Patrice Emery Lumumba was born on 2 July 1925, at Onalua village near the Katako-Kombe Town in the Sankuru district of north-eastern Kasai, Congo (modern day the Democratic Republic of Congo). . Lumumba’s tribe was the Batetela (Tetela) which is a dynamic branch of the Mongo-Nkutshu family of central Congo. He grew up in a mud-brick house. The Congo was a colony of Belgium and, as such, he attended both Protestant and Catholic schools run by white Belgian missionaries. Lumumba was intelligent and used to ask too many problematic questions

Lumumba was ambitious and aimed for social mobility, predominantly to form part of the “evolue”, the upper strata of the middle class; the highest-level indigenous Congolese could attain in the Belgian colony. His first employment was at the Postal Office as a postal clerk in Stanleyville City in 1954. However, Lumumba was accused of embezzlement and was jailed in 1955. Due to an extensive interview with King Baudouin, when he visited the Congo in 1955, Lumumba’s sentence was reduced in 1956. Lumumba, after working for almost three years,was appointed as the sales director for a brewery company in Léopoldville (currently known as Kinshasa) in 1957. This is how Lumumba left Stanleyville (currently known as Kisangani) for the Congo’s capital city, Kinshasa.

While Lumumba was working in Stanleyville, he joined the Belgian Liberal Political Party. When he relocated to Léopoldville to work at the brewery, he helped to find the Movement National Congolais (MNC) political party. Lumumba’s good personality and public speaking skills won him many admirers, making him a focal point within the party. While in prison in 1955, Lumumba reconsidered his status as an evolue and made a major shift towards Pan-Africanism and Congolese nationalism. The notion of nationalism enabled different ethnic groups that made up the Congolese society to come together and fight against colonial economic exploitation, political repression and cultural oppression.

The Belgian led government, in 1959, announced that Congolese local elections should take place within five years to full Congolese independence. At the Luluabourg Congress meeting in April 1959, various political groups and some members of MNC that favoured a unitary form of government for the Congo chose Lumumba to lead them. Within the MNC, however, there were other leaders that considered Lumumba’s views as radical and not good for the nation. It is argued that the result of this difference of opinion, was a split in the MNC party in July 1959 with a majority of the members following Albert Kalonji. Even though Lumumba had left Stanleyville , he was briefly detained on charges of encouraging the outbreak of riots in Stanleyville in November 1959. He was released from detention in time to attend the Round Table Conference in Brussels which paved the way for Congo’s general elections. Lumumba was an effective speaker in each of the Congo’s major vehicular languages as well as in French when compared to other Congolese leaders and this helped his campaigning.

After the May 1960 general elections, Congo achieved independence on 30 June 1960 with Lumumba as the leader of the largest single party. He was selected to become the Congo’s first prime minister and his political rival, Joseph Kasavubu, became president of the Congo.

As the prime minister, Lumumba faced sudden emergencies.The Congolese elite feared Lumumba’s notion of nationalism and participatory democracy and thus they started revolting against him. The revolt of the army and the secession of the provinces of Katanga and Southern Kasai were further emergencies. Lumumba sent Congolese troops to Southern Kasai province in attempt to restore the situation but the poorly trained soldiers killed thousands of Congolese civilians. The United Nations, through Secretary General Hammerskjöld, blamed Lumumba for the massacre of civilians. Lumumba disliked Belgium and the UN for not helping to restore order and unity in Congo. The Congolese elite conspired with foreign states, specifically the CIA and US administration, to get rid of Lumumba. When Lumumba asked for military help from the Soviet Union against the secessionist provinces of Southern Kasai and Katanga, President Kasavubu dismissed him from office on 5th September 1960. This was the beginning of the end of the political life of Patrice Lumumba. The Congolese National Assembly disagreed with the decision of the president and ordered Lumumba back in power as prime minister. This did not happen since a faction of the Congolese army, under Colonel Mobutu, took over the government instead and put Lumumba under the house arrest under the protection of Ghanaian troops of the UN force. Lumumba managed to get out of the house arrest in Kinshasa and attempted to leave for Stanleyville, but he was arrested by an army patrol and held prisoner in a military camp at Thysville.

From the military camp, Lumumba was transferred to Elisabethville, Katanga on January 18, 1961 despite the presence of United Nations troops, he was picked up by a small group led by Katanga’s interior minister, Godefroid Munongo. Lumumba was taken to a nearby house where he was assassinated.

Lumumba’s assassination made him a symbol of struggle for champions of African nations’ attempts to bond and set themselves free from the influence of the European Colonizers.

Patrice Émery Lumumba - South Africa history online

Why Patrice Lumumba Was a Threat

How the West Destroyed Congo’s Hopes for Independence

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  • GalaxyBrain [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    4·
    16 hours ago

    Vania should be stricken from metroidvania im replaying them, I liked them as a kid and they were the first ones I got into but now vastly vastly prefer the old school ones.

    They are just throwing everything at the wall. The shambolic castle design and poor signposting as well as lack of map references for why you were stuck at whatever dead end. Metroid showed when a red door was red on the damn map. The exp system and short range weapons combine to make backtracking fucking suck and you’ll need to do a lot of it. The dead ends are just dead ends cause most of the time the reward you get is useless to you aside from sale value to restock on potions. Instead of potions you could just have more health or not need to tank as many hits. Cause youre gonna blast through those potions trying to backtrack through hallways of unskippable enemies thar respawn every time you leave the room or giant open areas with small damage but hard to avoid enemies that fuck up your jumps and whittle you down for the next hallway. So you just tank hits going from save point to save point between dead ends until you need to warp back to the first area to buy potions and start your random search from the closest warp room to where the last unexplored dead end was. Im finding this really frustrating with dawn of sorrow as well cause after you can double jump you can dive kick flying enemies and bounce off which gives height and restores your second jump. My sequence breaks have yielded me a weapon im not gonna use, armor that i already have on and a full magic restore and magic restores itself by not using it. The souls of enemies being random ability drops is another thing that’s cool in concept but falls apart in execution cause your starting souls are fucoing stupid. Instead of one of each type where one is pretty useless and the other is just a stat bonus the starting ones should have been equivalents to the classic subweapons. I didn’t get any souls that attack upwards and am sick of using heavy swords for the arc when id rather use an equivalent to the age and id rather not grind axe knights to do so.

    • Esoteir [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      3·
      16 hours ago

      same honestly I really loved metroidvanias as a kid but as I grew older and got a deeply refined love for good pacing I can’t get into them anymore outside of like zero mission which works for me because the game was designed to be 100% completed in under two hours so the map is small and the backtracking isn’t painful when you can get anywhere on the map in like 60 seconds

      RETRVN to super castlevania 4 tbh

      • GalaxyBrain [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        14 hours ago

        I like Metroid and like that genre in concept but I think castlevania taught people you could do a half assed job and it would still be kinda fun.

        4 is actually my least favorite of the classic castlevsnia games that aren’t generally considered bad. My favorites are 1 and 3 on NES, then Bloodlines, then Rondo and then 4. I like 2 but its a different style of game. It is still however, maybe the one I replay the most aside from the first cause it’s fairly easy and has a lot of near set pieces. I like the 8 directional whipping but feel it should hage been used on a more mobile character in a game wirh more swinging and fluid platforming, would have been great for say an Indiana Jones game. As is it makes your subweapons kinda useless. In general I oddly kinda dislike 4 having less stiff controls when comparing it to other castlevania games. I love 4 as its own game but it’s not the slow and deliberate game I think of when I think classic castlevania.