📍Onalua, Kasai, Democratic Republic of Congo
1925 – 1961“I was born Patrice Émery Lumumba on the 2nd of July 1925 in Onalua, a village in the Kasai region of the Belgian Congo. I became a postal clerk, a beer salesman, a writer, and eventually the founding Prime Minister of the independent Republic of the Congo in June 1960. I was Prime Minister for less than three months before being deposed in a CIA-backed coup. I was transferred to Katanga province in January 1961, tortured, shot, and my body dissolved in acid. I was thirty-five years old. In those three months I had given the speech at independence that told Belgium and the world what colonialism had been — the back-breaking work, the insults, the dispossession — without ornament or diplomatic softening. No one who heard that speech forgot it.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons
Sources: Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. Patrice Lumumba (2014), Ohio University Press; De Witte, L. The Assassination of Lumumba (2001, translated Ann Wright and Renée Fenby), Verso