Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba by Emmanuel Gerard, Bruce Kuklick (review)

Death in the Congo offers a seamless account of the downfall of the Congo’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. Emmanuel Gerard is a professor of history at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and Bruce Kuklick is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. They have collaborated to produce a fascinating account of what happened in those first eventful months of the Congo’s independence in 1960. The authors use an impressive array of primary sources, the most important of which are new material from the National and State Archives of Belgium, the Belgian Foreign Affairs archives, the Archive of the United Nations, and newly released documents from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Death in the Congo shows how the legacy of Belgian imperialism helped create an international crisis and a grand-scale national tragedy. Gerard and Kuklick are brilliant on the interplay and importance of Belgian politics in the Congo’s crisis. King Baudouin, along with his father who had abdicated almost a decade earlier, “hated” the politicians who had “humbled the crown” (p. 33). The authors skillfully recount how Baudouin rendezvoused with his fiancée, allowing his personal impulses to affect his official duties with regard to the crisis. Besides dealing with a king-errant, Prime Minister Gaston Eyskens presided over an aging and “faltering” government that found the Congo to be a “millstone” around its neck (p. 34). Foreign Minister Pierre Wigny opposed Katangan secession and was left to confront its powerful supporters in the name of Defense Minister Arthur Gilson and the head of the Belgian Technical Mission in Elizabethville, Count Harold d’Aspremont Lynden. Gerard and Kuklick show the parallels between Belgian domestic crises and the way Belgian policymakers dealt with the Congo crisis. When it appeared that Eyskens could not hold his government together, Baudouin demanded he leave (p. 47), but Eyskens “thwarted” the king and won a shaky vote of confidence. Just hours before the vote Eyskens turned these same tactics on the Congo and demanded President Joseph Kasavubu to fire Lumumba. The authors’ attention to the complexities of political behavior and the subtle influences of politics add to the clever nature of the book.

Kuklick and Gerard offer a reasoned but dour view of the United Nations (UN) and the role of its Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjold, and only a little better view of U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower. The authors put both Hammarskjold and Eisenhower at the top of the list of those responsible for Lumumba’s death, even before any Belgian leaders, Army Chief of Staff Joseph Mobutu, or Katangan leader Moise Tshombe. Although the UN operation might have provided an “illusion of order” (p. 31) in Congo, Hammarskjold consistently misread the Belgians, stepped in at the wrong time (p. 43), and made speeches that were patently “difficult to interpret” (p. 78). The book shows how Hammarskjold tried to take a hard line on Katanga to “deflate” Lumumba but repeatedly failed to get UN peacekeepers into the province. Eisenhower in contrast worked to move beyond the ineffective UN, meeting with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s civilian head, Paul-Henri Spaak, to elevate the Western alliance (p. 70). Both scapegoated Lumumba for their failed and ineffective policies in the Congo.

Neither do the Congolese appear to be sound decision-makers. Perhaps a bit surprising is the small space devoted to Lumumba himself, who is often portrayed “through the eyes of several other people” (p. 219) and is not included in the book’s index. After a brief characterization of Lumumba, the authors, without much discussion, question the credibility of his aspirations (pp. 13–15). They have little to say about his relationship with either Kasavubu or Mobutu. Instead, in the chaotic first days after the Katangan secession, a “series of confused moves manifested the wretched naïveté of the local politicians” (p. 30). Although Mobutu was similarly “confused” during the events of September, the authors conclude that...