Living With Lumumba.(Patrice Lumumba)(Brief Article)

Artistically speaking, at least, Congo's time has come. The last couple of years have seen a steady stream of books and movies relating to the country's independence movement and the ensuing upheaval. There Was Barbara Kingsolver's best-selling novel "The Poisonwood Bible," about a proselytizing American minister and his family whom he moved there; "The Catastrophist," in which Irishman Ronan Bennett's Belfastian hero- -and his Italian lover--take up a good lefty cause in Belgian Congo; the documentary "Mobutu, King of Zaire," and two recent histories by journalists, "In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo," by Michela Wrong, and "The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe and Power in the Heart of Africa, by Bill Berkeley.

What's different--and refreshing--about the latest offering, the film "Lumumba," is that it was made by an insider: Raoul Peck, who was born in Haiti but moved to Congo in 1962. By then Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected head of the newly independent republic, was already dead. He had been put before a firing squad, then dismembered and burned.

Dense and expository, Peck's film which was screened last year at Cannes and is now making its way around much of the world--examines Lumumba's headlong rise and brutal death. He was just 36, a charismatic, whip-smart former beer hawker, when he led the massive nation into an independence movement it wasn't prepared for. In his seven months in office, he made enemies with just about everyone as the country fell apart. He was imprisoned and then sent to the secessionist province of Katanga for his execution. It's now accepted--and further supported in yet another new book, "The Assassination of Lumumba," by Dutch sociologist Ludo De Witte--that Lumumba, a nationalist whom the Soviets took a liking to, was done in by the Belgians, with CIA collaboration (and a wink from the United Nations). He was succeeded by the man in the leopard-skin hat, Joseph Mobutu, whose U.S.-bolstered dictatorship would last 30 years.

History buffs might group Lumumba with other black nationalists, such as Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey. For everyone else--Peck included-- Lumumba had been little known or largely forgotten. "I didn't even know much about him," says the 47-year-old Paris resident on a visit to New York for the film's opening. "You just didn't ...