The first prime minister of the independent Congo, a self-taught nationalist who led his country to freedom from Belgium in June 1960, held power for barely ten weeks before independence collapsed into army mutiny and the secession of Katanga, was dismissed in a power struggle and then captured and killed in January 1961 with the documented complicity of his former colonizer and amid Cold War hostility from the United States, and who in death became the defining martyr of African independence — the symbol of how dangerous it was for a newly free African nation to choose a leader the great powers would not accept.
On the day the Congo became independent, the Belgian king gave a speech praising the genius of his great-uncle, who had once owned the country as private property. Then the new prime minister rose, unscheduled, and answered him. Patrice Lumumba spoke not of gratitude but of the lash, the forced labor, and the humiliations of colonial rule, while the king sat stiff with anger. It was June 1960. Within ten weeks Lumumba would lose his office, within seven months he would be dead, and within a few years he would be a face on walls and banners across the world. He governed an independent nation for less time than a school term, and it made him immortal.