Lumumba Is Missing
On January 17, we commemorate the assassination of Patrice Lumumba (January 17, 1961). More than six decades later, his absence is a presence—heavy, luminous, demanding.
At United Souls, Lumumba is not one figure among others. He is the beginning. Our very first creation. The spearhead of our Figures of Struggle series—an artwork by the Toulouse-based artist Marie-Claire Laffaire: a stark black-and-white portrait, a gaze that cuts through time.
A gaze from Katanga, hands in handcuffs, delivered to imperial interests. A gaze that explains nothing—and therefore says everything. It carries the weight of a continent scandalously rich, facing a system that mistakes power for predation.
A Gaze That Carries a Letter
In that gaze, I hear the letter to Pauline: words held steady—respectful, never submissive. Lumumba draws a line that still guides us: dignity is not negotiable.
“Without dignity there is no freedom; without justice there is no dignity; and without independence there are no free people.”
And further on, the core of it: to remain upright, even when History is engineered against you.
“I prefer to die with my head held high… rather than live in submission and contempt for sacred principles.”
This is not posture. It is a compass.
The “Crime” of the Congo: Wealth Turned into a Curse
Lumumba paid for a truth that powerful interests could not tolerate: the Congo has the right to be sovereign, and its people have the right to inhabit their own wealth.
When a country becomes an open pit for others, its democracy becomes an inconvenience, its leaders become “problems,” and its future becomes a marketplace. The Congo, yesterday as today, remains one of the world’s strategic pressure points.
Frantz Fanon captured it with a sentence as sharp as a verdict:
“Africa is shaped like a revolver, and its trigger is in the Congo.”
In other words: what is decided in the Congo never remains confined to the Congo.
United Souls: Two Chapters for Lumumba
Our first Lumumba piece (Marie-Claire Laffaire) has remained, over the years, a central presence in the collection—because the symbol endures, because the story insists.
Then came a second chapter: following the restitution of Lumumba’s tooth, a late but profoundly political gesture, a new collaboration was born at United Souls with pop-art artist Fred Ebami—known in the scene as “Ebamiwarhol.”
This time, Lumumba returns in color. He reclaims codes and emblems: the Congo asserted, the hero restored, the leopard as a sign of strength and sovereignty. A way of saying: you do not only return a relic—you return a place.
2025: A Centenary, a Triptych of Struggles
Last year marked the centenary of Lumumba (1925–1961), alongside Malcolm X (1925–1965) and Frantz Fanon (1925–1961). Three births, three trajectories, one shared demand: to name reality, refuse humiliation, reclaim dignity.
A centenary is not a monument. It is a reminder: the future belongs to those who hold memory as a force for action.
In a Stadium, Lumumba Becomes a Body Again
In recent weeks, during AFCON 2025 in Morocco, one man shifted football toward ritual and reflection: Michel Kuka Mboladinga.
Match after match, he stood motionless—like a living statue of Lumumba. Even after DR Congo’s elimination in the round of 16, that presence kept speaking for an entire continent.
That is also Lumumba: a memory that circulates, moves through bodies, appears where no one expects it.
Making Lumumba Alive Again
We live in a globalized world, yet our souls remain connected. Each of us can do our part—a “hummingbird’s share”—to bend History toward a common ideal.
At United Souls, this is our way of fighting: to circulate memory in public space. To wear faces, struggles, and inheritance. To refuse comfortable forgetting.
Lumumba is missing. So let us make him alive again.