ON THIS DAY ·
Assassination of Patrice Lumumba
17 Jan 1961 — Congo’s first elected premier, ousted with CIA and Belgian connivance, is executed by secessionist forces in Katanga. Africa’s decolonization collides with the Cold War, and loses.
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The moment in context
Roughly ninety new states emerged from the collapse of Europe’s empires between 1947 and 1975. At Bandung in 1955 many of them rejected the demand that they enlist in one camp or the other, and the Non-Aligned Movement that grew out of it treated non-alignment as strategic flexibility rather than passive indifference. India, Egypt, Yugoslavia and others took aid and arms from both sides while guarding their independence, because playing the blocs against each other was the single form of leverage a poor state actually possessed.
From Cold War in the Third World, chapter 8 of The Cold War, 1945–1991 (NOV 1975).
The place: Assassination of Patrice Lumumba — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — Decolonization and bipolarity, mutually radicalizing. Empires fell for their own reasons. Bankruptcy, nationalism, the war’s shattering of white invincibility (Ch. 7’s Singapore lesson). But the Cold…
- The turn — October 1973 — the war that moved the pivot. Egypt’s canal crossing shatters Israeli invincibility in an afternoon. Israel’s counter-crossing nearly destroys Egypt’s Third Army. Washington’s…
- What it changed — Communism’s maximum map — and its hollowness. The 1975–79 additions (Indochina, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Nicaragua) convince Moscow the “correlation of forces” has turned. And…
Then ask the room: “The Third World was the Cold War’s chessboard.” Attack that sentence with evidence from this map. The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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