Shortly after leading the Democratic Republic of the Congo to independence in June 1960, the country’s first prime minster, Patrice Lumumba, was overthrown and murdered. Lumumba, whom Malcolm X called “the greatest black man who ever walked the African continent”, had given a spine-tingling speech on the day of independence, upbraiding the country’s former colonial power, Belgium, for its despotic and racist rule. This – and his suspected openness to cooperation with the Soviet Union – may have sealed his destiny. His premiership lasted ten weeks. Lumumba’s spirit of defiance is still evident in the chilling newsreel footage of him being held captive by his political opponents shortly before his death.
The question of western involvement in Lumumba’s murder has hung over those events ever since and forms the backdrop to William Boyd’s new novel, Gabriel’s Moon, the first in an intended series. It centres on a young British journalist called Gabriel Dax who is on assignment in Africa at the dawn of the 1960s. Gabriel, orphaned in odd circumstances, has flourished in spite of this early tragedy and grown up to become a successful travel writer. (The novel pokes mild fun at Gabriel’s self-regard and the apparently purple prose of his books, listed in a bibliography at the end of the book.) Returning to London, he finds the recordings he’s made of an interview with Lumumba bear accidental witness to the conspiracy surrounding his overthrow. Now courted by shadowy intelligence officers, Gabriel is drawn deeper into the double-crossing world of cold war spycraft, pressured into further assignments and ends up on missions behind the iron curtain – all while negotiating the legacy of his early childhood trauma with an enigmatic psychoanalyst called Dr Katerina Haas.
