At the height of her husband's power, 28-year-old Pauline Lumumba wore diamonds and high heels and Paris frocks. Last week she bared her breasts in the Congo's traditional sign of mourning, and led a wailing procession of other bare-breasted women through the streets of Léopoldville. Coldly and without regrets, her husband's archfoes in far-off Katanga province had just proclaimed that Patrice Lumumba was dead and buried deep.
The Katangese, who defied world opinion for weeks in hanging onto Lumumba, finished the affair with a flourish. "I will speak frankly," said Katanga Interior Minister Godefroid Munongo. "If people accuse us of killing Lumumba, I will reply: 'Prove it.' "
Last Look. The last time Patrice Lumumba was seen alive by anyone but his captors was Jan. 17. It was the low point in the career of a man who had dreamed of bossing a united Congo in the grand style of the man whom he admired, Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah. He had failed, but as a Western diplomat put it, "being the best demagogue around, he kept anybody else from running it either." Taken from a military prison in Thysville, where in typical fashion he had almost fast-talked his guards into mutiny, Lumumba was flown to Elisabethville, hauled out and savagely beaten by Katangese soldiers, then driven off to jail, his hands bound behind his back with rope. Most Congo experts are now convinced that the Katangese, aware that Lumumba was gaining followers even while in prison, shot him the very next morning.
The elaborate tale told by Minister Munongo last week did little to change anybody's mind. Lumumba, as Munongo told it, had escaped by stolen car from a farmhouse prison near the Portuguese Angola border, along with his Minister of Youth, Maurice Mpolo, and Senate Vice President Joseph Okito. The car ran out of gas. was found overturned in a ditch 45 miles away. Three days later, fleeing on foot, all three were "massacred by the inhabitants of a small village." The villagers "may have acted somewhat precipitously, though excusably," conceded Munongo, but he would pay them the $8,000 bounty that he had posted for Lumumba's head. He would not name the village because of the possibility of "eventual reprisals" nor say where the three bodies were buried for fear of later "pilgrimages to the scene."
The Katangese solemnly produced steel spikes that Lumumba supposedly used to tunnel through a wall in the farmhouse and sticks of firewood with which the prisoners slugged the guards. But a photographer allowed to take pictures of the farmhouse reported "no signs of recent habitation," except for a bar of soap and pictures of the Matterhorn on the wall. Dr. G. E. Pieters, a Belgian who signed the death certificates, had no doubts about the identity of the principal victim ("You'd recognize that goatee and those bulging eyes anywhere"). Asked how the men had died, he replied: "What happened between my entry into the bush and my return is a medical secret. The code of the doctor forbids me to speak." But he admitted to a reporter, "The bodies were not fresh."