Lumumba
Directed by Raoul Peck
With Eriq Ebouaney, Maka Kotto
Screening at Valhalla and Chauvel Cinemas, Sydney, and Lumiere Cinema, Melbourne
REVIEW BY NICK EVERETT
Lumumba ends as the film begins, with a heart-wrenching dramatisation of the brutal 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of independent Democratic Republic of the Congo, along with two of his ministers, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito.
Lumumba's assassination, by an execution squad commanded by a Belgian captain, was the subject of a recent Belgian parliamentary commission. Its findings prompted an official apology last month by the Belgian government.
Patrice Lumumba founded the Congolese National Movement (MNC) in October 1958 to spearhead the Congo's struggle for independence from Belgium. In December 1958, he took a MNC delegation to the all-African Peoples Conference in Ghana. There he was strongly influenced by pan-Africanism and anti-colonialism.
In October 1959, Lumumba was arrested in a brutal crackdown after a MNC-led demonstration that left 30 dead. From jail, he and his MNC comrades organised a boycott of the December election, rejecting the Belgian government's proposed five-year decolonisation plan in favour of immediate independence. Lumumba, and the MNC believed the plan to be a ploy to install a puppet regime in the mineral rich colony.
Lumumba was released from jail, after being tortured, to participate in a conference in Brussels, where it was agreed that the Congo would gain formal independence on June 30, 1960. Belgian officials and businesspeople haggled until they got an agreement that ensured Belgian troops would remain, supposedly to safeguard Belgian citizens.
The MNC won the May 1960 election with Lumumba as the leading nationalist politician. It was agreed that Joseph Kasavubu (played in the film by Maka Kotto), leader of the runner-up Akabo Party, would assume the presidency while Lumumba would serve as prime minister.
A highlight of the film is Lumumba's defiant, impromptu independence day speech asserting that Congolese independence was not due to the benevolence of Belgium's King Boudouin I, but due to the sacrifices and perseverance of the Congolese people who had suffered "a humiliating slavery imposed by brute force".
Soon after independence, the ranks of the Force Publique (armed forces) revolted against their white officers. At the same time, Moise Tshombe, leader of a rival, tribal-based party, led the secession of the copper-rich province of Katanga, backed by Belgian troops and Western business interests.
Lumumba appealed to the United Nations for military intervention, which arrived on July 14, 1960. However, the UN acted to protect Belgian and other Western interests in the country. Lumumba sought support from the Soviet Union and found himself in a stand-off with the pro-Western President Kasavubu.
Meanwhile, the US government communicated its desire for the ousting of Lumumba to Colonel Joseph Mobutu, who had assumed the role of army chief of staff. In September 1960, Kasavubu sacked Lumumba. However, both continued to claim leadership of the government until Mobutu seized power in a military coup. After months of evading arrest, Lumumba was captured in January 1961.
After being transferred to Katanga by plane on the orders of two Belgian ministers, Lumumba was assaulted in the presence of Belgian officers and tortured in a villa guarded by Belgian troops. After his execution, on January 17, 1961, his body was exhumed by a Belgian police commissioner, Gerard Soete, and dissolved in acid.
Lumumba's director Raoul Peck, a former minister of culture in Haiti, spent several childhood years in the Congo and is a strong admirer of the African nationalist leader. The film is based on much of his own research, as well as that undertaken by Belgian sociologist Ludo De Witte. De Witte published The Assassination of Lumumba in 1999 and was a strong campaigner for a Belgian government inquiry into Lumumba's murder.
Peck lays bare the complicity of the UN, and the Belgian and US governments, in the horrible events. The character of Lumumba, an inspiring figure of African nationalism, is conveyed well by actor Eriq Ebouaney.
Yet the film inevitably flies through historical events with tremendous speed. Lumumba's transformation from Belgian beer salesperson to postal workers' union organiser and then independence leader occurs in the blink of an eye. We are often left in the dark as to the relationship between Lumumba, his comrades in the MNC and the anti-colonial revolution that is unfolding around them, especially within the ranks of the armed forces.
The final scene in the film captures dissent in the faces of a couple of solemn Lumumba supporters standing amongst a crowd that is celebrating the first anniversary of the Congo's independence, while Mobutu sits on his throne.
The guerilla struggle brewing outside Kinshasa by "Lumumbists", under the leadership of the late Laurent Kabila, that finally succeeded in overthrowing the Mobutu dictatorship in 1997, might have made a better conclusion to the film.
Nonetheless, Peck brings to life a figure that Western elites would like to forget.
Shortly before his assassination, Lumumba penned the following words in a farewell letter: "The only thing we wanted for our country was the right to a decent existence, to dignity without hypocrisy, to independence without restrictions... The day will come when history will have its say."
From Green Left Weekly, February 20, 2002.
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