by MAHIR ALI
At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s-60s, US cultural initiatives seemed to be a relatively innocuous means of exerting soft power. These included State Department-sponsored tours by prominent musicians. The all too few descendants of African slaves whose prodigious talent had elevated them to iconic status were deemed particularly valuable in shaping America’s image in post-colonial Africa.
On one such tour, according to a report by Jason Burke in The Observer, jazz trumpeter and vocalist Louis Armstrong found himself being entertained in November 1960 by Larry Devlin, political attaché at the US embassy in Leopoldville, the capital of Congo.
Devlin was actually the CIA station chief in that city, and was determined to use Armstrong’s tour as a means of infiltrating Elisabethville, the capital of the breakaway province of Katanga, home to Congo’s lucrative repositories of minerals.
Katanga had broken away after Congo won independence in June 1960. At Congo’s independence ceremony, the nation’s newly elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba struck a tone very different from that of the outgoing colonial power’s representatives.
After King Baudouin of Belgium tried to cast his nation’s role in a benevolent light, ignoring the fact than an estimated half of Congo’s population had perished as a consequence of this benevolence, Lumumba made it clear that independence was the consequence of a brutal struggle, rather than a gift from Brussels. “We are your monkeys no more,” he declared.
Perhaps his fate was sealed even then. Decades later, Devlin confessed to the CIA’s role in toppling Lumumba in a coup led by Colonel Joseph-Desire Mobutu. Lumumba had requested UN assistance to reverse the secession of Katanga under the leadership of Moise Tshombe, whose actions were guided from Brussels, and who was propped up by Belgian and French mercenaries.
The UN responded, but after Lumumba was deposed the blue berets eventually handed him over to Mobutu loyalists, who humiliated him before transferring him to Katanga. He was tortured and summarily executed in January 1961. The CIA has claimed for some decades now that although it was indeed plotting to murder Lumumba, the matter was taken out of its hands. Britain’s MI6 has been more reticent about its role.
Belgium eventually acknowledged its complicity around the turn of the century. A Belgian police commissioner confessed he had dismembered Lumumba’s corpse and dissolved it in a vat of acid. (One wonders if Jamal Khashoggi’s murderers were aware of the precedent.)
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