colonialist lackey when its operation fails the Lumumba government. That is an instrumental relation to the institution, and it is visible on the book's own pages — the anti-UN memorial resting its case for the prosecution on a UN document it elsewhere teaches the reader to despise.
The Fourth International honoured Lumumba too, and it is important to record that the anti-Stalinist left did not treat his murder as a Cold-War talking point but as a crime and a lesson. Writing in the International Socialist Review (vol. 24, no. 2, whole no. 163, Spring 1963), Karolyn Kerry reviewed the posthumous Congo, My Country and reproduced the same testament to his wife that this book prints as the "Will" — in a different English translation, but the same document, ending "Long live the Congo! Long live Africa!" Kerry's verdict on the killing is as unqualified as Moscow's: "The treacherous role of the United Nations played no small part in facilitating this dastardly act." On the crime, and on the UN, our tradition and this book agree.
Where they part is in the reading of why Lumumba fell — and here the reply corpus offers something the Progress volume withholds. For the Soviet frame, Lumumba's destruction is wholly external: an imperialist crime, executed through a bought army and a corrupt Secretary-General. That is true as far as it goes, and it goes a long way. But it stops exactly where analysis should begin. Kerry's review reads Lumumba's own political development as the evidence: the Lumumba of 1956 had advocated a gradual "Belgo-Congolese Community" under Belgian "tutelage," and under the pressure of the revolution "did not hesitate to jettison the reformist views" — because "history today has placed on the agenda tasks which cry out for revolutionary solutions." This is the Fourth International's long-held theory of the colonial revolution applied to the Congo: that in a country held down by imperialism, the democratic and national tasks — independence, unity, land, an end to the looting of the mines — cannot be carried through to completion by nationalism alone, however brave, but only by a movement willing to strike at the property relations that made the Congo, in the words of the book Lumumba himself read, "a source of colossal superprofits." Lumumba's non-alignment, his appeals to Washington and to the UN, his hope that juridical independence might be defended by international law — these were not personal errors so much as the limits of a nationalism that had no answer when the empire refused to abide by its own rules. The reply corpus honours the martyr and refuses the consolation: the reliance on the UN that Lumumba's own Will came to curse was, in the Trotskyist reading, of a piece with the reliance on a "national" solution that the class enemy would never permit.
The second thing the reply supplies is precisely what the frozen 1961 memorial cannot: an account of the aftermath. The same journal, reviewing René Lemarchand's study in 1965 ("Political Awakening in the Congo," ISR vol. 26, no. 2, whole no. 171, Spring 1965), was already probing the "class divisions between the Congolese leaders themselves" that a purely anti-imperialist frame leaves out of focus — the divisions that turned Mobutu, Kasavubu and Tshombe from Lumumba's colleagues into his executioners. A reader who wants to know what became of the cause this book memorialises — the Stanleyville government, the 1964 risings and their bloody suppression, the consolidation of Mobutu — will not find it here, and should be sent to that literature. It is not a failing of a book compiled in 1961 that it does not contain 1965. It is a limit of reading only this book in 1966, and beyond, that one would never learn the decolonisation it celebrates had, in the Congo, so wholly miscarried.
One honest caveat about the reply. The immediate reaction of the Fourth International's own press to the murder — the weeklies of 1961 — is not in the holdings consulted here; the contemporaneous socialist commentary available is the quarterly ISR from 1963 onward. The judgement recorded above is therefore the movement's considered verdict at two years' and four years' distance, not its first cry. It does not differ, on the essentials, from what Moscow said in February 1961: that this was a colonialist murder, and that the UN operation was complicit in it. The difference is that the reply refused to let the crime stand in for the whole explanation.
Read this book for Lumumba, and it is indispensable. The independence speech, the prison letters, the Will — these are the words of one of the twentieth century's authentic liberation martyrs, printed generously and, in the main, without expurgation. On the crime itself the book is not wrong: Lumumba was murdered by the empire and its servants, and the outrage that fills these pages is earned. The Soviet solidarity it records was, in this instance, real and creditable; there is no call to sneer at it, and a critic who did would be doing tribalism, not history.
What the book cannot give — because it is a memorial and not an analysis, and because it is a Soviet memorial with a use for its subject — is the harder truth that runs alongside the crime: that Moscow's friendship, however genuine, was late, limited and powerless to save him; that the Cold-War frame which makes the Congo a chapter in Soviet virtue also makes a non-aligned nationalist into an asset he never was; and that the reliance on outside guarantors which the frame celebrates was the very thing Lumumba's Will, written in a Katanga prison, had learned to distrust. "It will not be the history which will be taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations," he wrote. He might have added Moscow to the list — not because the Soviet Union was among his murderers, for it was not, but because the history taught there, too, had its own reasons for the shape it gave his life. This edition keeps his words. Read them past the frame, and they say more than the frame allows.