Lumumba and the Broken InheritanceCongo · 1960–1965“Independence came on a Thursday. By the next week, the inheritance was already being stolen.”Belgium left the Congo with sixteen university graduates, an army officered entirely by Belgians, and the richest mineral ground on the continent. Patrice Lumumba, thirty-four years old, became prime minister of all of it — for two and a half months.The lesson the elders kept: Decolonisation that hands over a flag but not the army, the economy or the time to build, hands over a crisis with a national anthem.