Patrice Lumumba Centenary Dialogue: Anthony Monteiro

This is the transcript of a presentation given by Anthony Monteiro at the online discussion "The Legacy of the African Liberation Struggles: Continuing Struggle Against Neocolonialism in a Time of Western Crisis", an intercivilizational dialogue organized to commemorate the centenary of Patrice Lumumba.​
Anthony Monteiro is a scholar of W.E.B Du Bois and founder of the Saturday Free School in Philadelphia. He was involved in the international solidarity campaign in support of the African Liberation Struggles and in the anti-Apartheid and black liberation movement.

I think to celebrate Patrice Lumumba and to be invited is a great honor. Of course, I am going to look at Lumumba, the history of the Congo and of Pan-Africanism from the standpoint of the United States and the current crisis of the United States. Because, you know, I believe that the further we get from the time that Patrice Lumumba lived, the more clarity his life brings to world events.

We felt in the African-American community, although I was a teenager at the time, we felt the assassination of Patrice Lumumba very deeply. We looked upon it as a blow against the anticolonial struggle in Africa and we saw it, and increasingly so, as the West speaking out of both sides of its mouth; claiming to be for anticolonialism and democracy while preparing through the CIA, the British intelligence, and of course NATO to carry out coups and assassinations of African leaders. This was saying, in effect, that the West was not interested in real independence, but were interested in establishing a new order, a neocolonial system and Africa would be a fundamental foundation of this.

You know in 1963, in November, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and when Malcolm X, after giving a speech in New York, was asked what is your view about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Malcolm said it was an instance of the chickens coming home to roost. By which he meant that the assassination of Patrice Lumumba was now being actualized with the assassination of an American president. I would just extend that observation to the over 60 years since the United Nations General Assembly declared 1960 the year of Africa, ironically the same year that Patrice Lumumba became the prime minister of a new Congo. However the Western countries were committed to guaranteeing that there would never be the substance of independence, economic independence on the African continent.

In a lot of ways, sixty-five years later after the independence of the Congo, in a certain sense,  the political instability and crisis of the United States to use Malcolm X's words is an instance of the chickens coming home to roost. The wars, the destabilization, the assassinations especially of African leaders at every level and the attempt to control the world and to control the wealth and labor and intellect of Africa now is coming home to roost. For people who are not intimately familiar with the situation in the United States, we look like we are in something close to a civil war. The political sides are that antagonistic.

I think that we can speak of and think of Patrice Lumumba perhaps as the first martyr in what is this continuing struggle against the global neocolonial system that the West, and especially the United States, wanted to replace the old colonial empires with a new global neocolonial system. This has been a very difficult struggle because whereas in the old colonial system it was very direct. You knew that the Belgians controlled the Congo, that the British controlled Nigeria and Ghana and Sierra Leone, that Liberia was under the foot of the United States even though it claimed to be independent. And that South Africa and Zimbabwe and Namibia and the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde were controlled by what appeared to be settler colonial regimes or the Portuguese but in fact were controlled from the centers of finance capital, especially in the United States.

Here we're talking about Wall Street banks which have now evolved into these behemoths of world finance and investment and trade. We're talking about not just banks in the old sense but investment banks, hedge funds. Then we're talking about the corporations connected to them such as mining companies which have exploited Africa, not only the Congo but South Africa, Namibia, the large oil companies that sought to and have pretty much controlled a good part of the petroleum in Angola and Nigeria.

In this larger scheme we're looking at what drove the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the illegal overturning of his government and the attempt by people like Tshombe and Joseph Mobutu, traitors to Africa, to work with the West and Western intelligence for their own interest and sometimes for the interest of small groups of their own ethnic group against the cause of Africa itself.

You know, we talk of the Cold War and it's talked about a lot, the Cold War, the end of the Cold War with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But why was there a Cold War? Why was there attempts by the West to guarantee that there would not be an effective pan-Africanism, an economic and even monetary union on the African continent? Why did this never occur? Why were there all of these attempts to undermine positive non-alignment, effective non-alignment? Why was there all of this effort to marginalize leaders like Patrice Lumumba, like Kwame Nkrumah, like Amilcar Cabral and on and on. What they in the West wanted to call radical African leaders as though they were unreasonable.

The point was that the two systems, the system of freedom represented by the Indian independence, the Chinese revolution, the Russian revolution, that example could not take root and should not take root in Africa. And thus the Cold War, in many ways focused heavily upon Africa, was to prevent leaders and nations from arising that would unite with Asia, would unite with the Soviet Union and other socialist countries in a win-win economic order.

Now here we are 65 years after the Congolese independence and then in 1961 the assassination of Patrice Lumumb. We have a Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in China and a good part of the delegates representing governments and states were from Africa. Even when they did not make it officially to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting, they expressed their solidarity with China and with China, Russia, Iran, North Korea. These nations that have become the targets of Western corporate and imperialist power. I think that we are looking at a new world order, an anti-neocolonial world order. This is very hopeful.

And lastly, on the crisis in the United States. Do not underestimate this crisis. It is existential. The ruling elite itself is uncertain of its capacity to rule a country that is divided so sharply as the United States is. I live through the 1960s, a decade of assassinations. In many ways we look upon that decade as that of assassinations beginning with the assassination of Patrice Lumumba then Medgar Evers then John F. Kennedy then Malcolm X then Martin Luther King then Robert F. Kennedy. This was a period, I would suggest, where elements of the deep state engineered a coup d’état in the interest of a powerful US empire. I think they were partially successful in that.

We might now be entering another period of assassinations with the assassination of Charlie Kirk. But more than a period of assassination and unlike the 1960s, the political divisions in the country looked like a low-level civil war. The forces associated with MAGA and Donald Trump have openly said that they will avenge the assassination of Charlie Kirk. They blame his assassination on the so-called left and the rhetoric and the liberals in effect calling Trump and his allies fascists and so on. They say their rhetoric created the psychological conditions for the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

I bring this out to say that at the same time that the system of neocolonialism is in crisis, the major hegemon, the major empire in the world, the United States is also in a deep domestic political crisis. The question for us is where do we go from here?

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