The violent collapse of order (1960–1965) that followed the Belgian Congo's hasty independence — an army mutiny, the secession of mineral-rich Katanga, the dismissal and assassination of the first prime minister Patrice Lumumba, with Belgian and Katangan involvement and documented U.S. plotting against him, the largest United Nations peacekeeping operation of its era, and a Cold War proxy struggle that ended with the rise of the dictator Mobutu. It became the defining case of foreign intervention in newly independent Africa, and of the gap between the flag of sovereignty and the substance of it.
Belgium granted the Congo independence on 30 June 1960, then watched it come apart within a week. The new state inherited a flag, a seat at the United Nations, and almost nothing else. Belgium had ruled for decades without training Congolese to govern, command troops, or run a treasury, so the apparatus of a country was handed over with no one prepared to work it. Within days the army mutinied, the richest province broke away, and the former colonizer sent its soldiers back. Five years later the first prime minister had been murdered and a Western-backed strongman ruled. The Congo Crisis is where the hopes of 1960 went to die, and where independence on paper met its limits in fact.