A sweeping, jazz-scored exploration of Cold War intrigue and African liberation, Johan Gimonprez’s 'Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat' lays bare the cultural and political battlegrounds where empires, artists, and freedom fighters clashed.
In a new film, former UN-Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld is portrayed as a defender of a fledgling postcolonial state. But his role in the Congo Crisis is more complicated.
Pedro Monaville selects key texts that helped shape a new book on Congolese student-driven left nationalism in the aftermath of Patrice Lumumba’s assassination.
Jacques Bongoma was a young Congolese progressive who became a close advisor to Joseph Mobutu after the country’s 1965 coup.
German historian Daniel Tödt wrote a history of the Congolese évolués. In this interview, he talks about the historiographical interventions of his book and the role of Patrice Lumumba in the history of évolués.
The return of Patrice Lumumba’s remains must not be an occasion for Belgium to congratulate itself, but for a full accounting of the colonial violence that led to the assassination and coverup.
Patrice Lumumba became a martyr of African independence. But what are Lumumba's "political afterlives" nearly sixty years later?
"Africa will write its own history and in both north and south it will be a history of glory and dignity" (Lumumba, 1960)
António Oliveira Salazar founded Portugal’s New State dictatorship in 1933. Some Portuguese still remember him fondly.
Creating spaces where artists related to the Congolese diaspora can freely tell their side of the story.
The merits of restaging 'Une Saison au Congo,' Aimé Césaire's history of the life and death of Patrice Lumumba, in London, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor.
When a member of the UK's House of Lords (a few months before she died) told another Lord, over tea, that she'd organized Lumumba's abduction and murder.
Anyone who knows anything about Cold War politics, knows the CIA had a hand in Lumumba's murder. The only difference now is that it's been proven.
A graphic novel written and illustrated by a group of Congolese graphic artists, take stock of a half-century of independence for the DRC.