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"The Congo's independence marks a decisive step towards the liberation of the entire African continent."

A former postal clerk and beer salesman who became a fiery nationalist orator, Patrice Lumumba led the movement that won the Congo's independence and became its first prime minister in June 1960. At the independence ceremony he stunned the departing Belgians with a searing speech recounting the humiliations of colonial rule — winning the adoration of Congolese and the enmity of the West in a single address. When his country disintegrated within days, Lumumba appealed first to the UN and then, in desperation, to the Soviet Union — a step that convinced Washington and Brussels he was a dangerous radical who had to be removed. Deposed within months and imprisoned, he was handed over to his Katangese enemies and murdered in January 1961 with American and Belgian complicity, his body dissolved in acid. His death made him one of the great martyrs of African independence, a symbol of Cold War interference that endures to this day.

"The unity of the Congo must be preserved above all men."

A cautious, conservative nationalist and leader of the Bakongo people, Joseph Kasavubu became the Congo's first president, sharing an uneasy partnership with the far more radical Lumumba. Their rivalry erupted in September 1960 when each tried to dismiss the other, plunging the government into a constitutional crisis that opened the door to army intervention. Kasavubu's dismissal of Lumumba helped set in motion the events that led to the prime minister's murder. He remained a figurehead president through the years of crisis, presiding over the Katanga campaigns and the Simba rebellion, but real power drained toward the army. In November 1965 his own army chief, Mobutu, deposed him and seized power, ending Kasavubu's career; he retired to his farm and died a few years later.

"In our African tradition there are never two heads to a village."

A former journalist and sergeant in the colonial Force Publique, Joseph Mobutu rose to army chief of staff at independence and became the pivotal figure of the crisis. Backed by the CIA and Belgium as a reliable anti-communist, he mounted his first coup in September 1960, sidelining the politicians and helping deliver Lumumba to his death. He consolidated power over five years of chaos and, in November 1965, seized full control in a bloodless coup. He would rule the country he renamed Zaire for thirty-two years, styling himself Mobutu Sese Seko, plundering its wealth on a colossal scale while enjoying Western support as a Cold War ally. His kleptocratic dictatorship, a direct product of the crisis, ruined the country; he was finally overthrown in 1997 and died in exile months later, as the wars that would kill millions engulfed the Congo he left behind.

"The pursuit of peace and progress cannot end in a few years in either victory or defeat."

The Swedish diplomat and second UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld made the Congo the great test of his belief in an active, independent United Nations. He committed the world body to its largest peacekeeping operation yet — ONUC — to restore order, secure Belgian withdrawal, and, most fatefully, end the Katangese secession, walking a razor's edge between the Cold War superpowers. The mission drew the UN into open war in Katanga, and in September 1961, flying to Ndola to negotiate a ceasefire with Tshombe, Hammarskjöld died when his plane crashed at night in circumstances never fully explained — many believe he was shot down or sabotaged. The only Secretary-General to die in office, he was awarded a posthumous Nobel Peace Prize, and his death remains one of the Cold War's enduring mysteries, still under investigation decades later.

"Katanga is a strange kind of independence — a company with a flag."

An Irish diplomat, writer, and intellectual, Conor Cruise O'Brien served as Hammarskjöld's representative in Katanga and became the controversial face of the UN's attempt to end the secession by force. It was O'Brien who, in September 1961, launched Operation Morthor, the offensive that pitched UN peacekeepers into open battle with Katangese forces and mercenaries — and which stalled at Jadotville and coincided with Hammarskjöld's fatal flight. Blamed by many for exceeding his mandate and forced to resign, O'Brien wrote a famous, mordant memoir of the affair, 'To Katanga and Back,' which cast the secession as a puppet state of Belgian mining interests. He went on to a remarkable second career as an Irish government minister, writer, and one of the most provocative public intellectuals of his age.

"Katanga will not be governed from Léopoldville by men who cannot govern themselves."

A wealthy Katangese businessman and politician, close to Belgian mining interests and white settlers, Moïse Tshombe declared the secession of mineral-rich Katanga days after independence and ruled it for two and a half years as president of a breakaway state — one financed by the Union Minière mining company and defended by white mercenaries. To his supporters he was a pragmatic pro-Western moderate; to his enemies, a puppet and the man responsible for Lumumba's murder on Katangese soil. Driven into exile when the UN crushed the secession in 1963, Tshombe made an astonishing comeback: recalled in 1964 to become prime minister of the whole Congo, he used his old mercenaries to help suppress the Simba rebellion. But Mobutu's rise ended his career. Convicted of treason in absentia, he was later kidnapped in a hijacking, imprisoned in Algeria, and died there in 1969, officially of a heart attack.

"Katanga will defend itself by every means."

The grandson of a Yeke king and the hard man of the Katangese secession, Godefroid Munongo served as Tshombe's interior minister and security chief, and was widely regarded as the most ruthless figure of the breakaway state. He controlled the police and the intelligence apparatus and was present at, and implicated in, the killing of Patrice Lumumba after the deposed leader was flown to Katanga. Defiant to the end of the secession, Munongo remained a powerful figure in Katangese politics after its collapse. He never faced justice for Lumumba's murder, the details of which he took largely to his grave, and he died in 1992 — an enduring symbol of the dark, violent core of the Katanga affair.

"We are soldiers of fortune, and fortune favours the bold."

An Irish-born, British-raised former army officer and accountant, 'Mad Mike' Hoare became the most famous mercenary of the Congo wars. He first fought for the Katangese secession, then, in 1964, was hired by Tshombe's central government to raise and lead '5 Commando,' a unit of white mercenaries — many South African and Rhodesian — that spearheaded the campaign to crush the Simba rebellion, retaking towns and racing to relieve the hostages at Stanleyville. Hoare's mercenaries — the 'affreux,' or 'terrible ones' — were effective and brutal, and their role fixed the image of the white 'dog of war' in the postcolonial African imagination. Hoare later attempted a farcical coup in the Seychelles in 1981, was imprisoned, and lived to the age of 100, an unrepentant relic of the era of the freelance soldier.

"The human element failed. There is no will to fight. The leaders are corrupt."

In 1965, at the height of his fame after the Cuban Revolution, Che Guevara secretly slipped into the eastern Congo with a band of Cuban fighters to try to turn the Lumumbist Simba rebellion into a continental revolution. He hoped to train the guerrillas in the tactics that had won Cuba and to open an African front in the global struggle against imperialism. It was a disaster. Che found the rebel leaders absent, corrupt, and unwilling to fight, the fighters reliant on magic charms rather than discipline, and the whole enterprise hopeless. After seven months he withdrew in bitter failure, confiding to his diary that the rebellion had no future. His Congo venture, largely secret at the time, was a formative defeat that preceded his final, fatal campaign in Bolivia two years later.