This is Pauline Lumumba, the woman who watched them kill her husband and then walked half-naked in protest. You may not have seen the photo, but it shows a Congolese 🇨🇩 woman, bare-chested, with her hair shaved, walking in the street crying, with a child tied on her back.
That woman is Pauline Opangu Lumumba, the wife of Patrice Lumumba, in 1961.
Patrice was only 35 years old and had been Prime Minister of Congo for just 67 days. His crime was that he declared, “Congo is not Belgium’s property. Our gold, our copper, and our diamonds will feed our children.” Because of those words, Belgium, America, and his own army chief, Mobutu, decided that he must die. On January 17, 1961, they took Patrice, together with Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito, to Katanga.
Pauline recounts what happened to him in harrowing detail. She said they beat him for hours, pulled out his teeth, and forced him to eat his own speech papers. Then a Belgian 🇧🇪 officer, Gerard Soete, shot him. After that, they cut his body into pieces with a saw and poured acid over it to dissolve him, so that no grave would ever exist. There was no body, no grave, only acid.
When they told Pauline, she did not scream. In Congolese tradition, she shaved her hair to mourn her husband. She removed her top to show the world, “You have stripped me of my husband. I have nothing left.” Then she walked barefoot from Leopoldville to the place where they killed him, a journey of 1,000 km, with her baby on her back, singing his name all the way.
Mobutu, who took part in killing her husband, went on to become President for 32 years with US support. Belgium kept Lumumba’s gold tooth as a souvenir in a police station until 2020. Patrice Lumumba died because he wanted a united Africa, like Gaddafi. Pauline died in 2014, still waiting for his body to be buried, and she never remarried. That is the price of saying, “Africa for Africans.” And you still think Africa’s poverty is because we are lazy.
#FreeAfrica
