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COPYRIGHT 2002 Indiana University Press
The "biopic" Lumumba, which premiered in New York, Washington, and Los Angeles in July 2001 after opening in Paris and Montreal and which has been released in limited distribution internationally, is a film of great interest to Africanists. Directed by acclaimed Haitian documentary filmmaker Raoul Peck, Lumumba chronicles the rise, rule, arrest, and assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the charismatic leader and first prime minister of the postcolonial Congolese nation in 1960. Lumumba's career was meteoric and cruelly brief. Rising from rural obscurity to political activism in the Congolese National Movement party while working as a beer salesman in Leopoldville, he was imprisoned by the Belgian colonists for political activity but released to attend the 1960 international meeting on the Congo in Brussels prior to independence. Lumumba became the Congo's first prime minster in June 1960 at the age of thirty-four. He was forced out of office after two months, imprisoned, tortured, and killed by Belgian soldiers--in complicity, the film claims, with European and American government agents and other Congolese leaders, notably Joseph Mobutu--six months later. His leadership was, in the film's final words, "fifty years too soon."
Lumumba talks back to historical realities by giving voice from beyond the grave to Lumumba himself. As its narrator, he remarks, "History will have its say someday." In voicing an unwritten controversial history, Peck's film combines archival documentary means, such as photos and chronologies of 1960, with the interpretive resources of historical fiction to interpret the assassination of Lumumba and events leading up to it as a conspiracy against African self-determination. The documents his argument relies on were shrouded in secrecy for nearly forty years, until the recent publication of a Belgian army memoir and Dutch sociologist Ludo De Witte's 1999 study, now translated as The Assassination of Lumumba, which forced the Belgian government to convene a parliamentary commission investigating its role in the murder (see Bennett).
Lumumba is an extraordinary film for both cinematic and political reasons, and its affective and aesthetic power derives not only from its stunning indictment of international complicity in the assassination, but also, and primarily, from Peck's brilliant and deeply moving use of storytelling to depict a leader caught in the crossfire of colonial economic interests and African ethnic intrigues. Peck told interviewer Emory Holmes II how...
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