On this day in 1959, Congolese residents of Stanleyville rebelled against Belgian colonizers, demanding independence after a speech by Patrice Lumumba. Police suppressed the riot, killing ~70, imposing martial law, and arresting Lumumba.
The day prior, Lumumba called for a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience in a speech to the MNC congress, also ordering Congolese people to not collaborate with the Belgian colonial government and announcing that the party would not take part in the upcoming December elections.
The rebellion began on October 30th when the police arrived at the suburb of Mangoba to arrest Lumumba. The uprising was suppressed with military force, including two companies of infantry.
In total, approximately 70 people were killed in the fighting, and up to 200 were wounded. Lumumba himself was arrested by police as the government imposed martial law and banned gatherings of more than five people.
Congo would achieve independence from Belgium on June 30th, 1960, with Lumumba serving as its first Prime Minister. He was assassinated by Belgian forces and their collaborators on January 17th, 1961.
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I hate critiques of empiricism getting dismissed too easily by pretending they could only apply to very unlikely questions like "will the sun rise tomorrow" or "will the laws of the universe change instantly". Like yeah, it's probably fine to dodge some of these fundamental philosophical questions if the body of knowledge physics, chemistry, or mathematics. There won't be practical questions. But these very basic questions seem really important for stuff like "do econonic models built during the post-war boom really make sense now". Like it feels in the social sciences the laws of the universe, so to speak, do fundamentally change constantly. Sociologists and psychologists seem pretty acutely aware, even if academia seems to prefer you publish bad papers to having serious philosophical discussions about the future of your own field. But fucking economists get handed over a bunch of levers of power, with zero democratic accountability, on the premise that their framework is infallible.
As a social sciences; No one respects economists. Most of us fully understand that the knowledge we create can only be empirically evaluated with great difficulty and many caveats, if at all. We do the best we can through observation and the limited experimentation that is possible, all the while building better tools and exploring new theoretical approaches.
Like there's a good number of people in Anthropology who agree that western capitalist economics is a pseudo-scientific religion, and it is studied as such.