The written
record

Office de Publicité, Brussels, 1961 · English: Pall Mall Press, London, 1962

Le Congo, terre d’avenir, est-il menacé?

Published in English as Congo, My Country

Patrice Lumumba

His only book, written in 1956–57, around the time of his trial and imprisonment, and published after his death. It shows the évolué Lumumba before the radical one: a reformer arguing for equal treatment and a Belgo-Congolese partnership.

SignificanceThe essential document of his intellectual starting point — and of how far and how fast his politics travelled between 1956 and 1960.

Présence Africaine, Paris, 1963

La pensée politique de Patrice Lumumba

Edited by Jean Van Lierde · preface by Jean-Paul Sartre

The founding collection of his speeches, letters, press statements and interviews from 1958 to 1961, gathered by the Belgian pacifist Jean Van Lierde, a friend and adviser. Sartre’s long preface is a major essay in its own right.

SignificanceThe standard French source for most of the texts quoted on this site.

Little, Brown, Boston, 1972

Lumumba Speaks

The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958–1961

Edited by Jean Van Lierde · translated by Helen R. Lane

The English edition of Van Lierde’s collection, with Sartre’s introduction — for decades the main way English-speaking readers encountered Lumumba in his own words.

SignificanceThe most complete English collection of his speeches and correspondence.

HSRC Press, Cape Town, 2012

Patrice Lumumba

Voices of Liberation

Compiled and introduced by Leo Zeilig

A selection of his key speeches and letters in South Africa’s Voices of Liberation series, with a biographical introduction that sets each text in context.

SignificanceA concise, affordable reader for students coming to Lumumba for the first time.

Ohio University Press, Ohio Short Histories of Africa, 2014

Patrice Lumumba

Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja

A short, authoritative life by one of the Congo’s leading political scientists, who places Lumumba in the history of Congolese struggles for democracy.

SignificanceThe best brief biography by a Congolese scholar.

Haus Publishing, London, 2008

Lumumba: Africa’s Lost Leader

Leo Zeilig

A readable full-length biography that follows Lumumba from Onalua to Katanga and pays close attention to the MNC as a political organisation.

SignificanceA good narrative introduction to the whole life.

Institut Africain-CEDAF / L’Harmattan, 1998

Patrice Lumumba: jeunesse et apprentissage politique, 1925–1956

Jean Omasombo Tshonda and Benoît Verhaegen

The detailed scholarly study of his childhood, schooling and Stanleyville years, based on interviews and colonial archives. Followed by a second volume on 1956–1960.

SignificanceThe reference work on the early life this site’s biography draws on.

Verso, London, 2001 · Dutch original De moord op Lumumba, 1999

The Assassination of Lumumba

Ludo De Witte

The book that reopened the case. Working from Belgian archives, De Witte documented the role of Belgian ministers, officers and advisers in Lumumba’s transfer to Katanga and his killing.

SignificanceIts publication led directly to the Belgian parliamentary inquiry of 2000–2001.

Harvard University Press, 2015

Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba

Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick

A Belgian and an American historian reconstruct the decisions in Léopoldville, Brussels, Washington, New York and Élisabethville that led to 17 January 1961, weighing each actor’s responsibility.

SignificanceThe most careful assessment of shared responsibility.

Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2023

The Lumumba Plot

The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination

Stuart A. Reid

A narrative history of American policy towards Lumumba, from the Eisenhower administration’s alarm to the CIA’s poison plot and its backing of Mobutu.

SignificanceThe fullest account of the American side, drawing on declassified records.

Penguin, 1972

Conflict in the Congo: The Rise and Fall of Lumumba

Thomas Kanza

A memoir-history by the young diplomat who represented Lumumba’s government at the United Nations — an insider’s view of 1960.

SignificanceTestimony from inside Lumumba’s government.

Zed Books, London, 2002

The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History

Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja

The wider story — from the Free State to the wars of the 1990s — in which Lumumba’s government is one chapter of a long struggle for democracy.

SignificanceEssential context for the colonial background and the crisis.