'He passed by like a meteor': The life and death of Patrice Lumumba

Stuart A. Reid's new book is a wonderful read

All things equal, Patrice Lumumba was on his way to becoming just another incompetent, corrupt and authoritarian post-independence African leader. Instead, in the fog of the Cold War with the United States seeing ‘Soviet apparitions’ everywhere, the world’s superpower at the time became deeply involved “in a country which represented no strategic threat to the U.S., which housed no significant commercial U.S. commercial interests; in which few American citizens resided; and which was contagious to no U.S. territory” as a U.S. Senate committee led by Frank Church concluded.

The Man before the myth

Lumumba was born sometime in 1925 and, as was common across Africa in the early 20th century, his exact birth date was anchored to when a colonial endeavour passed his town. There is surprisingly still no agreement as to what his original name was or why (or when) he changed it to Patrice Lumumba. What is however clear is how intellectually malleable he was in his early years and how flexible, to put it mildly, his honesty was. In his first job working in a mining canteen, he stole items and sold them on the black market but by his second job he had transformed into a model colonial subject and began dressing very nicely, wore glasses and got fluent in French. He had an early marriage that was solely for the purpose of claiming an extra allowance from his employer and eventually married his long suffering wife, Pauline Opango, when she was 14. He got Pauline pregnant with their 4th child in 1960 at the same time as his secretary Alphonsine Masuba, a former beauty queen who could read and write (Pauline could not). Later, he got a prestigious job as a postal clerk and in 1956, he was caught stealing what was the equivalent of his 2 years salary (he had been stealing for 3 years without detection). The reason he gave was a good insight into who he was at the time, just 4 years before Congo’s independence: “How can a man improve his standard of living, secure decent conditions for his family, pay for his children’s education and, in general, enter the ranks of the civilised, with such an inadequate income?” he said of the job which had made him a member of Congo’s indigenous elite.

Just a few years before then, he espoused what might at best be described as a very charitable view of Belgian colonialism saying “We promise docility, loyal and sincere collaboration to all those who want to help us achieve, in union with them, the element that is beyond us: civilisation”. The first time he ever met the King of Belgium, he managed to grab his attention for 7 minutes but only discussed the issues of his Évolué class and then used the paper he ran and edited, The Postal Echo, to do a 6 page glowing feature on the King’s visit. All of this was in the context of the unique nature of Belgian colonialism in Congo and the way Leopold II ran it as his personal property. Much of the way Belgian colonialism played out is well known but is still striking when compared with say, Nigeria’s experience of British colonialism. Just a few years before independence, there were no nationalist or independence movements whatsoever in Congo. The first stirrings of nationalism in Lumumba began when he was jailed for the aforementioned theft in 1956 and found the prison conditions unbearable. The Stanleyville (today’s Kisangani in the Democratic Republic of Congo) prison was over capacity and full of urine. He complained that prison inmates were served food that “a European would never serve to his dog”. He began to rail against racial inequality and other glaring injustices that his eyes had not previously been open to. His prison sentence was cut short and in another display of those malleable standards, he took up a job as a beer salesman, after previously loudly denounced beer drinking and the culture it engendered in the country. He was so good at it - a sign of his later political strengths - that ‘Give me a Lumumba!’ became shorthand for punters asking for Polar beer in Congo’s various bars. He would later divert some of the company’s marketing budget to his personal political activities. It was while doing this job he would meet Joseph Mobutu who had been writing for newspapers at the time (the two men shared a few similarities including stealing and marrying 14 year old wives).

The major turning point in his politics came in 1958 when he attended Kwame Nkrumah’s Africa Conference in Ghana. In attendance were Frantz Fanon, Shirley DuBois (W.E.B’s wife) and various other leading lights of the Pan-African and independence movements across the continent. Meeting Nkrumah and the others completely changed his attitude towards Belgium and on his return to Congo, he was the star turn at the country’s first ever political rally. He called on Congo to “free itself from the chains of paternalism” and vowed to “wipe out the colonialist regime”. He went on to say “Africa is irrevocably engaged in a merciless struggle against the coloniser for its liberation”. It is hard to overstate how much of turnaround this was for the Lumumba of just a few years before who wanted nothing more than to be seen as ‘Europeanised’. That rally also had the effect of persuading Mobutu to enter into politics, sensing that something was afoot in the country.

A point I like to make is how colonialism handed countries far larger than what they could have ever put together on their own to African postcolonial leaders. In Congo, this phenomenon was on steroids - not only did nationalism and agitation start much later than in other African countries (for perspective: Ghana was already independent before Congo’s first ever political rally), it moved a lot quicker as well. Everyone began forming their own political party and the pre-independence election ended up being contested by an astonishing 80 parties. This also had the effect of forcing Lumumba into more radical positions since there was always someone ready to outflank him for being ‘too soft’ on the Belgians. In 1955 the Belgian King had visited Congo to adulation and cries of ‘Long live the King!’ (including that 6 page feature Lumumba wrote on him). By his next visit in 1959, he was insulted by crowds demanding ‘Independence now!’ with smoke grenades needed to clear the crowds. Around this time, Lumumba had been put in detention for inciting a riot that began the morning after he had given a fiery speech railing against the Belgians. He had become so hated by the white population by this point and there were fears a white officer might kill him in detention.

No country for young men

If Lumumba was undergoing an accelerated course in nationalism and independence agitation, Congo itself was far less ready. At independence, the country boasted only 20 university graduates in total - the result of deliberate policy by the Belgians to undereducate the Congolese - and only 2 of them made it into the first national cabinet (Lumumba, who only had the education he had received via his Post Office training, was not one of them). As with many other African countries, independence was entirely an elite affair but again, it was far worse in Congo. “What is independence?” ordinary people asked and all sorts of fantasies proliferated - no more taxes, prisoners would be free, plenty of food, clothes and cars and “families scrubbed the gravestones of their ancestors, hoping they would rise from the dead”. As the country hurtled full speed ahead to this unknown freedom, some Belgians simply gave up and left the country. Lumumba’s Congolese National Movement (MNC, founded in 1958) won the most seats in the June 1960 parliamentary elections but fell short of a majority (45 out of 137 seats). This stunned the Belgians who had backed Joseph Kasavubu’s Alliance des Bakongo (ABAKO), an ethnic politician in all but name.

The result was a government that prioritised inclusion above anything else - Lumumba became Prime Minister and Kasavubu became President (again, Congo had moved quicker than other African countries by deciding before independence that the King of Belgium would not be its head of state. Nigeria took 3 years to remove the Queen as Head of State in 1963). The government was an incoherent mess with one Ghanian official sent to the country to help complaining that ministers seemed to spend all their time drinking in bars. The country had no anthem at independence (and American song was played at the ceremony instead) and only when a UN official inquired about how the country should be distinguished - given the other French Congo across the river - did they think about this problem. After much squabbling and negotiation, they settled on Republic of Congo and for their neighbours to go by Congolese Republic. One minister later went to the UN office and asked to sit there for 3 days saying he had never used a desk before. In the words of Andrée Blouin - a woman who became his confidante and the subject of many unfounded rumours - said Lumumba “had the annoying habit of trying to see everyone who asked for him” with visitors constantly “streaming through his office as if it were a train station”. On Independence Day, he wrote an incendiary speech insulting the departing Belgians (his advisers asked him to tone it down but he refused) and was still making amendments to the speech as Kasavubu was giving his own address. He would later try to make amends with the Belgians during lunch but this only helped to reinforce their (growing) belief that he was an unreliable person. On the domestic front, Pauline threw his belongings out from the balcony on that same day because she was increasingly convinced he was going to leave her for someone more ‘Europeanised’. His new job as Prime Minister began to create a distance between him and Mobutu who he had appointed as his personal assistant while party leader but who now struggled for access to him amid the throng. All this is to sympathise with a man who was completely out of his depth but perhaps genuinely wanted to lead his country to a better future.

It did not take long for the whole thing to start coming apart. Again, as with many other newly independent African countries, a standing army proved to be the first source of trouble. Of course in Congo it happened at 5x the normal speed. The ‘Force Publique’, the colonial army that had morphed into the Congolese army but still led by Belgians, suffered a mutiny within days of independence. Junior Congolese soldiers revolted and beat up and locked up their Belgian superiors. They then embarked on a looting and raping spree (visibly pregnant women were spared) across the country and made their way to the PM’s and President’s residence. Lumumba’s response was to announce a mass promotion where everyone was promoted to the next highest rank. It did not work and this proved to be a fateful opening for Mobutu who was drafted in to talk to the soldiers and quell the unrest (he had received some military training in the past) and had a fair deal of success doing so. In this febrile atmosphere, rumours and paranoia reigned and 60,000 of the 80,000 Belgians in the country fled the Congo within 2 weeks of independence. White women believed that Congolese men were coming to rape them and spread the rumours among themselves like wild fire. Lumumba had a simple answer to this problem - it was the Belgians. He fired all Belgians in the Force Publique and promoted Mobutu to Colonel, the highest ever rank for a Congolese, effectively putting him in charge of the army (Mobutu went about in civilian clothes for a couple of weeks while they tried to find him a uniform that fit). Belgium sent in 300 troops to quell the situation which further enraged Lumumba. 11 days after independence, Moise Tshombe declared independence for his native Katanga region. What had taken 7 years in post-independence Nigeria with Biafra had happened in less than 2 weeks in Congo. A United Nations ‘peacekeeping’ force was cobbled together for the first time and the blue UN helmets were born.

Soviet Apparitions

Was Lumumba a communist? Mr. Reid makes a convincing argument that he was not. It is certainly not hard to believe that Lumumba didn’t take communist ideology that seriously. But the meme about him spread for a number of reasons. Firstly, in 1958 he had become friends with Ahmed Sekou Toure in Guinea who was firmly on the Soviet side of the ledger. Yet Toure’s circumstances were somewhat unique as the departing French colonialists had adopted a scorched earth policy on their way out of the country to teach the Guineans a lesson - they went so far as to remove light bulbs and burn everything they had used. Toure was grateful for the Soviet embrace when his country had no one else to turn to.

Secondly, as he ran his campaign for office, it was clear that he was well funded but no one could say for sure where the money was coming from. In the absence of anything definitive, the ‘Soviets’ filled the gap. His former ally, Albert Kalonji, who had split from the MNC poured petrol on this rumour by claiming that ‘Communists’ in Belgium had given Lumumba 10 million francs (roughly US$200,000 at the time). Another Belgian journalist claimed he had received US$2.8 million from foreign funders. These rumours spread to the point that his MNC became derided on the streets as Moscou Nous Conseils (Moscow guides us). The secessionist Tshombe got in on the act as well by printing derogatory cartoons showing Lumumba carrying a briefcase labelled Moscow.

But the most damaging effect came from the Americans who were gripped at the time by Domino Theory i.e. if one country were to come under communism in a region, surrounding countries would follow, a theory without credible evidence till this day. All of this was made worse by the nature of Congo as an American outpost. It was considered a backwater posting with less than 10 officials and with the State Department discouraging its own staff from taking up a posting there. Incompetence reigned and into this arrived the book’s villain - Larry Devlin - at the age of 37 as the CIA’s man on the ground. However badly Lumumba behaved, they managed to portray him in a worse light. The same incompetence and naiveté would lead them to fall for Mobutu’s sweet talk.

It was not just the Belgians Lumumba fell out with. Into the deteriorating situation in Congo also arrived Ralph Bunche, the son of a Detroit barber and one of the highest ranking African Americans in public life, on behalf of the United Nations. Bunche had been in Palestine in 1948 at the height of the Stern Gang who ended up killing his boss at the time, Folke Bernadotte, the UN appointed mediator to the conflict. Yet he constantly complained that Palestine had nothing on the Congo’s troubles. Whatever hopes for some racial affinity between he and Lumumba never materialised. They never got along for a moment with Lumumba referring to him as “that American negro” who failed to think like an African. In turn Bunche referred to him as a “maniacal child” and a “jungle demagogue” and went on to describe him as the “lowest man I have ever encountered” and most incredibly “it would be unkind to the animal kingdom to describe him as having the morals and conduct of an ape”.

The idea that Lumumba was crazy was now fairly widespread and his trip to the United States in July 1960 to solicit American support for his failing country (would a communist have done this?) did not help his cause. Ghana’s Oxford-trained Ambassador to the UN, Alex Quaison-Sackey, described him as crazy to Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN Secretary-General. His tendency to say whatever he thought his particular audience wanted to hear led Time Magazine to write that “his temperament is like the New England weather; if you don’t like it, wait a minute”. One businessman who met him later commented that he believed Lumumba was on drugs. A diamond merchant met him at a meeting and complained that he was struggling to get a visa to visit the Congo for business. There and then Lumumba took his passport and wrote “This is a visa” inside it. One US official who escorted him on a shopping trip to Manhattan later wrote that Lumumba came up short US$150 at the till but instead of returning the excess items he asked the official to pay for it. On their way back in the car, Lumumba brought out his handkerchief and US$300 fell out. He simply picked them up, pocketed them and said nothing. A particularly damaging rumour spread about his time in Washington DC claiming he had asked for a ‘blonde’ for the evening. It did not take much for this to play into the racial stereotypes of Congolese men raping white women. In the midst of all the chaos in Congo, Lumumba had impulsively signed a 50-year US$2 billion deal with an American businessman named Louis Detwiler, who was little more than a conman. Thankfully, he was later able to wriggle out of the contract with a man the Ghanaians had warned not to ever come back to Ghana. After the US he visited Canada and the Canadians described him as “vain, petty and perhaps unscrupulous”.

Were all these stories about Lumumba true? Was he a crazed drug user with a fantasy for blondes? It almost doesn’t matter. The reality was that the casual racism of the 1960s helped ensure that this was what most people who mattered in the US and the West had come to believe about him (words like ‘stupid’ were regularly used to describe him). And those perceptions went a long way in sealing the fate of a man who was mostly harmless but struggling under the weight of a crushing job and had no friends.

Off with his head

The security situation in Congo continued to deteriorate and Lumumba continued to blame the Belgians. He had a point - the breakaway rebels in Katanga were being backed by the Belgians. Before long the Belgians began to entertain the idea of assassinating him and considered a number of options including using his love of women to get at him. Larry Devlin and the CIA were also considering the idea of getting rid of him. It is a testament to the power of perceptions that this man - whatever his faults - had stoked so much strong feelings that people settled on killing him as the solution to whatever problems the Congo was facing.

A major claim in the book - still debated till today - was that the CIA got approval from President Dwight Eisenhower for his assassination at a meeting on August 18th. At this point, Eisenhower was coming to the end of his second term in office and was in poor health and very cranky. He had lost interest in his job and was playing golf everyday. He also held pretty racist views towards Lumumba and clearly did not think he amounted to much. Wherever the order came from, the CIA clearly began working on various assassination ideas, some of which were truly laughable - a reflection of the incompetence on the ground in a backwater posting. They considered putting poison in his toothpaste and hired a Greek ‘hitman’ who took 200,000 Francs from them to do the job and promptly disappeared. They also considered hiring a powerful witchdoctor to ‘neutralise’ what was widely thought to be Lumumba’s magic powers to allow them get at him. Later on they would hire two different hitmen to do the job and both of them somehow ended up staying in the same hotel in Congo. They ended up blowing each other’s cover and one of them tried to pay the other to do the job on their behalf.

Chaos descends, Mobutu ascends

As the Katanga situation deteriorated, the Americans tried to convince Kasavubu that he had the (dubious) power to remove Lumumba from office. For reasons that are not clear to understand (at least from the book), Kasavubu refused to go along with this plan. Each time they asked him, he would either keep quiet or change the subject to questions around how he could visit the US. Mobutu took the opportunity of this stalemate to try to take Katanga using the army. It descended into an orgy of ethnic violence. Mobutu eventually retreated but this greatly upset Lumumba who wanted him to continue the fight. Both men had a shouting match and Lumumba made the fateful decision to seek Russian help to continue the job. The very modest Soviet help arrived very late as they did not consider Lumumba as useful to them. But no matter, in the US this was framed as a ‘Soviet invasion’.

Dag Hammarskjöld at the UN continued to prevail on Kasavubu to remove Lumumba from office and eventually he relented, announcing his removal as Prime Minister on the evening of September 5th. Within an hour, Lumumba had counterattacked with his own radio address removing Kasavubu as President. President had fired Prime Minister and Prime Minister had fired President. Lumumba managed to convince parliament to let him address them and by the time he had finished dazzling them with his incredible oratorical powers, they voted 88-1 in favour of returning to the status quo.

Unable to assassinate him (yet), Devlin settled for the next best alternative - using the army to get rid of him. A disgruntled Mobutu made himself available to them and received US$5,000 in funding. He initially arrested Lumumba but when he (Lumumba) reminded him of their long friendship, he lost his nerve and let him go. Eventually on September 14th, Mobutu announced his coup and said he was placing the country in the hands of a ‘College of Commissioners’, a group of university graduates he described as ‘technocrats’. Once more, Congo had gotten there first with the first military coup in Sub-Saharan Africa. But Mobutu was no longer able to arrest Lumumba as by this time he was being guarded by Ghanaian troops. As long as he remained alive, everyone feared that his oratorical powers would eventually lead him to dominate the country’s politics. So, even after sponsoring a coup to remove him from office, the CIA continued to work on its plans to assassinate him.

Mobutu’s college of commissioners did not fare better in governing Congo and rumours of another coup were rife, of course. Soon he too, was being referred to as childish (he was only 30 at the time). Mobutu got angry at the Ghanaians and sent troops to close down their embassy and remove all Ghanaian diplomats from the country. There his troops met Tunisian soldiers guarding the embassy and were unable to carry out his orders. Such was the chaos of ‘independent’ Congo. By November, the US, using a lot of bribery, had engineered a vote at the UN General Assembly to recognise Kasavubu’s faction as the sole representative of the Congo. At this point, Mobutu had laid siege to Lumumba’s residence but could not get to him as he was being guarded by an inner ring of UN soldiers. So Mobutu’s men formed an outer ring and effectively placed him under house arrest.

The End Game

The loss of the UN vote convinced Lumumba that he would lose his UN protection and the only way was for him to escape to Stanleyville (Leopoldville, today’s Kinshasa, was the capital at the time and where he was being held) where he hailed from and had a lot of popular support and an army and government in waiting. If he could reach there, he would declare a new government effectively triggering a civil war in the country.

In an escape scene out of a movie, he made it past the UN guards and Mobutu’s men and began his journey to Stanleyville. After much travelling, he ran into a crowd and could not resist giving them a speech. Someone spotted him and passed the information on to the intelligence services. With Stanleyville on the horizon, he yet again stopped for one more rally and here Mobutu finally caught up with him. He was arrested and beaten in front of the cameras and then taken away for more torture.

All of this was happening in the lame duck period in the US where John F. Kennedy had won the November elections and was waiting tot take office on January 20th 1961. JFK had made a number of overtures to African independence movements and there was a lot of hope that his coming to office would mean the US would tip the scales in favour of Lumumba. Indeed an early report presented to JFK concluded that Lumumba was “the most plausible leader for the country”. Calls began to rise for his release and the longer he remained in detention the more of a problem he presented to Mobutu.

A few days before JFK was due to be sworn in as president, Mobutu and the College of Commissioners decided to ‘transfer’ him to the rebels in Katanga, ostensibly to answer charges of committing ethnic violence against them. This was in effect a death sentence. Larry Devlin knew of this plan but decided to withhold the information from Washington DC. On January 17th, 3 days before JFK’s swearing in, he was transferred by plane to Katanga. On the plane he was beaten so badly, the crew members pleaded for him and one of them threw up at the sorry sight. The outgoing Eisenhower government got wind of this and began making panicked calls to the Belgians (who were the Katanga rebels’ backers) warning them not to kill him. At a 90 minute meeting where a lot of whiskey was consumed, Moise Tshombe and his fellow Katangans decided they could not keep him for long and decided to kill him. He, along with 2 of his former ministers, were driven late at night by a team that included 4 Belgian officers to a bush where shallow graves were dug. All 3 of them were shot and buried there. But it did not take long for an antelope hunter to discover the graves so the next day they went back and exhumed bodies for burial at another site. This proved unsatisfactory still so a 3rd attempt was made - this time the bodies were dumped in barrels filled with sulphuric acid with only his gold capped molars recovered and taken away. The tooth was finally returned to Congo last year by Belgium. Lumumba was 35 at his death.

The news eventually filtered out that he had been killed and the Katangans made no attempt to deny they had killed him. In fact they expressed how happy they were at having done it. Pauline went on a street march on Valentine's Day 1961 to mourn him, bare chested, where she was joined by hundreds of mourners. In perhaps the most ironic quote in the book, when she demanded the release of his body from Tshombe, he said that “According to Bantu tradition, it is formally forbidden to unearth, even though only for several seconds, a body which is covered by earth”. At this point the actual manner in which he had been killed and reburied multiple times was not yet publicly known.

Postcript

Demonstrations broke out around the world including 100,000 people in a stadium in China who were addressed by Premier Zhou ‘it’s too soon to tell’ Enlai who blamed his ‘vile murder’ on the US and Belgium. A young Maya Angelou joined a protest at the UN Security Council Chamber where she shouted ‘assassin!’ at Dag Hammarskjöld. The UN was plunged into crisis and the Soviets, who had never really helped Lumumba when he needed it, used the opportunity to try to oust Hammarskjöld from his position. JFK used the opportunity to clean house at the CIA and State Department with a number of people losing their jobs. Mobutu meanwhile was trying to win over everyone and when he had a baby boy he named him ‘Joseph Moise’ in an attempt to flatter Joseph Kasavubu and Moise Tshombe. One of his acolytes, Cyrille Adoula, was backed by the US as a moderate and installed as PM. Katanga refused to participate in this new government and in 1963, Dag Hammarskjöld arranged to meet with Tshombe in Rhodesia to try to make some progress on the Katanga question. He died in a plane crash on the way there. His successor, U Thant, took no prisoners and decided everyone had had enough of Tshombe and the Katangans. Force was deployed and Tshombe was chased out of Congo and 6 years later he died in Algeria and was buried in Belgium.

Adoula purged all the Lumumba ‘leftists’ from government and created new problems for himself in the process. By September 1963, he was on very shaky ground so he did the tried and tested thing of dissolving parliament. A couple of months later, JFK was assassinated and by January 1964, another rebellion had broken out led by a former Lumumba education minister, Pierre Mulele, who had returned to Congo after receiving guerrilla training in Maoist China. The combination of the US being distracted in the aftermath of JFK’s assassination and Adoula’s weakness meant they took Stanleyville in short order and half of the country afterwards while carrying out some gruesome killings, forcing Adoula to resign. Congo became an international theatre and by April 1965, Che Guevara had arrived in the country with 100 men to provide support for the rebels. He left in disappointment complaining that the soldiers only seemed interested in drinking and womanising. He singled out their leader, one Laurent Kabila, aged 26, as being particularly addicted to drink and women.

Lyndon B. Johnson decided to send in US troops to support the Congolese government and they were soon able to take back Stanleyville in fierce fighting estimated to have claimed 100,000 lives. By November, Mobutu had extracted another backing from the US which allowed him to take power once again. At the age of 35, he was now fully in charge of Congo and promised to stay in office for only 5 years. In the event, he only overstayed this promise by 27 years. The following year he consolidated his power by publicly executing 4 people for an attempted coup against him. That put the fear of God into his enemies and from there he never looked back. A weary western world went along with him because in their thinking, as Mr. Reid put it in the book, “In the Congo, occasional barbarity was the price of stability”. He purged all his rivals and murdered others. He then proceeded to brazenly rehabilitate the image of Lumumba by building a mausoleum to him and instituting an annual Lumumba Day. He blamed ‘colonial machinations’ for his killing.

By 1974, when Mobutu had fully consolidated his hold on power, the Lumumba Day stopped being commemorated and his mausoleum fell into disrepair.

Yesterday and Today

The Congo is perhaps Africa’s most tragic story. A country seemingly doomed to fail with a succession of small men attempting to lead a very big country. In that sense, Lumumba was simply the first man to be chewed up by the country. No one seems to touch power there and remain anywhere close to normal.

Patrice Lumumba was a victim who had been killed by a thousand cuts before he was finally shot dead. The book paces a lot of blame on the US for his killing on the grounds that they had tried to assassinate him multiple times and Devlin did not stop his transfer to the Katangans when he could. In what is an incredibly well researched and written book (I strongly commend it to you), I hesitate to go along with this view wholly. The US were culpable but not all the blame can and should be placed on them. There was plenty to go round in the tragic killing.

Did his death change anything about Congo’s future? Unlikely. In his barely 5-month stint as PM, he had already shown signs of an authoritarian turn and almost certainly authorised Mobutu’s genocidal run in attempt to take back Katanga. There was plenty of racism about him but beyond the actual comments made, the infantilising did far more damage to my mind. It remains unclear to me why winning back Katanga was the agreed plan for all parties (except the Belgians). The country was too big for him to manage and I kept waiting for an adult to enter the room and say ‘no, you can’t have back Katanga, focus on governing what you have’.

But there is a part to the story that is most relevant for today. Here’s a throwaway paragraph buried deep inside a WSJ piece from August about the coup in Niger:

Though the U.S. had spent hundreds of millions of dollars transforming Niger into its top military outpost in the Sahara, it didn’t have an ambassador in the country.

The Biden administration didn’t formally nominate one until eight months after the previous ambassador left, only to face opposition from Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), who has put holds on State Department appointees until the White House releases intelligence he believes could show Covid-19 leaked from a Chinese lab. 

Washington also has no ambassador at the African Union or in neighboring Nigeria—or anybody in a special envoy post that it had created to deal with the region’s deterioration. The relevant Africa desk at the National Security Council was in flux, held by a short-term temporary post that was due to hand off to another temporary caretaker within days.

With coup after coup happening across Africa and rumours of Russian and Chinese influence, we are once again seeing Africa being treated as an understaffed backwater posting. Yet the ‘great power contest’ narrative continues from strength to strength in the Western media. With no eyes on the ground, the US launches silly programmes targeted at the continent dripping with ignorance.

What I’m trying to say is this - if the US and China/Russia were to come to blows somewhere in the world, then someone is going to get killed in Africa.

That’s worth thinking about and the biggest lesson to take away from this masterful and, ultimately, timely book.