An Open Letter to the Youth of Congo and Africa
Sons and daughters of the Congo, Brothers and sisters of the continent, on 17 January 1961, in a forest clearing near Élisabethville, Belgian officers and Katangese mercenaries tortured, shot, and dissolved Patrice Émery Lumumba in sulphuric acid. They thought that by erasing even his bones they could erase the idea that Congo’s minerals could belong to Congolese people and that Africa could stand united and free. They failed. The acid entered our veins instead.
A living Sculpture at 2025/26 Afcons In Loving Memory of the Late Patrice Lumumba
Lumumba was not killed by “the West” as some faceless monster. He was killed by a precise, centuries-old machinery that refused to accept the end of formal empire: the Belgian government and Union Minière, colonial economic logic, Cold War doctrines, the infant IMF-World Bank system, and a United Nations controlled by former colonial powers. Declassified archives prove that ministers, spies, and corporate executives planned and celebrated the assassination. They acted as the last guardians of a system born in the slave trade and the Scramble of 1885. That system has a name: neocolonialism. It still rules today through debt traps, unequal contracts, currency domination, and the financing of armed groups that keep mineral zones lawless and cheap. Because that system survived independence: Congo produces 75% of the world’s cobalt yet has almost no battery factory, more people died in the two Congo wars than in all other African conflicts since 1960 combined, and Africa exports $400 billion in raw materials every year and imports $600 billion in finished goods exactly the same imbalance Leopold II designed.
Had Lumumba lived just ten more years: The Inga dams would be lighting half the continent, Katanga’s copper and cobalt would have built universities, railways, factories. Congo would have become the industrial heart of Africa, A real radical Organisation of African Unity would have been born in Kinshasa and Apartheid would have fallen earlier, the CFA franc would never have survived. That future was murdered and dissolved in acid.
These are the Reforms We Can No Longer Postpone, from the Base to the Summit.
Grassroots fire starting now;
1. Form Lumumba Cells in every village, campus, mine camp, ten people reading his speeches aloud and posting them everywhere.
2. Paint his 30 June 1960 speech on every wall. When they erase it, repaint it the same night.
3. Organise monthly “Cobalt Marches” carrying empty batteries: “This battery killed a Congolese child. Charge it with justice.”
4. Create People’s Mining Observatories, photograph every truck, expose every theft.
5. Launch the Lumumba Reparations Fund; 1 dollar from every African and honest ally on the 17th of every month for lawsuits, scholarships, and community solar plants.
6. Every 17 January at 21:00 sharp, stop the mines for one minute of continental silence. Let the machines feel what real power is.
Structural Revolution demanded now
1. Force Belgium, the UN, the US, and Britain to open every archive tomorrow or face asset seizures.
2. Declare every mining contract signed under foreign-backed secession or dictatorship legally void.
3. Pass an African Resource Sovereignty Charter: minimum 51% African ownership, full value-addition on the continent within 15 years.
4. Collectively repudiate all odious debt.
5. Create an African Industrialisation Fund financed by a continental mineral export tax, no IMF veto allowed.
6. Build a pan-African rapid-intervention force that will never again let a Lumumba or Sankara die alone.
To Readers in Europe and North America, you are not guilty of 1961, but you profit from it every day in your phones, your cars, your pensions. Demand the opening of the archives, the cancellation of odious debts, and contracts that no longer bleed Africa. Silence is complicity.
Our Ancestors Are Watching, from the forests of Kongo, from the hills of Buganda, from the banks of the Nile and the Niger, from the graves of Samory Touré, Nehanda, Behanzin, and all who fought the first invasion, they are watching. From the unmarked ditch where Lumumba’s bones were dissolved, his spirit is watching. They are not asking for tears. They are asking for victory.
I see the day when Congolese youth march into Glencore and the manager signs the new contract because his own children are marching with us in London and Zurich.
I see the girl born in a Kamituga tunnel opening Africa’s first gigafactory named “Patrice Émery Lumumba.”
I see Belgium on its knees returning the stolen tooth because every embassy on the continent is surrounded.
I see the acid meant to erase him become the fire that forges a continent that finally owns itself. That day is not coming. You are bringing it. The grave they never gave him is now the womb of a new Africa.
Lumumba’s last letter to his wife Pauline, written hours before they killed him, ends with these words: “History will one day have its say… Africa will write its own history, and it will be a history of glory and dignity.” That day has not yet come. But it can begin with you today. If we take back the Congo, we take back the continent and finish what they tried to dissolve in 1961.
With rage, love, and unbreakable hope, A child of Africa who refuses to forget.
Read more about the Author here; Philip Kakungulu
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