Patrice Lumumba holds a place in the cosmology of post-colonial African political leaders second only, perhaps, to Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah.
The name alone conjures up visions of a pure and unsullied hero, a far-sighted father of the dream of African liberation, a 20th-century martyr to that cause.
There are many less charitable voices that dismiss Lumumba as a flash in the pan, a man who could not possibly have had the intellectual resources or the
lasting charisma to achieve the goals he set for himself in the tumultuous and treacherous politics of the Congo: a black romantic who walked to his doom with his eyes wide open.
The most uncharitable would say that the best thing that ever happened to Lumumba was getting himself eliminated while his reputation was still intact.
It is true that there has not since been another Congolese politician who has been able to attain anything like Lumumba’s stature, mythical as it may be.
But what do we really know about Lumumba? Where do we place him on the scale of political correctness, standards that are first set by utopian politicians, but which those very same politicians are the first to betray?
If he had lived, would Lumumba have been a Nelson Mandela or a Jonas Savimbi? Or would he merely have been a Bill Clinton, well meaning, stumblingly effective here and there, but fatally flawed by the passing temptations of power?
Or would he just have turned out to be a nobody, here today, gone tomorrow?
These are questions we will never be able to answer. Yet his image, goateed and bespectacled in a style disturbingly reminiscent of that other black martyr of the 1960s known as Malcolm X, still presses buttons of memory, even among those who were born long after his time.
A rash of new books, documentaries and general theories about the rise and fall of Lumumba have been hitting the stands in the past few years, giving further insights into how he was assassinated and at whose behest.
Haitian-born director Raoul Peck’s new feature film, Lumumba, has just joined the pack.
Peck’s film is beautifully shot, using the dramatic landscapes of Mozambique and Zimbabwe (it was impossible to shoot this film in the Congo, of course) as a backdrop to the drama. It sets the stage for the tale that is to unfold, reminding us, most importantly, that Lumumba held office as prime minister for a mere two months before his abduction and ultimate assassination, when he was still only 36 years old.
But the film falls into the Hollywood trap, painting the characters in broad brush strokes, rather than giving them inner depth. Thus Lumumba is portrayed as a tall, handsome, strapping baritone of a chap, a two-dimensional Superman of impeccable moral standing. Ranged against him are an equally two-dimensional bunch of baddies, led by the jowly and frowning Moise Tshombe, the Katanga separatist also deeply implicated in the mysterious death of Swedish diplomat Dag Hammarskjold (secretary general of the United Nations at the time) and the puppet president Joseph Kasavubu, with the lean and hungry figure of Joseph Desire Mobutu lurking on the sidelines.
Peck hints at a white hand playing a critical role at the edge of the frame. But if you have seen Belgian film-maker Thierry Michel’s Mobutu, Roi du Zaire, and indeed some earlier documentary films about the inheritance of King Leopold’s disastrous Central African plantation, this version becomes somewhat coy.
The naked intervention of the Belgian, French and American governments, particularly through the medium of the CIA, has been so thoroughly exposed to the light of day in recent years as to give definitive credence to the conspiracy theories of the Cold War years.
Tshombe, Kasavubu and Mobutu, like Savimbi, Bokassa, Amin and others closer to home, all started their careers as puppets in someone else’s charade. The fact that they were later able to produce such genocidal outcomes in their own right does not alter that reality.
Asked about the accuracy of his scenarios and the wordy dialogues that unfold through them, Peck says that his film is an authentic interpretation of events because he had access to so many vivid recollections of some of the surviving players in the real-life drama.
The trouble is, real life translated directly into drama hardly ever makes good cinema. Real life, as we can see from the unfinished Al Gore/George Bush soap opera, generally stumbles towards its climax, or, more usually, anti-climax, with little sense of drama, style or subtlety.
Movies have to be more cunning than this. Movies become gripping, and therefore believable, when they manage to be more convincing than real life.
Watching Peck’s film unfold, I could not help making comparisons again and again with Michel’s cinematic documentary, Mobutu, Roi du Zaire, which came out last year. Mobutu’s vanity had ensured that his career was followed in minute detail by his own special presidential film unit. Thus he became, posthumously, the main actor in his own movie, giving posterity a rare, three-dimensional insight into the complex character of a real-life villain.
Added to this were the on-camera testimonies of those who were around him, first-person accounts of life, death and desire at the court of a dictator.
A movie would have to have the craft and the cool distance of something like Oliver Stone’s JFK to be able to outdo the power of that documentary and convey the vicious intricacy of the intriguing factions that ended the short life and political career of Lumumba.
Understanding the motives of those who sought his destruction would have told us a lot more about Lumumba himself and why his destruction was thought to be so necessary.
Peck’s version, for all its technical splendour and fine acting, regrettably fails to rise to this challenge.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza