Patrice Lumumba

Patrice Lumumba was born in the Kasai region of the Belgian Congo and worked as a postal clerk and travelling beer salesman before rising through evolue associations that Belgium tolerated as a safety valve for educated Africans. He helped found the Mouvement National Congolais in 1958, campaigning for full independence rather than the gradual self-rule Belgium preferred, and was jailed on the eve of a Brussels conference on the colony's future, a sentence that only raised his profile.

When Congo became independent in June 1960, Lumumba, at 34, became its first prime minister. The country collapsed within days: the army mutinied, the mineral-rich province of Katanga seceded with Belgian backing, and Lumumba's appeals to the United Nations and then the Soviet Union for help alarmed Western governments in the middle of the Cold War.

President Kasa-Vubu dismissed him in September, and army chief Joseph Mobutu, later shown to have been paid by Belgian and American intelligence, placed him under house arrest. Lumumba tried to flee to his political base and was captured, flown to secessionist Katanga, and shot by a firing squad in January 1961 with Belgian officers present. His body was dissolved in acid to destroy the evidence.

Belgium formally apologised for its role in 2002. Lumumba is remembered across Africa as a martyr of the continent's unfinished decolonisation.