Fifty years ago today, Patrice Lumumba was tortured and gunned down in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The first democratically elected leader of the newly independent country, he was just 35 years old.
Today Lumumba's country is "in a state of wreckage from which it has not yet recovered," living with the effects of war, sexual violence, corruption, poverty and disease. A country rich in natural resources (the richest country in the world in terms of natural resources?) its per-capita GDP is less than $200 per year (second poorest on Earth).