It was created to honor the national and panafrican hero Patrice Lumumba, independence leader and first prime minister of the country, who was executed in 1961 during the Congo crisis.

[1] In 2013 President Joseph Kabila's prime minister, Matata Ponyo, signed a series of decrees creating about 78 new cities[2] including Lumumbaville.

[6] It was not until June 2020, just a few days before the 60′th anniversary of independence, that a proposal to carry out the making of Lumumbaville into a city was approved at a meeting of the Ilunga cabinet with the strong support of President Félix Tshisekedi.

[7] The city administration was installed in time to organize three days of mourning in Lumumbaville when Lumumba's remains were repatriated in June 2022 and brought to Onalua as part of a tour of the country before being laid to rest in a special mausoleum in Kinshasa.

[11] In the Congo there is little interest in the management of sacred groves and their conservation rests mostly on traditional custom and fear of the forbidden.