Kanza, who served Lumumba as the Congo’s first ambassador to the United Nations, told the conference that Lumumba was killed only three days before the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy because the latter had promised Eleanor Roosevelt that he planned to use his powers to have Lumumba released from jail and let the Congolese Parliament decide whether or not he would remain prime minister. But he did not tell us how this information was made known to the conspirators, who moved with extraordinary haste to preempt Kennedy’s alleged intention."

~ George Nzongola-Ntalaja

Patrice Émery Lumumba was born on July 2, 1925, and died on January 17, 1961, murdered. In 1959 he had been arrested for inciting anti-colonial riots. Despite being arrested, his party (MNC, Mouvement national Congolais) won the local elections in a resounding fashion, while in Belgium they were about to hold the Brussels Conference where it would be negotiated the future independence of Congo. Eventually, Lumumba was released and allowed to participate in the Brussels Conference. In May 1960, the first democratic elections were held in the country which would become officially independent on June 30, 1960. The MNC won the elections, Lumumba became the first democratically elected prime minister, and Joseph Kasa-Vubu became the first democratically elected president of the Congo.

Unhappy to witness African natural wealth falling into the hands of Africans, the US and its allies had to react. With the excuse of coming "to protect Belgian interests in the region", Belgium sent 10,000 soldiers to the Congolese region of Katanga where the Belgium company Union minière du Haut Katanga was operating (read plundering). 

To Belgium,  a NATO member, it was offered plenty of military support from several allies, namely Germany, which gave them access to several military bases, and the US, which provided them with training and military equipment that made it possible for Belgium to send warplanes to the region, to transport 10,000 troops in record time, and to bomb the Congo River estuary.

In reality, these Belgian troops were coming to support the secessionist "ambitions" of the Katanga region led by Moise Tshombe, a Western puppet whose only goal in life was to perpetuate white Western capitalism's control over Congolese mineral wealth.

Newly elected President Lumumba reacted by asking the United Nations to help him stop the foreign aggressors. The UN simply pretended nothing was happening in Congo. Realizing the extent of the Western interests and of the Western might fighting against him and against his country, in the middle of the Cold War, Lumumba took the risky decision to ask the USSR for support. Only then did the UN reacted and sent its first blue helmets, not to stop NATO's aggression against Congo, but to machiavellianly install a buffer zone in Katanga between the belligerent parties, the first step towards the hypothetical independence of Katanga (like they did with Kosovo stolen from Serbia which, by the way, is also very rich in mineral resources), thus granting protection to most Western interests in the case of an odd defeat. 

Meanwhile, in Léopoldville, was unleashed a coup d'état orchestrated by the CIA and carried out by local forces with its backing. Mobutu Sese Seko (who went down in history as one of the most barbaric African dictators) came to power thanks to this coup. In the following weeks, Lumumba and other members of the democratically elected government repeatedly tried to reorganize into a shadow government. On January 17, 1961, Patrice Lumumba and two other politicians, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito, were captured and taken to the Katanga region where they were executed by the local military forces. The US, Belgium, and their Western allies had saved "their" African mineral wealth and ushered in a new era of terror and misery for the Congolese people.

In February 2002 the Belgian government officially apologized to the Congolese people and admitted "moral responsibility" and an "irrefutable share of responsibility for the events that led to Lumumba's death". In 2010, in a letter sent to the London Review of Books, Davie Lea stated that Daphen Park (former MI6 spy) confessed to him that he was the organizer of Lumumba's assassination. On June 21, 2007, secret CIA documents were declassified, proving that this very terrorist agency was the prime organizer of Lumumba's martyrdom.

Read:

Patrice Lumumba, by Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja

The Assassination of Lumumba, by Ludo De Witte