Institute of Development and Education for Africa (IDEA)

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IDEA Extends Gratitude to Diretube for the Patrice Lumumba Video

May 28, 2016

We at the Institute of Development and Education for Africa (IDEA) are gratified to watch a brief documentary video on Lumumba put out by Diretube. While we thank Diretube for posting this video for our consumption, we particularly wish to convey our heartfelt appreciation to the presenter Shewenzu Melaku; the script writer Simneh Getaneh; project manager Teshome Tadesse; and editor Benti Abera.

The video entitled Leadership in Africa: The Legacy of Patrice Lumumba, dramatically captures the early 1960s political crisis in the Congo that led to the ultimate murder of Lumumba. By all measure, the documentary did a marvelous job in depicting the Lumumba experience but it was too short to fully document the politics of Congo in the early 1960s; and while the video critically examined the interference of Belgium and the United States in the Congo affairs, it does not extrapolate the heyday of the Cold War as manifested in the Congo and in which the Soviet Union was also involved. Moreover, while the video correctly documents the role of Joseph Kassa Vubu and Mobutu in the elimination of Lumumba, it does not mention Moise Kapenda Tshombe, the then Prime Minister of Congo and whose soldiers tortured and killed Lumumba along with his comrades. Incidentally, Tshombe was then admired as the “pro-West and anti-communist” by Richard Nixon.

If this documentary was at least 45 to 1 hour long, it could have effectively documented not only the hidden agenda that became the real cause for the murder of Lumumba and the permanent deep crisis in the Congo, but also the many facets of Lumumba, including his gift of writing brilliant essays and mesmerizing poems, one of which we like to present to our readers:

The dawn is here my brother; dawn! Look in our faces

A new morning breaks in Africa

Our only will now be land, the water, mighty rivers

Poor Negro was surrendering for thousands of years.

And hard torches of the sun will shine for us again

They will dry the tears in eyes and spittle on your face

The moment when you break the chains, the heavy fetters

The evil, cruel times will go never to come again.

This poem was first posted in 2006 in an article entitled The Ideological and Historical Foundations of Pan-Africanism, which can be read in its entirety by clicking this link: www.africanidea.org/pan-Africanism.html It was also featured in another article entitled The Rise of the Sun People: A New Morning Breaks in Africa, www.africanidea.org/Morning_break_Africa.html

The last part of the video shows how the executioners burned the clothes of Lumumba and his comrades in an effort to obliterate any incriminating proof in case the Lumumba blood cries and finds itself in the court of law. However, the burning of the clothes is a juvenile delinquent crime compared to the gruesome and humanly incomprehensible crime committed by the murderers after they killed and buried Lumumba and his friends: They exhumed the corpses and burned them with nitric acid, and one of the Belgian murderers took the teeth of Lumumba as trophy to Belgium, and after four decades he recently confessed that he had kept the teeth of Lumumba in his homestead and he admitted that he suffered from constant nightmare.