Belgian diplomat faces charges for 1961 Patrice Lumumba assassination
Ninety-two-year-old Etienne Davignon, the last survivor of the 10 conspirators, is scheduled to be tried for the crime
The name Patrice Lumumba, the first elected prime minister of what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), still echoes down the decades as a martyr of African decolonisation; seen as the hope of many of his people — he was brutally murdered in 1961 by conspirators of the ancien régime colonial.
Today, a 92-year-old Belgian, Etienne Davignon — the very last survivor of the 10 conspirators accused of entanglement in Lumumba’s assassination — is scheduled to be tried for what many Africanists see as one of the worst crimes of the colonial rearguard as it attempted to impose its imprint on the continent in the midst of the dramatic “wind of change” liberation period. ..
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