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Secret Letter. Scarcely two months after he took office, his good Ghana friend Kwame Nkrumah sent him a worried letter. "Patrice," wrote the "Redeemer," "if you fail, you have only yourself to blame and it will be due to your unwillingness to face the facts of life." The letter arrived too late: President Joseph Kasavubu had fired Lumumba. Lumumba's response was typical. He tried to fire Kasavubu. But the President was supported by the army, and it was Lumumba who stayed out.
For two months Lumumba lived under the protection of a U.N. guard-and used the telephone kept open for him by the U.N. to plot his return to power. One night he ducked past his guards and drove off, alone, toward his home town of Stanleyville, where he hoped to lead a revolution against Kasavubu. He was arrested before he got there. His captors, in Congo fashion, saw to it that he was beaten up, jailed, and, at Kasavubu's orders, eventually turned over to the personal custody of his archenemy Moise Tshombe—who either arranged to have him killed or let him die from wounds inflicted by Kasavubu's men.
Had he been wiser, or smarter, Patrice Lumumba would have been 39 this year. And the Congo might well have become a nation with no more than the normal ration of African problems instead of a blood-spattered land of savagery, corruption and anarchy—which is largely what Lumumba helped make it.