r/HumanPorn

At the World Cup on Tuesday — a man in a red suit stood completely still for 90 minutes in the stands. Then he covered his mouth and pointed a gun to his head.

FIFA’s cameras cut away immediately.

His name is Michel Kuka Mboladinga — known as “Lumumba Vea,” which means “Lumumba Lives.” For more than a decade he has stood motionless at every DR Congo match — suit and tie, arm raised — as a living tribute to Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of an independent Congo.

Patrice Lumumba gave a stunning Independence Day speech on June 30, 1960 — standing before King Baudouin of Belgium — excoriating Belgian colonialism. Malcolm X called him “the greatest Black man who ever walked the African continent.”

Six months after independence, Belgian officers and soldiers captured Lumumba, tortured him, and executed him by firing squad. His body was dismembered and dissolved in acid. The only known remnant was a gold tooth kept by the Belgian officer responsible for 39 years until his death.

That is what Lumumba Vea stands in tribute to. Every single match. In a suit. Motionless. For 90 minutes.

On Tuesday against Colombia — he added something new. He covered his mouth and mimicked a gun to his head. A silent, devastating protest against the world’s silence over eastern DR Congo — one of the globe’s most severe yet least-covered humanitarian crises, which has displaced millions and claimed countless lives through violence and massacres.

Lumumba Vea went viral this week — covered by USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, CNN and the BBC. Every outlet explained the Patrice Lumumba connection. Not one mentioned the link between Lumumba’s CIA-backed assassination, the Western strategy to destabilize an independent Congo, and the current humanitarian catastrophe in eastern DRC today.

That connection is not a footnote. It is the entire story.

The same Western powers that assassinated Lumumba in 1961 — because he wanted Congo’s mineral wealth to benefit Congolese people — have spent 65 years ensuring the DRC remains destabilized, its cobalt and coltan flowing to Western technology companies while its people are massacred in the east.

FIFA cut the cameras. The mainstream media covered the gesture without the history. And a man in a red suit stood in the stands and said — without words — what the world refuses to hear.

Lumumba Lives.

This photograph-postcard published by the Brazilian government in 1904 shows a unique picture taken a decade earlier, somewhere near the Branco River in Northern Brazil, in 1894.

It depicts a Macuxi/Macushi young adult man in ceremonial regalia, including feathered headgear and feathered necklace/frock, while holding a stone axe in this right hand, and bow and arrows on the left hand. He stands over the skin of a jaguar, with its skull lying on the bottom-left corner of the image, as mementos of a successful hunt.

This is believed to be the first image depicting a person who was born inside the territory that now corresponds to the Brazilian state of Roraima.

The photograph-postcard was made by German photographer George Huebner, who visited the region looking for orchids in that year and took the first-ever photographs of the Braco River basin. The only known extant copy belongs to the vast personal collection of Maurício Zouein, a professor at the Universidade Federal de Roraima who holds a doctorate in social history (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro). He shared this valuable piece of history in 2022 through his book *"A ideia de civilização nas imagens da Amazônia"* ("The Idea of Civilization In Amazon's Images").