The Speech That Got Patrice Lumumba Killed

On Congo's independence day in 1960, a young prime minister grabbed the microphone and said what no one in the room wanted to hear. Seven months later he was dead.

Patrice Lumumba went from postal clerk and beer salesman to Congo's first prime minister at just 34. His independence-day speech made him a hero across Africa and a target in Brussels and Washington. Within weeks his country was falling apart: the army mutinied, Belgian troops returned, and mineral-rich Katanga broke away. His turn to the Soviet Union alarmed the West, and a campaign in South Kasai ended in the killing of hundreds of Luba civilians under his government. The CIA plotted his death, his own aide Joseph Mobutu took power, and in January 1961 Lumumba was handed to his enemies in Katanga and shot.

Sixty-one years later, a single tooth was all his family got back.