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Books on
and by Patrice Lumumba
Lumumba (Panaf, 1973) /
The Assassination of Lumumba (De Witte, 2001) /
Lumumba Speaks: Speeches and Writings, 1958-1961
Congo, My Country (1966) /
The Martyrdom of Patrice Lumumba (1971) /
Lumumba: A Biography
(McKown, 1969)
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Independence
Day Speech
(June 30, 1960)
By
Patrice Lumumba
Men and women of the Congo,
Victorious fighters for independence, today
victorious, I greet you in the name of the Congolese Government.
All of you, my friends, who have fought tirelessly at our sides,
I ask you to make this June 30, 1960, an illustrious date that
you will keep indelibly engraved in your hearts, a date of
significance of which you will teach to your children, so that
they will make known to their sons and to their grandchildren
the glorious history of our fight for liberty.
For this independence of the Congo, even as
it is celebrated today with Belgium, a friendly country with
whom we deal as equal to equal, no Congolese worthy of the name
will ever be able to forget that it was by fighting that it has
been won [applause], a day-to-day fight, an ardent and
idealistic fight, a fight in which we were spared neither
privation nor suffering, and for which we gave our strength and
our blood.
We are proud of this struggle, of tears, of
fire, and of blood, to the depths of our being, for it was a
noble and just struggle, and indispensable to put an end to the
humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force.
This was our fate for eighty years of a
colonial regime; our wounds are too fresh and too painful still
for us to drive them from our memory. We have known harassing
work, exacted in exchange for salaries which did not permit us
to eat enough to drive away hunger, or to clothe ourselves, or
to house ourselves decently, or to raise our children as
creatures dear to us.
We have known ironies, blows that we endured
morning, noon, and evening, because we are are Negroes. Who will
forget that to a black one said "tu," certainly not as
to a friend, but because the more honorable "vous" was
reserved for white alone?
We have seen our hands seized in the name of
allegedly legal laws which in fact recognized only that might is
right.
We have seen that the law was not the same
for a white and for a black, accommodating for the first, cruel
and inhuman for the other.
We have witnessed atrocious sufferings of
those condemned for their political opinions of religious
beliefs; exiled in their own country, their fate truly worse
than death itself.
We have seen that in the towns there were
magnificent houses for the whites and crumbling shanties for the
blacks, that a black was not admitted in the motion-picture
houses, in the restaurants, in the stores of the Europeans; that
a black traveled in the holds, at the feet of the whites in
their luxury cabins.
Who will ever forget the massacres where so
many of our brothers perished, the cells into which those who
refused to submit to a regime of oppression and exploitation
were thrown [applause]?
All that, my brothers, we have endured.
But we, whom the vote of your elected
representatives have given the right to direct our dear country,
we who have suffered in our body and in or heart from colonial
oppression, we tell you very loud, all that is henceforth ended.
The Republic of the Congo has been
proclaimed, and our country is now in the hands of its children.
Together, my brothers, my sisters, we are going to begin a new
struggle, a sublime struggle, which will lead our country to
peace, prosperity, and greatness.
Together, we are going to establish social
justice and make sure everyone has just remuneration for his
labor [applause].
We are going to show the world what the black
man can do when he works in freedom, and we are going to make of
the Congo the center of the sun's radiance for all of Africa.
We are going to keep watch over the lands of
our country so that they truly profit her children. We are going
to restore ancient laws and make new ones which will be just and
noble.
We are going to put an end to suppression of
free thought and see to it that all our citizens enjoy to the
full the fundamental liberties foreseen in the Declaration of
the Rights of Man [applause].
We are going to rule not by the peace of guns
and bayonets but by a peace of the heart and will [applause].
And for all that, dear fellow countrymen, be
sure that we will count not only on our enormous strength and
immense riches but on the assistance of numerous foreign
countries whose collaboration we will accept if it is offered
freely and with no attempt to impose on us an alien culture of
no matter what nature [applause].
In this domain, Belgium, at last accepting
the flow of history, has not tried to oppose our independence
and is ready to give us their aid and their friendship, and a
treaty has just been signed between our two countries, equal and
independent. On our side, while we stay vigilant, we shall
respect our obligations, given freely.
Thus, in the interior and the exterior, the
new Congo, our dear Republic that my government will create,
will be a rich, free, and prosperous country. But so that we
will reach this aim without delay. I ask all of you, legislators
and citizens, to help me with all your strength.
I ask all of you to forget your tribal
quarrels. they exhaust us. They risk making us despised abroad.
I ask the parliamentary minority to help my
Government through a constructive opposition and to limit
themselves strictly to legal and democratic channels.
I ask all of you not to shrink before any
sacrifice in order to achieve the success of our huge
undertaking.
In conclusion, I ask you unconditionally to
respect the life and the property of your fellow citizens and of
foreigners living in our country. if the conduct of these
foreigners leaves something to be desired, our justice will be
prompt in expelling them from the territory of the Republic; if,
on the contrary, their conduct is good, they must be left in
peace, for they also are working for our country's prosperity.
The Congo's independence marks a decisive
step towards the liberation of the entire African continent
[applause].
Sire, Excellencies, Mesdames, messieurs, my
dear fellow countrymen, my brothers of race, my brothers of
struggle--this is what I wanted to tell you in the name of the
Government on this magnificent day of our complete independence.
Our government, strong, national, popular,
will be the health of our country.
I call on all Congolese citizens, men, women
and children, to set themselves resolutely to the task of
creating a prosperous national economy which will assure our
economic independence.
Glory to the fighters for national
liberation!
Long live independence and African unity!
Long live the independent and sovereign Congo!
Source: Robin McKown, Lumumba: A Biography. New York:
Doubleday & Company, 1969.
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Lumumba: A Film by Raoul Peck
Raoul Peck tells the story
of the African freedom fighter
Patrice Lumumba
with fire and grace. The opening scene sets the vérité tone with
the sound of a saw cutting through bone; two Belgian soldiers
are breaking down Lumumba's body and incinerating it in a
ten-gallon drum. From there, the film backtracks to the origins
of the Congolese independence movement and proceeds to explain
how a man's legacy could be considered so threatening. Peck
handles all of this, including the atrocities, with refinement,
and lets the drama of Lumumba's story run smoothly, free of
heavy historical detail. Eriq Ebouaney is extraordinary in the
lead role, the production feels emotionally true, and the
speeches generate spontaneous applause. Only the ending comes
off as too hopeful, as we know that with Lumumba's death, the
regime of Mobuto began. In French and Lingala.—Michael
Agger,
The New Yorker
Made in the tradition of
such true-life political thrillers as MALCOLM X and JFK, Raoul
Peck's award-winning LUMUMBA is a gripping epic that dramatizes
for the first time the rise and fall of legendary African leader
Patrice Lumumba.
When the Congo declared its independence from Belgium in 1960,
the 36-year-old, self-educated Lumumba became the first Prime
Minister of the newly independent state. Called "the politico of
the bush" by journalists of the day, he became a lightning rod
of Cold War politics as his vision of a united Africa gained him
powerful enemies in Belgium and the U.S. Lumumba would last just
months in office before being brutally assassinated. Strikingly
photographed in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Belgium as civil war
once again raged in the Congo, the film vividly re-creates the
shocking events behind the birth of the country that became
Zaire during the reign of Lumumba's former friend and eventual
nemesis, Joseph Mobutu. This is the English-dubbed version of
the film.—Amazon.com
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Cuba An African Odyssey
is the previously untold story of Cuba's
support for African revolutions.
Cuba: An African Odyssey
is the story of the
Cold War told through the prism of its least known
arena: Africa. It is the untold story of Cuba’s
support for African revolutions. It is the story of
men like Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, Agosthino
Neto and of course Che Guevara who have become
icons, mythical figures whose names are now
synonymous with the word revolution. This is the
story of how these men, caught between capitalism
and communism, strove to create a third bloc that
would assert the simple principle of national
independence. It is the story of a whole dimension
of world politics during the last half of the 20th
century, which has been hidden behind the facade of
a simplistic understanding of superpower conflict.
Cuba: An African Odyssey will tell the inside
story of only three of these Cuban escapades. We
will start with the Congo where Che Guevara
personally spent seven months fighting with the Pro-Lumumbist
rebellion in the jungle of Eastern Congo. Then to
Guinea Bissau where Amilcar Cabral used the
technical support of Cuban advisors to bleed the
Portuguese colonial war machine thus toppling the
regime in Europe. Finally, Angola where in total
380,000 Cuban soldiers fought during the 27 years of
civil war. The Cuban withdrawal from Angola was
finally bartered against Namibia’s independence.
With Namibia’s independence came the fall of
Apartheid… the last vestige of colonialism on the
African continent.
Cuba: An African Odyssey unravels episodes of
the Cold War long believed to be nothing but proxy
wars. From the tragicomic epic of Che Guevara in
Congo to the triumph at the battle of Cuito
Carnavale in Angola, this film attempts to
understand the world today through the saga of these
internationalists who won every battle but finally
lost the war.
Credits: Written,
directed and narrated by Jihan El-Tahri / Edited by
Gilles Bovon / Photography by Frank-Peter Lehmann
Sound Recordists: James
Baker, Graciela Barrault / Produced by Tancrède
Ramonet, Benoît Juster, Jihan El-Tahri
Source:
Snagfilms
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Heart of Darkness
By
Joseph Conrad
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed,
Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
By Adam Hochschild
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What This Cruel War Was Over
Soldiers Slavery and the Civil
War
By Chandra Manning
For this impressively researched
Civil War social history, Georgetown
assistant history professor Manning
visited more than two dozen states
to comb though archives and
libraries for primary source
material, mostly diaries and letters
of men who fought on both sides in
the Civil War, along with more than
100 regimental newspapers. The
result is an engagingly written,
convincingly argued social history
with a point—that those who did the
fighting in the Union and
Confederate armies "plainly
identified slavery as the root of
the Civil War." Manning backs up her
contention with hundreds of
first-person testimonies written at
the time, rather than
often-unreliable after-the-fact
memoirs. While most Civil War
narratives lean heavily on officers,
Easterners and men who fought in
Virginia, Manning casts a much
broader net. She includes
immigrants, African-Americans and
western fighters, in order, she
says, "to approximate cross sections
of the actual Union and Confederate
ranks." Based on the author's
dissertation, the book is free of
academese and appeals to a general
audience, though Manning's harsh
condemnation of white Southerners'
feelings about slavery and her
unstinting praise of Union soldiers'
"commitment to emancipation" take a
step beyond scholarly objectivity.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Incognegro: A Memoir of
Exile and Apartheid
By Frank
B. Wilderson III
Wilderson, a professor,
writer and filmmaker from
the Midwest,
presents a gripping account
of his role in the downfall
of South African apartheid
as one of only two black
Americans in the African
National Congress (ANC).
After marrying a South
African law student,
Wilderson reluctantly
returns with her to South
Africa in the early 1990s,
where he teaches
Johannesburg and Soweto
students, and soon joins the
military wing of the ANC.
Wilderson's stinging
portrait of Nelson Mandela
as a petulant elder eager to
accommodate his white
countrymen will jolt readers
who've accepted the
reverential treatment
usually accorded him. After
the assassination of
Mandela's rival, South
African Communist Party
leader Chris Hani, Mandela's
regime deems Wilderson's
public questions a threat to
national security; soon,
having lost his stomach for
the cause, he returns to
America. Wilderson has a
distinct, powerful voice and
a strong story that shuffles
between the indignities of
Johannesburg life and his
early years in Minneapolis,
the precocious child of
academics who barely
tolerate his emerging
political consciousness.
Wilderson's observations
about love within and across
the color line and cultural
divides are as provocative
as his politics; despite
some distracting
digressions, this is a
riveting memoir of
apartheid's last days.—Publishers
Weekly
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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