Lumumba

FilmReview: Patrice Lumumba by Raoul Peck



Film Review

Patrice Lumumba


A Film by Raoul Peck

Reviewed By Marvin X
© 2002 by Marvin X


Note: We send out this review on the 50th anniversary of independence in the Congo. Lumumba said he was fifty years ahead of histime, and so it is. But even fifty years later the same problems ofpoverty, ignorance and disease remain, the Europeans are still therestealing the wealth, although the Chinese have entered the drama.Hopefully, with the Chinese, in exchange for precious minerals, thereshall be construction and reconstruction, although we don't understandwith a population of seventy million mostly unemployed why Chineselaborers are needed. There seems little jubilation among the population.One Congolese said, "After fifty years of independence, happiness hascome to the man in charge and those around him--they eat well and arewell paid."

--mx


My African consciousness began with the murder of Patrice Lumumba. After high
school graduation, Ienrolled at Oakland's Merritt College and found myself in the midst ofthe black revolutionary student movement. Students Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, RichardThorne,Maurice Dawson, Kenny Freeman, Ernie Allen, Ann Williams, Carol Freemanand others were rapping daily on the steps at the front door of MerrittCollege. Some of them wore sweatshirts with Jomo Kenyatta'spicture, sold by Donald Warden's African American Association, whichheld meetings on campus, and sometimes Donald Warden, renamed Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al Mansour,rapped. The theme was often the African independence struggle,especially the MauMau'sin Kenya.

But a frequent topic was the 1961 brutal murder of the democraticallyelected Congolese Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. Thebrothers were well read and in their raps they documented the facts andfigures of the African liberation struggle. They gave reference tosuch books as KwameNkrumah's Neo-Colonialism:the final stage of imperialism, where he documented the riches ofAfrica, especially the Congo, that the West coveted and committed massmurder to maintain. Patrice Lumumba was the first African leader I'dknown about who was assassinated, and the brutal way he was eliminatedhelped expedite my African consciousness, especially learning how hisso-called comrades betrayed him to continue the Western world's plunderof the Congo's vast mineral riches.

On one level, it was hard to believe, since I was attempting to get blackenized and didn't want to face thereality of black treachery. As students, most of us were Blacknationalists, not yet the revolutionary black nationalists we would soonbecome, that allowed some of us to employ a class or Marxist analysisto the Pan African struggle, which Nkrumah's writings brought to thetable.

The brothers leaning in the Marxist direction were Ken Freeman, Ernie Allen,and maybe Bobby Seale, all of whom were associated with SoulBookmagazine, a revolutionary black nationalist publication featuring thewritings of LeRoiJones, James Boggs,Max Stanford, Robert F. Williams, Sonia Sanchez, Askia M. Toure',myself and others, although I was a budding writer, just out of highschool and knew nothing about Marxism.

If I had, it would have helped me understand the class nature of Lumumba's final days. I couldn'tcomprehend how Mobutu, Kasavubu, and Tshombe couldbe so wicked to conspire with the white man to kill their brother. Itwould take the black hands of Malcolm's murderers for me to begin tounderstand.

Actually, I wouldn't fully understand until years later after reading amonograph by Dr. Walter Rodney, himself the victim of assassination inGuyana, South America, entitled West Africa and the Atlantic SlaveTrade, in which he carefully deconstructed African social classes andtheir role in the slave trade, detailing how the political, military,judicial, and even religious institutions became corrupt and expeditedour removal from the Motherland.

Amiri Baraka sings to us:

My brother the king
Sold me to the ghost
When you put your hand on your sister and made her a slave
Whenyou put your hand on your brother and made him a slave
Watch out forthe ghost
The ghost go get you Africa
At the bottom of theAtlantic Ocean
Is a railroad of human bones
the king sold thefarmer to the ghost....

It is hard to believe it has been forty years since the death of Lumumba,maybe because in the interim we've had innumerable cases in Africa andeven in America of similar acts of treachery. Supposedly black ministerswere involved in the death of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Blackelected politicians have been selling out the black community for atleast the past thirty years, especially since the 1972 Gary Conventionof the Congress of African People. We have no choice but to see ourstruggle as class struggle, race being incidental.

We cannot have any illusions that a black face will save us, only black hearts. Those who study the Bibleand Qur'anknow the history of all men is the story of treachery, deceit, lust,greed, jealousy, envy and murder -- but the glass can be seen as halffull: the history of man is also about good transcending evil,liberation defeating oppression, ascension after crucifixion, joy aftersorrow, victory over defeat. Yet, how many prophets survived? How manyrighteous people survived and continued in their righteousness, ratherthan succumb to iniquities?

Men of Lumumba's character are rare upon the stage of history, men dedicated to the liberation of their people, menwho are confident that no matter how great the odds, freedom will comesoon one morning.

Raoul Peck's film was depressing because it showed a leader in a Indiana Jones snake pit full of vipers and cobras of the worse sort,snakes who danced to the rhythm of Western drums, not those of themighty Congo, for Lumumba's mission appeared doomed from thestart, he said himself that he was fifty years ahead of his time. Thismay have been the truest statement of the movie, for only ten yearsremain before the half-century mark in the modern history of the Congoor Zaire. Maybe in the last ten years of his prophecy, the people ofZaire will become truly free.

What the movie failed to give us were the deep structure motivations for the behavior of men like Kasavubu, Tshombe andMobutu. Yes, the Europeans were there, had been there stealing thewealth, especially of Katanga Province which held 70% of thenation's riches, but we needed to see the very beginning with BelgiumKing Leopold's butchery, including his role in the European carving upof Africa at the 1890s Berlin Conference. We need to know the custom ofchopping off limbs so en vogue today with diamond seeking armies inZaire, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and elsewhere originated with KingLeopold. Only then can the unaware and unread understand what demonicforces created such inhuman beings as the three main characters thatsurrounded Lumumbaand ultimately brought about his downfall. From the movie we aretempted to say his own people did him in, but we know better, we mustknow better-think of diamonds, chrome, uranium, plutonium, cobalt, zincand other minerals.

Look at Zaire today with several competing armies from neighboring countries (Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, et al) warringover the same minerals for the same European masters who instigated thetreacherous actions of Kasavubu, Tshombe andMobutu. Their names have a poetic ring that we should remember foreveras the sound of death in a people, the sound of condensation and thelowest rats in creation, but understand they represent class interestsand their class mates are visible throughout Africa and the world, evenin the American political landscape: we have Clarence Thomas, Ward Connelly andColin Powell -- new world rats, but rats none the less, who are everybit the measure of the Congo Three.

And let us not forget the reactionary behavior in the black liberation movement, the murder byincineration of Samuel Napier in the Black Panther fratricide, theassassination of Bunchy Carter and John Huggins by the US organizationin the BSUmeeting room on the campus of UCLA, the Muslims setting a prostituteon fire in San Francisco and other terrorists actions such as the Zebrakillings.

Even the Black Arts Movement had its psychopathic shootouts with thewounding of Larry Neal and other acts we need not list. Shall we neglectto mention the hip hop generation also has its catalogue of madnesssuch as the east coast/west coast killing of rap giants Tupac andBiggie Small. Let Lumumba be a lesson for us all. Let'slearn from it and move to higher ground. Some of our madness is simplythat -- we cannot attribute all evil acts of man to white oppression,although white oppression in inexcusable. We must take responsibilityfor Black Madness.

We are happy the director created a screen version of this historic drama. The actors made us feel the good in Lumumba andthe evil in his associates, black and white, for the whites performedtheir usual roles as arrogant, paternalistic colonial masters whose aimwas to hold power until the last second as we saw when they released Lumumba fromprison to attend independence talks in Belgium. We saw the starkcontrast of character in the speeches of Lumumba asprime minister and Kasavubu as president. Lumumba wasstrong, Kassavubucapitulating even on the eve of freedom, signaling his intent toremain a colonial puppet.

For those who came away like myself, and one could sense the sad silence in the audience as they departed the theatre, a friendremarked that we must not give up hope because the enemy will never tellyou when you are winning.

For more writings and/or information on Marvin X go to

www.blackbirdpressnews.blogspot.com

www.parablesandfablesofmarvinx.blogspot.com

http://www.blackthinktank.com
http://www.aalbc.com
http://www.nathanielturner.com
http://www.umich.edu,
http://www.konch.
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