Who killed Patrice Lumumba? More than six decades after the first prime minister of an independent Congolese state was put to death by a nocturnal firing squad, his ghost continues to haunt Belgian politics. Officially, of course, a concise answer has long been available: Lumumba was put to death in January 1961 by a platoon of colonial soldiers and police officers, under the watchful eye of Katangese secessionist Moïse Tshombe, after which a member of the squadron dissolved his body in an acid bath, unveiling his teeth to a Belgian television journalist decades later. The question of who supplied the platoon with its instructions and weaponry, however, cannot be answered with the same concision.
From the outset, fingers in Kinshasa and Brussels were pointed at major players: the Belgian royal family; the upper strata of Belgium’s capitalist class, particularly the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga – a subsidiary of the infamous Socièté Générale, an emblem of European finance capital and predecessor of Umicore mining company – who were anxious to secure their property holdings in the post-colonial age; as well as American security services, concerned about stability in the African mineral belt between the Cold War nodes of Angola and Rhodesia, and then communist infiltration of the new Congolese government. The matter is far from settled. All too often, however, it seems of merely historical interest – another cold case from the tumult of the decolonial era. In recent decades, the residual links maintained between the DRC and Belgium in the Mobutu era have been severed, with both countries increasingly alienated from each other, economically and politically. The disconnect is only increased by the small size of Belgium’s post-colonial diaspora, hardly comparable to that of other ex-empires such as France or the United Kingdom.
The possible prosecution of Étienne Davignon – a 93-year-old former diplomat, captain of industry and son-in-law of the founding father of Europe’s Atlantic alliance Paul-Henri Spaak – has recently forced a reopening of the Lumumba case. There now is a significant chance that Davignon will stand trial for his complicity in the murder. During the political upheaval that engulfed the Congo following independence, he served as an intern at Belgium’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The ministry has long been suspected of aiding and abetting the killing. Davignon now faces a battery of war crime charges – not subject to a statute of limitations – including ‘unlawful detention and transfer of a civilian or prisoner of war’, absence of ‘fair and impartial trial’ and ‘humiliating and degrading treatment’. Lawyers representing Lumumba’s descendants firmly deny that Davignon was only a minor character. At the time, he also served as a diplomatic envoy to neighbouring Burundi, where he supervised the decolonisation process. Despite his youth, Davignon operated at the apex of the Belgian state elite.
For a long time, evidence of the Belgian state’s complicity was largely fragmentary. In 1999 however – following the death of Lumumba’s authoritarian successor Mobutu, and the departure of the Christian-Democrats from the Belgian government, pillars of colonial rule before independence – historian Ludo De Witte was able to demonstrate how deep Brussels’s involvement in the murder was in his renowned The Assassination of Lumumba. This ranged, he argued, from supporting the regional independence movements that incarcerated Lumumba to transporting him to his assassination site. In response, a parliamentary inquiry was set up to clarify Belgium’s role in the affair.
The inquiry swiftly faced a chorus of critics – including De Witte himself, who accused investigators of not digging deeply enough and of leaning into colonial apologetics. In 2011, descendants of the former Congolese leader brought their own case against ten alleged Belgian accomplices, including Davignon, the only still living. An unexpected piece of evidence is now set to speed the prosecution: a string of conversations with the Belgian politician held under the inquiry’s watch. Public access to the transcript is a forlorn hope, but journalists were given access after an anonymous leak. A recent report has probed the half-truths Davignon offered in the conversations and gathered reminiscences from other Belgian diplomats involved in the crisis. This includes former minister Mark Eyskens – son of then Belgian PM Gaston Eyskens, himself a public anti-lumumbiste – who claimed that much sleuthing remains to be done on the case, especially on the American side: ‘the role of the Americans in the whole affair is underestimated’.
In fact, in the Anglosphere, significant attention has been given to Washington’s involvement. Take for example Stuart Reid’s The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War (2023). Reid, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, delves into newly opened American archives, pointing to the early involvement of CIA operatives and President Eisenhower in the assassination. One of the book’s scoops is a meeting report from 1960, in which during a White House plenary about the crisis the President drew an ‘X’ next to Lumumba’s name. Reid also presents new testimony from American agents active in Central Africa since the 1940s, partly because of the region’s uranium deposits, crucial for the rapidly escalating nuclear arms race.
Reid did not consult Belgian witnesses in extenso and the country often appears as of secondary interest in his book. The result is that his analytical lens is steadily displaced from Belgium to America in the sequence of events that led to the murder. In public engagements, this has at times produced improbable speculation on Reid’s part. In his view, the US might have landed upon a less bloody solution if its imperial cadres had been less blinded by Cold War paranoia. A Strangelove-like atmosphere hung over the security apparatus, which ultimately proved counterproductive: according to Reid, Lumumba remained pro-American until the last moment, when it became clear that the United States would stand aloof from the Congolese power vacuum – after which he launched a desperate bid for Soviet aid, always unlikely to succeed with a conservative foreign policy establishment in Moscow.
The lessons that Reid draws from the affair have a whiff of predictability. Policymakers in Washington should not be too quick to dismiss a hesitant friend as an enemy. With China supposedly bent on becoming the 21st-century avatar of Soviet communism, non-aligned forces in Africa or Asia must not face premature accusations of treachery. Reid even suggests that the US in fact ran no significant economic risk from Congolese independence, and that a mineral belt with political autonomy might well prove tolerable stateside. As historians have pointed out, while the Shinkolobwe mine in Katanga had furnished the uranium ore used to manufacture the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was shuttered by the time independence came. The Americans had tapped into other sources, thereby catching Belgian officials by surprise in the late 1950s, when a renegotiation of previous trade treaties was being considered. The hypothesis that the Congo crisis found at least a proximate cause in the post-war race for raw materials – as Lumumba suggested to the New York Times a month before his death – appears deeply unlikely to Reid.
The Lumumba Plot has been subjected to savage criticism by De Witte, who faulted it for neglecting the Belgian variables in the crisis. Not only is the myopic focus on US influence self-aggrandizing – as if the Belgians were third-rate players in the Congo at the time – it indirectly supports the case of those in Belgium who are bent on closing the Lumumba dossier once and for all. Belgium’s motives in the crisis went far beyond resentment over his independence speech, after all. The democratisation of the former colonial army which Lumumba proposed in late 1960 already counted as an unforgivable provocation. Following this, numerous figures in the Belgian satrapy anticipated a Suez-style nationalisation of Katangese resources as had happened in 1956. Coupled with fears of an Algerian scenario – in which local Belgian colons would start Committees of Public Safety to safeguard their status as settler superiors and start a civil war – the rapidity of the Belgian retreat from its former crown colony begins to make sense. Evidence of the funds that flowed from Union Minière to the various indigenous saboteurs of the independence process has also long been available. This illustrates that raw materials other than depleted uranium (copper and cobalt, above all) weighed heavily on the Congolese scale – all facts that receive only a cursory mention in the discussion across the Atlantic.
The amnesia characteristic of Belgium’s relationship with its former dependency has persisted into the current media debate on the trial. Between Eyskens’s deflective apologism and Reid’s American exclusivism, a set of important questions remain unresolved, far from irrelevant to the current conjuncture. In 2025, a conflict-ridden Congo remains one of the world’s deadliest commodity frontiers, even more so for the extractive assets required for the global green transition; Umicore is a listed company with astronomical profits. One hardly needs to argue for the importance of Europe’s alignment in the coming Sino-American confrontation – with all its accompanying ideological blinders and extractivism, African scrambles and alliance policies. Seen from this angle, the Lumumba case seems anything but histoire ancienne.
Read on: Linda Melvern, ‘Dispatching Lumumba’, NLR 11.