Read on Twitter
Great thread on impact of Patrice Lumumba and Congo Crisis in Egypt.
Wanted to share a few things that I covered in my diss though I imagine @ericburton227 and @Reem_AbouElFadl would have lots to share as well abt role of Cairo in anti-colonial struggles https://twitter.com/gerthuskens/status/1252651726034919424
Wanted to share a few things that I covered in my diss though I imagine @ericburton227 and @Reem_AbouElFadl would have lots to share as well abt role of Cairo in anti-colonial struggles https://twitter.com/gerthuskens/status/1252651726034919424
This is one of my favorite covers from the Arab Observer 
, and I think gets at how much of an impact the Congo crisis had in Cairo pretty much from the outset in the summer of 1960 (Nasser was even criticized over his focus on Congo in the fall)
, and I think gets at how much of an impact the Congo crisis had in Cairo pretty much from the outset in the summer of 1960 (Nasser was even criticized over his focus on Congo in the fall)
Egypt along with India and Ghana were part of the UN peacekeeping mission( definitely checkout @AM_OMalley's recent book on this!) and as far as I know this was the first time Nasser authorized troop deployments outside the Arab world (tho how much that distinction matters 
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There was also gov't promoted protests within Cairo that August with lots of news coverage in the Egyptian press over the summer and fall of 1960. I think it's pretty well known that Lumumba's children escaped to Cairo in November, followed by Pauline later on (though maybe not)
And in December, Salumu & the pro-Lumumba faction came to Cairo to meet w/ the Soviet ambassador in Egypt (a pretty established strategy for African nationalists), but also set up a new delegation in Cairo to be able to get their message out to international audiences
The Pathe clip in the thread is really phenomenal and I'll just add a photo of the protests, as well as Fathia Nkrumah with Lumumba's children in Cairo a few weeks earlier in late January.
In terms of relations with Belgian, Egypt actually re-established relations pretty quickly in 1961 even though they did nationalize Belgian property in December 1960 and then again after February (at least as far as I remember)
While Lumumba's assassination is definitely the high point, the specter of Congo continued to pop up in Egyptian political discourses (speeches, pamphlets, etc..) as a sort of lesson abt resurgent neocolonialism & simultaneously danger of over reach - esp. after collapse of UAR!
Eventually hoping to publish an article I've been sitting on for a few years about this, and how it reemerges in 1964 with the second crisis, but would love to hear if others have thoughts abt symbolism of Congo & how much we should interpret from monuments...
I'm still working through how in this moment conservative post-colonial modernizers & radical revolutionaries became allies & I wonder if this physical act of renaming spaces is actually that revolutionary or should be interpreted as co-opting this movement (or maybe both)
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