Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, the author of this short biography of the late Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba, was a teenager in the Congo at the time of Lumumba's assassination. Lumumba is generally recognized as a key figure in the transition from African colonialism. Nzongola-Ntalaja is now a professor of African, African-American and diaspora studies. The book is therefore both scholarly and set in a strong personal context, which includes 50 years of reading and research on Congolese politics. It recounts Lumumba's development as a leader and his unwavering opposition from an early age to the racism, injustice and exclusion of the colonial system. Lumumba was an outlier, an autodidact whose formal education stopped at fifth grade but whose knowledge base was equivalent to a good university education. He was elected prime minister in the first democratic election held in the Congo in 1960 and was assassinated seven months later, at the age of 35. Annotation ©2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
Patrice Lumumba was a leader of the independence struggle in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as the country’s first democratically elected prime minister. After a meteoric rise in the colonial civil service and the African political elite, he became a major figure in the decolonization movement of the 1950s. Lumumba’s short tenure as prime minister (19601961) was marked by an uncompromising defense of Congolese national interests against pressure from international mining companies and the Western governments that orchestrated his eventual demise.Cold war geopolitical maneuvering and well-coordinated efforts by Lumumba’s domestic adversaries culminated in his assassination at the age of thirty-five, with the support or at least the tacit complicity of the U.S. and Belgian governments, the CIA, and the UN Secretariat. Even decades after Lumumba’s death, his personal integrity and unyielding dedication to the ideals of self-determination, self-reliance, and pan-African solidarity assure him a prominent place among the heroes of the twentieth-century African independence movement and the worldwide African diaspora.Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja’s short and concise book provides a contemporary analysis of Lumumba’s life and work, examining both his strengths and his weaknesses as a political leader. It also surveys the national, continental, and international contexts of Lumumba’s political ascent and his swift elimination by the interests threatened by his ideas and practical reforms.