Patrice Lumumba was the first prime minister of the independent Congo and one of the great martyrs of African liberation. His fight for real independence made him a target of the colonial and imperial powers that sought to keep the Congo's immense wealth in their hands. Born in 1925 in the Kasai region of what was then the Belgian Congo, he worked as a postal clerk and a writer before throwing himself into the independence movement. In 1958 he helped found the Congolese National Movement, the only party that sought to unite the country's many peoples across ethnic and regional lines. That December, at the All-African People's Conference in Accra, he met Kwame Nkrumah and joined the wider Pan-African struggle.

When the Congo won its independence on June 30, 1960, Lumumba became prime minister. At the independence ceremony, with the Belgian king looking on, he answered the colonizers' self-congratulation with a speech recounting the forced labor, humiliation, and violence the Congolese people had suffered under Belgian rule. Within days, the mineral-rich province of Katanga seceded with the backing of Belgium and Western mining interests. When the United Nations refused to help restore the country's unity, Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union for aid, and the Western powers marked him as a threat.

The Eisenhower administration authorized his elimination, and the CIA developed a plot to poison him. In September 1960 Lumumba was ousted in a coup by army chief Joseph Mobutu, who would go on to rule the Congo for over three decades with Western support. Lumumba was captured and handed over to his enemies in Katanga, where on January 17, 1961, he was executed alongside his comrades Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito, with Belgian officers present. His body was destroyed to erase any trace, and decades later Belgium returned one of his teeth to his family. Lumumba's legacy endures as a symbol of Africa's unfinished struggle for true independence, and of the price imperialism exacts from those who refuse to surrender their people's wealth and dignity.