Patrice Lumumba’s  Independence Day address, delivered on Congo Independence Day, June 30,1960.

 

 

“Men and women of the Congo, victorious fighters for independence, today victorious, I greet you in the name of the Congolese Government. All of you, my friends, who have fought tirelessly at our sides, I ask you to make this June 30, 1960, an illustrious date that you will keep indelibly engraved in your hearts, a date of significance of which you will teach to your children, so that they will make known to their sons and to their grandchildren the glorious history of our fight for liberty.

 

For this independence of the Congo, even as it is celebrated today with Belgium, a friendly country with whom we will deal as equal to equal, no Congolese worthy of the name will ever be able to forget that it was by fighting that it has been won, a day-to-day fight, an ardent and idealistic fight, a fight in which we were spared neither privation nor suffering, and for which we gave our strength and our blood.

 

We are proud of this struggle, of tears, of fire and of blood, to the depths of our being, for it was a noble and just struggle, and indispensable to put an end to the humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force.

 

This was our fate for eighty years of a colonial regime; our wounds are too fresh and too painful still for us to drive them from our memory. We have known harassing work, exacted in exchange for salaries which did not permit us to eat enough to drive away hunger, or to clothe ourselves, or to house ourselves decently, or to raise our children as creatures dear to us.

 

We have known ironies, insults, blows that we endured morning, noon and evening, because we are Negroes. Who will forget that to be black, one said “tu”, certainly not as to a friend, but because the more honourable “vous” was reserved for whites alone?

 

We have seen our land seized in the name of allegedly legal laws which in fact recognized only that might is right. We have seen that the law was not the same for a white and foe a black, accommodating for the first, cruel and inhumane for the other.

 

We have witnessed atrocious sufferings of those condemned for their political opinions or religious beliefs; exiled in their own country, their fate truly worse than death itself. We have seen that in the towns there were magnificent houses for the whites and crumbling shanties for the blacks; that a black was not admitted in the motion-picture houses, in the restaurants, in the stores of the Europeans; that a black traveled in the holds, at the feet of the whites in their luxury cabins.

 

Who will forget the massacres where so many of our brothers perished, the cells into which those who refused to submit to a regime of oppression and exploitation were thrown?

 

All that, my brothers , we have endured