by HORACE CAMPBELL
January 2011 marked 50 years since Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was assassinated. This assassination represented one of the many examples of efforts to destroy the African self-determination project. In his book on The Assassination of Patrice Lumumba, Ludo de Witte noted that,
“The murder has affected the history of Africa. The overthrow of Congo’s first government, the elimination of Lumumba, the bloody repression of the second resistance to the neocolonial regime of Joseph Kasavubu, Mobutu and Moise Tshombe and finally the creation of the Second Republic in this vast strategic country: the repercussions of all these events had disastrous consequences throughout Africa as a whole. If Africa was a revolver and the Congo its trigger, to borrow Frantz Fanon’s analogy, the assassination of Lumumba and tens of thousands of other Congolese nationalists, from 1960-1965, was the West’s ultimate attempt to destroy the continent’s authentic independent development.”
Fanon had written on the continued efforts to destroy transformations from colonialism and in June 2011, fifty years after this assassination and the murder of numerous genuine freedom fighters in Africa, it is now possible to fully chronicle all of the efforts to pre-empt Africa’s reconstruction. Ludo de Witte used the metaphor of the revolver with the trigger to connect the militarism that is linked to the plunder that has been going on for the past fifty years with the massive propaganda on “development” and “progress” to cover up the role of the international mining houses and pharmaceuticals in Africa. As a scholar, I have been very cautious in using the formulations of progress and development. I am conscious of the genocidal activities that have been carried out in the name of progress and am always aware of the extermination of the First Nation peoples of the Americas in the name of progress. When writers and those who suffered from slavery and genocide draw attention to this history, then we are told that such events as the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans are unfortunate by products of progress and development.
Throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America the forces of international capitalism plundered the resources of the planet as the imperial reach of capital covered the globe. Today, these international plunderers work with local African allies and in the particular case of the DRC, they work in collaboration with the government of Rwanda in looting the DRC. Rwanda is presented as a serious development partner for Western companies, while the role of the Rwandese leadership in looting the DRC is overlooked.
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