The influence of Patrice Lumumba's thinking on the internationalisation of the Katanga crisis
Keywords:
Democratic Republic of Congo, Katanga, crisis, Patrice Lumumba, ThinkingCopyright (c) 2023 Ana Olmedo Alberca
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to analyse the impact of Patrice Lumumba's leadership in the early stages of the crisis caused by the secession of the province of Katanga (Democratic Republic of Congo) between 1960 and 1963. The figure of what was to become the prime minister of the newly constituted Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly the Belgian Congo, underwent a shift in thinking from connivance with the Belgian presence to rejection of Western interference. It was precisely this shift that brought him into the spotlight of the international community, which, in the historical context characterised by the beginning of decolonisation and the Cold War, interpreted his movements as a rapprochement with the communist bloc, prompting the intervention of actors both inside and outside the African continent.
Starting with the analysis of its thinking through its main speeches, a brief historical contextualisation will be carried out in order to go on to address its transformation, the three pillars that make it up (anti-colonialism, pan-Africanism and centralism) and the endogenous and exogenous factors that frustrated its political project, and which make this crisis one of the most paradigmatic examples of neo-colonialism.
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