Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick. Death in the Congo

In January 1961, after less than six months in office, Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba succumbed to a maelstrom of forces that vied to keep Congo in the clutches of a postcolonial order dictated by capitalism and the Cold War. Neither his hamstrung and ephemeral government nor his dwindling cadre of supporters, both in Congo and abroad, could overcome a web of formidable opponents that his nationalistic rhetoric had riled up. Since then, Lumumba’s meteoric rise and fall has held a strong fascination for scholars, journalists, and activists. In commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Lumumba’s brutal murder, Congolese historian Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja wrote a piece in The Guardian (January 17, 2011) crediting it as “the most important assassination of the 20th century.” The death of Lumumba has elicited a cottage industry of books, plays, songs, films, and paintings, which aside from sharing some of their hagiographic agenda, have all attempted to disentangle the web of events, interests, and agencies that arrested Lumumba in his quest to emancipate Congo from Belgian colonialism. None has accomplished this task more doggedly than Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba by Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick.

Archaeology · Art history · Colonialism · Political science · African Studies and Ethnography · African Studies and Geopolitics · History · HIV/AIDS Impact and Responses · Law