Forty Years to Say It

Congo became independent on 30 June 1960, with Patrice Lumumba as its first prime minister.

The state was independent and almost nothing else had been prepared for. There were very few Congolese university graduates, almost no Congolese army officers, and an administration staffed at every senior level by Belgians who had not expected to leave. Within days the army mutinied against its Belgian officers. Within weeks the province of Katanga declared independence under Moïse Tshombe, with Belgian troops on the ground and the backing of the mining interests that operated there.

Katanga is where the copper and the cobalt were. A mineral province seceding from the country its revenue supports, assisted by foreign forces with commercial interests in the province, is a pattern that recurs wherever wealth sits concentrated in one part of a map, and it has recurred since on three continents.

Lumumba asked the United Nations for help expelling the Belgians and restoring the territory; when that did not come in the form he wanted, he asked the Soviet Union. In the autumn of 1960 that was sufficient to make him, in Washington and Brussels alike, a problem to be solved rather than a head of government.

He was dismissed in September, detained, and on 17 January 1961 flown to Katanga, the province most committed to killing him. He was beaten during the flight and shot that night by a firing squad, with Belgian officers present. His body was afterwards destroyed with acid by a Belgian police officer, Gerard Soete, who kept a tooth.

Forty years later, a Belgian parliamentary commission of inquiry examined the record and concluded, in November 2001, that certain members of the Belgian government and other Belgian actors bore a moral responsibility for the circumstances leading to his death. In 2002, the foreign minister Louis Michel apologised to Lumumba's family and to the Congolese people. The tooth was returned to the family in 2022.

There is one distinction this chapter insists on, and it is a matter of method rather than of loyalty.

The CIA had its own plot against Lumumba, documented by the Church Committee, involving a poison prepared and sent to the station chief in Léopoldville. It was not carried out, and it is not the plot that killed him. American intent is documented; American execution is not. Two countries wanted the same outcome, and one of them brought it about.

Collapsing those two into a single story is common and it has a consequence: it moves the responsibility away from the state that a parliamentary commission found responsible, and towards the state that is easier to blame. Accuracy here is not a favour to anybody. It is the only reason the 2001 finding means anything.

Which brings this book back to where it started.

Belgium investigated itself in public, named its own ministers, and apologised. That is more than most of the states in this course have done about anything. It took forty years, it happened only after a historian's work made the question impossible to leave alone, and there is still no formal state apology for the colonial period itself.

The point is not that Belgium behaved well. The point is that the countries which eventually produce the documents are the countries a chapter like this can be written about at all, and that this is a fact about archives rather than a league table of conduct.