Lucas Samalenge

Samalenge was born on 2 October 1928.[2] He became a nationally elected Member of Parliament for the CONAKAT party for the district of Élisabethville. This party consisted mostly of Southern Katangese people, including Moïse Tshombe and Godefroid Munongo. He was the only MP of his party to vote the investitutre at the Lumumba Government in June 1960.[3]

Flag of the State of Katanga

When Katangese provincial governor Moïse Tshombe declared the independence of the State of Katanga from the Congo, Samalenge became the Secretary of State of Information. His Chef de cabinet was the Belgian journalist Étienne Ugeux and deputy Chef de cabinet was Barthélemy Bwengu.[4] Public relations officer for Samalenge's office was Christian Souris, who later wrote a novel based on true facts under the pseudonym Christian Lanciney, named Les héros sont affreux.[5][6] According to Catherine Hoskyns, his office had a dual function of offering a Katangase nationalism for the Katangese people, and to brand the country as a peaceful, prosperous, Western-oriented state endangered by black nationalism and pro-communist forces in the Congo and at the United Nations. The information secretariat coordinated the Katangese representations in Brussels, Paris, and the Katanga Information Services in New York, as well as the various pro-Katangese groups abroad.[7] The propaganda efforts abroad in Katanga and abroad were successful. After Operation Rum Punch in August 1961, it seemed as if the secession was on its last legs, but the failure of Operation Morthor and the death of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld further consolidated the regime. Samalenge issued a statement in October 1961 in which he boasted that the 1.7 million Katangans have defeated the whole United Nations of more than 2 billion people, which succeeded because Katanga was in the right, according to him.[8]

At the time of the arrival of prisoners Patrice Lumumba, Maurice Mpolo, and Joseph Okito in a Douglas DC-4 plane at the airport of Luano in Katanga's capital Élisabethville during the afternoon of 17 January 1961, Samalenge was at the Cinéma Palace movie theatre with his Chef de cabinet Étienne Ugeux[9] and Tshombe at a screening of the Moral Re-Armament campaign when Tshombe was called to his residence somewhere between 16:00 and 17:00.[10] Minister of Finance Jean-Baptiste Kibwe later denied that Samalenge was present when the three Congolese politicians were assassinated near Élisabethville, but other sources place him at the execution.[11]

Samalenge was one of the very first individuals, or perhaps the first individual, to reveal Lumumba's death. According to Frédéric Vandewalle, he went on a pub crawl on the streets of the capital on 18 January and drunkenly confided to journalist Léopold Daffe of the Secreatariat of Information the details of the assassination.[12] According to Ludo De Witte, Samalenge went to the busy bar Le Relais and told everyone that Lumumba was murdered and he kicked his corpse. He then went around repeating the story until the police took him away.[13]

Lucas Samalenge died on 19 November 1961 under suspicious circumstances. Jules Chomé, Belgian lawyer and critic of the Katangese secession (and, later, a notable critic of Mobutu Sese Seko) reported that he officially died during a hunting incident, but that he was probably assassinated because he knew too much about the death of Lumumba.[14] The alleged incident took place in the woods 120 kms northwest of Élisabethville[15] His death occurred during the same week of Katangese Minister of National Education Joseph Kiwele, who died of a brain thrombosis on 14 November.[16] His body showed gunshot wounds in his neck, and when he was found, the people accompanying Samalenge already disappeared.[17]

In 1961, a literary competition named "Lucas Samalenge" was organised in Élisabethville.[18]

• List of unsolved deaths