# Seventy-Two Days *A Biography of Patrice Lumumba* — Legendary Biographies No. 088 - **Subject:** Patrice Émery Lumumba (born Élias Okit'Asombo) - **Written by:** Aubin Kalonji - **Shelf:** Power & Politics / World Politics - **Published:** 2025 - **Extent:** 215 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 215 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **Hardcover:** $24.99 — 6 × 9 in · 215 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90470-044-7) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Camille Rhodes (ISBN 979-8-90623-025-6) - **Content notes:** state-sponsored murder; torture Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/088-seventy-two-days.html ## About this book On June 30, 1960, in the great hall of the Palais de la Nation in Léopoldville, a thirty-five-year-old former postal clerk rose to address a king. Patrice Lumumba had not been invited to speak. What he said in the next eleven minutes — about the lash, the forced labor, the looted rubber and severed hands — would help cost him his life within seven months. Aubin Kalonji traces the seventy-two days of Lumumba's premiership and the long shadow they cast: the mutiny in the Force Publique, the secession of Katanga, the cables flying between Brussels, Washington and the United Nations, and the slow closing of every door. He returns again and again to the rooms where decisions were made — and to the man at the center of them, by turns visionary, exhausted, naive, and unyielding. Drawing on Belgian state archives, declassified CIA files, and the testimony of those who drove the final convoy into the bush outside Élisabethville, Kalonji reconstructs not only a killing but a vanishing: of a country's first independent government, of a generation's faith in the postcolonial promise, of a body that was dissolved in acid so that no grave could be made. What she offers, in the end, is a portrait of a man who understood, perhaps before anyone, what independence on someone else's terms would cost. ## Contents 1. Son of Onalua 2. The Mission School 3. The Évolué 4. The Awakening 5. The Mouvement National Congolais 6. Accra 7. The Round Table 8. The Speech 9. Prime Minister 10. Katanga 11. The Cold War Comes to Congo 12. The Appeal 13. The Coup 14. The Escape 15. The Transfer 16. January 17 17. The Aftermath 18. The Unfinished Promise 19. The Tooth ## Questions **Who is Seventy-Two Days about?** Patrice Émery Lumumba (born Élias Okit'Asombo). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case Seventy-Two Days — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 5,644 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 64,500 words, 19 chapters, 215 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. **Does this book carry content warnings?** Yes: state-sponsored murder; torture. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle. ## The writer Aubin Kalonji is a Congolese-Belgian journalist who reported from Kinshasa and Brussels for Le Soir before relocating to writing books about post-independence African statesmen, their unfinished projects, and the foreign hands that interfered. His research focuses on archival records and personal interviews, aiming to reconstruct complex historical moments with clarity. In Seventy-Two Days, he examines the brief, pivotal leadership of Patrice Lumumba during the Congo crisis. He currently lives in Brussels, where he works as an independent researcher and frequently lectures on Central African twentieth-century history.