JÄGER, Anton

Complicities New Left Review -21/11/2025

Who killed Patrice Lumumba? More than six decades after the first prime minister of an independent Congolese state was put to death by a nocturnal firing squad, his ghost continues to haunt Belgian politics.

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From the outset, fingers in Kinshasa and Brussels were pointed at major players: the Belgian royal family; the upper strata of Belgium’s capitalist class, particularly the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga – a subsidiary of the infamous Socièté Générale, an emblem of European finance capital and predecessor of Umicore mining company – who were anxious to secure their property holdings in the post-colonial age; as well as American security services, concerned about stability in the African mineral belt between the Cold War nodes of Angola and Rhodesia, and then communist infiltration of the new Congolese government.

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The possible prosecution of Étienne Davignon – a 93-year-old former diplomat, captain of industry and son-in-law of the founding father of Europe’s Atlantic alliance Paul-Henri Spaak – has recently forced a reopening of the Lumumba case. There now is a significant chance that Davignon will stand trial for his complicity in the murder. During the political upheaval that engulfed the Congo following independence, he served as an intern at Belgium’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The ministry has long been suspected of aiding and abetting the killing. Davignon now faces a battery of war crime charges – not subject to a statute of limitations – including ‘unlawful detention and transfer of a civilian or prisoner of war’, absence of ‘fair and impartial trial’ and ‘humiliating and degrading treatment’. Lawyers representing Lumumba’s descendants firmly deny that Davignon was only a minor character. At the time, he also served as a diplomatic envoy to neighbouring Burundi, where he supervised the decolonisation process. Despite his youth, Davignon operated at the apex of the Belgian state elite.

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As historians have pointed out, while the Shinkolobwe mine in Katanga had furnished the uranium ore used to manufacture the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was shuttered by the time independence came. The Americans had tapped into other sources, thereby catching Belgian officials by surprise in the late 1950s, when a renegotiation of previous trade treaties was being considered.

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