Emmanuel Gerard is Professor of History at KU Leuven–University of Leuven. Bruce Kuklick is Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.
In Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba, Emmanuel Gerard
and Bruce Kuklick open a wide aperture onto one of the most charged
historical whodunits of the 20th century… It lays bare the
entangled international actors that conspired to seal Lumumba’s
fate and that of the independent Congolese nation… Death in the
Congo is a riveting account.
*Wall Street Journal*
Death in the Congo is history for grown-ups, lucid and unsparing,
alert to our infinite capacity for deceit and self-deception.
*Chicago Tribune*
The story of Patrice Lumumba’s death is fascinating because it
seems emblematic of the Cold War–era decolonization of Africa… What
is distinctive and new in this very readable account is the
authors’ unrelentingly negative portraits of all the actors
involved. No one emerges unscathed: not the bumbling Congolese, not
the Cold War-crazed Americans, not the petulant Europeans—and,
worst of all, not even Lumumba himself, whom Gerard and Kuklick
portray as a gifted speaker but also a self-promoter who was
generally clueless about the exercise of power.
*Foreign Affairs*
While political violence is no stranger to the Congo, what happened
to Lumumba in the early 1960s still matters… To this day no one has
been prosecuted for Lumumba’s death. And this is where a book as
calm, clear and authoritative as Emmanuel Gerard’s and Bruce
Kuklick’s Death in the Congo adds true value. Novelists and
filmmakers have all had a go at the Lumumba story, but here at last
is history-writing at its most powerful: a work that reads in part
like a charge sheet for a war-crimes prosecution and in part like a
Shakespearian tragedy with farce thrown in… The drama of Lumumba’s
death makes a grand finale. But the book’s true importance lies in
spelling out the roles of the various powers involved, notably
America and Belgium. Individual prosecutions are now unrealistic,
but Death in the Congo demonstrates (something Tony Blair and
George W. Bush might ponder) that it is never too late to
investigate political decisions that lead to manipulation and
murder.
*The Spectator*
[Gerard and Kuklick] have bravely taken on the most important and
disturbing assassination of a democratically elected leader in
modern times, and an event on a par with that of Archduke Franz
Ferdinand for the mayhem and madness left in its wake… Rather than
interpreting [Lumumba’s] downfall as the result of crude Cold War
anti-communism, Gerard and Kuklick rightly argue that Cold War
tensions were more contextual, feeding into a U.S. commitment to
support Western interests and influence in post-colonial Africa;
its sympathy for Nato and its Belgian secretary general; and the
Eisenhower administration’s hatred of Lumumba.
*Times Higher Education*
[Gerard and Kuklick] have brilliantly and usefully provided fresh
details about how Lumumba, Okito, and Mpolo died. The book offers
revealing photographs of Lumumba with others, including President
Joseph Mobutu of Zaire… A book about an old story that has new
nuances and details for its readers, who should definitely include
general readers, students still in search of the truth about the
assassination, and, indeed, seasoned as well as amateur
Africanists.
*Africa Today*
Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba is an eminently
readable and absorbing book by Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick
which examines the evidence in a balanced and coherent manner while
examining the complex tapestry of the alliances, pacts, and
promises that comprised relations over the Congo between
Léopoldville (now Kinshasa), Brussels, the Katangan capital
Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi), London, New York, and Washington…
A thought-provoking work of history.
*H-Net Reviews*
Death in the Congo captures a striking portrait of an international
crisis in the early Cold War caused by one post-colonial
nationalist’s rise to power. It meticulously details the way
Patrice Lumumba was subsequently ousted and how his murder was
encouraged by western powers. In many ways, it is a character study
of the political leaders who instigated and backed Lumumba’s murder
and the men in the lower ranks who carried it out.
*International Affairs*
Outstanding… This major work of scholarship succeeds in showing how
the convergence of a complex mix of interests and motivations
resulted in Lumumba’s murder.
*Journal of American History*
The authors provide wealth of detail in this worthy primer to the
events that plunged the nation into decades of dictatorship under
Joseph Mobuto (Mobutu Sese Seko).
*Publishers Weekly*
Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick shed light on an important
episode in the annals of decolonization, the Cold War, and African
nationalism, as well as on significant aspects of the domestic
politics of Belgium and the United States. Death in the Congo is a
welcome contribution to our understanding of the darker side of
decision-making in ostensibly open and democratic political
systems.
*Edouard Bustin, Boston University, Emeritus*
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