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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Struggles for the 'second independence' in Congo-Kinshasa |
Author: | Wamba-dia-Wamba, E. |
Year: | 1987 |
Periodical: | Utafiti |
Volume: | 9 |
Issue: | 1 |
Pages: | 31-50 |
Language: | English |
Notes: | biblio. refs., ills. |
Geographic terms: | Congo (Democratic Republic of) Central Africa |
Subjects: | political conditions rebellions 1960-1969 politics imperialism political ideologies Political leadership Lumumba, Patrice, 1925-1961 Mulele, Pierre |
External link: | https://d.lib.msu.edu/utafiti/188/OBJ/download |
Abstract: | Patrice E. Lumumba, the first head of the government of the independent Congo (now Zaire), was assassinated in Elisabethville, Katanga, on January 17, 1961. Despite massive support from the people, Lumumba failed, fundamentally because of insufficient political and theoretical development of the leading core of the mass movement of struggle for true national independence. Lumumba lacked any solid organizational structure capable of dealing with imperialism, let alone systematically organizing the large masses of people and isolating local imperialist allies. A period of confusion and opportunism among Lumumbist nationalists followed Lumumba's assassination. In 1963 all the remaining Lumumbist forces regrouped in the Conseil national de libération (CNL), a form of united front serving as the leading core of the second independence movement. The revolutionary tendency within the CNL worked out a specific revolutionary strategy to lead the popular mass insurrection of 1963-1964, and Pierre Mulele's maquis provided the truly revolutionary leadership. Mulele was the first in the Congo to attempt to organize a national and democratic revolution with a Marxist-Leninist inspiration. The revolution he organized was ultimately defeated by the absence of an economy of resistance. Ann. (two documents, written by Mulele or under his supervision, summing up the first three years of armed struggle, including a self-evaluation of the weaknesses which ultimately led to failure, and describing the problems the maquis were facing), notes, ref. |