CCongolese and Congolese, independence fighters today victorious, I salute you on behalf of the Congolese government. To all of you, my friends, who fought relentlessly alongside us, I ask you to make this June 30, 1960 an illustrious date that you will cherish. To all of you, my friends who fought tirelessly alongside us, I ask you to make this June 30, 1960 an illustrious date that you will keep indelibly engraved in your hearts, a date whose meaning you will proudly teach your children, so that they in turn can tell their sons and grandsons the glorious history of our struggle for freedom. For, this independence of the Congo, if it is proclaimed today in the agreement with Belgium, a friendly country with which we deal as equals, no Congolese worthy of the name will ever be able to forget, however, that it is by the struggle that it has been conquered, an everyday struggle, an ardent and idealistic struggle, a struggle in which we spared neither our strength, nor our deprivations, nor our sufferings, nor our blood.
It was a struggle that was of tears, fire and blood, we are proud of it to the very depths of ourselves, because it was a noble and just fight, an indispensable struggle to put an end to the humiliating slavery which was forced upon us by force. What was our fate in 80 years of colonial rule, our wounds are too fresh and too painful for us to be able to drive them out of our memory. We have experienced the hard work required in exchange for wages that did not allow us to eat our hunger, to dress or to lodge decently, or to raise our children as loved ones. We knew the ironies, the insults, the blows we had to undergo morning, noon and night, because we were niggers.
Who will forget that a black man said "you", not as a friend, but because the honorable "You" was reserved for whites only! We have known our lands stolen in the name of supposedly legal texts, which only recognized the right of the strongest. We knew that the law was never the same, depending on whether it was a white or a black, accommodating for some, cruel and inhuman for others. We have known the atrocious sufferings of the relegated for political opinions or, religious beliefs: exiled in their own homeland, their fate was really worse than death itself. We have known that in the cities there were magnificent houses for the whites and huts crumbling for the blacks; that a black man was not allowed in cinemas, in restaurants, or in shops called "European"; that a black man was traveling on the hull of barges at the foot of white in his luxury cabin. Who will forget, finally, the shootings in which so many of our brothers perished, or the dungeons where were brutally thrown those who no longer wanted to submit to the regime of a justice of oppression and exploitation!
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THE DEATH THAT STRANGLED THE HEART OF AFRICA: The dehumanizing assassination of Patrice Lumumba from Congo and the Derailment of the Former Belgian Colony
Features
| Is Adult Product | |
| Release Date | 2018-02-04T00:00:01Z |
| Language | French |
| Number Of Pages | 41 |
| Publication Date | 2018-02-04T00:00:01Z |
