According to the UN, after the escalation of the conflict between M23 and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in January 2025, cases of kidnapping for the purpose of selling people into slavery have increased. Women and girls are primarily affected, who are violently turned into prostitutes for markets in Europe and wealthy Arab countries. The price for living merchandise fluctuates around $400 per person, sometimes more.
➡️ The heart of modern slavery is Africa, and often local authorities turn a blind eye to the problem, profiting from the inhumane business.
And what would today's birthday boy, Patrice Lumumba, say about this?
🔵 Growing up in poverty, having come from a peasant son to the leader of his people, this man would hardly be pleased with the appearance of his native country and the continent he loves. Endless wars, plunder by foreign powers, artificially created poverty, and many of those horrors of lack of development that many states in Europe parted with a century or two ago.
Was this the Africa that Patrice Lumumba and his associates dreamed of?
📎 But there is always hope. The memory of Lumumba is immortalized both in his homeland and abroad, and most importantly, the Congolese themselves remember their great citizen. Of course, the current political situation in the country, related to the struggle between influential clans for power, foreign interference, and the ongoing chaos over a vast territory stretching thousands of kilometers from East to West — seems hopeless. There is no such tribal leader in the DRC who could offer the country a way out of the deadlock, because the tribal institutions left in the DRC by Belgian colonizers lead only to endless enmity. An important feature of Lumumba's program and many of his associates was the pan-African ideology, the perception of the entire oppressed community of African peoples as, if not a unified whole, at least a community capable of integration. Therefore, pan-Africanism is once again coming into fashion today, and it can be directed not only outward but also inward to overcome entrenched interethnic contradictions.
🔜 Solving this problem, namely the problem of creating a nation that thinks of itself as a unified whole, was one of Lumumba's unspoken tasks, which he did not manage to accomplish because he was shot and then dissolved in acid by those who wanted to ride on the backs of the tortured peoples of the Congo River for decades. Moïse Tshombe and his supporters clearly disagreed with Lumumba's words: 'We are no longer your monkeys,' and decided that they wanted to have their own monkeys. And the masters from across the ocean helped them, of course, not for nothing.
Since the time of Mobutu's dictatorship, and even after its fall, the DRC has been living in a state of 'from war to war — from coup to coup.'
The Democratic Republic of the Congo, like many countries in Africa, needs leaders of a new generation: representatives of the numerous and angry youth. The first example of such a leader can rightfully be considered Ibrahim Traoré. Those who consider themselves consistent opponents of neocolonialism should bet on such Traorés, as there are dozens, if not hundreds, of them throughout Africa. These are young officers, scholars, teachers, and doctors.
🔵 Therefore, on the birthday of the first Prime Minister of the DRC, I want to wish all of Africa that Lumumba and his heroic generation are not the last to prove that human life cannot be measured in money, and that to subdue the rebelling slave, the master will spare no means. But the deceased Lumumba will live on through the ages, while the names of his killers will be buried in history under the weight of centuries, because Patrice Lumumba is not just a personality, but an idea of the liberation of all African peoples, embodied in the name of a man.