A decade with Lumumba

Patrice Lumumba was only 34 years old when he came to be prime minister of the newly independent Congo in 1960. The revolutionary nationalist managed to stay in office only two months before he was imprisoned, tortured and finally executed, less than a year after becoming the nation's first democratically elected leader. Perhaps he was attempting the impossible, defying vested foreign interests after 75 years of colonial Belgian rule. After all, Lumumba was an inexperienced politician with no formal university training, no staff and no means. He was attempting to lead a vast, arbitrarily designated nation comprised of more than 50 warring political parties, without even a secretary to open his mail. Mistakes were made, to be sure. Perhaps the most fatal of them, implies filmmaker Raoul Peck, was in believing that the Congolese people might actually control their own destiny.

And yet Lumumba's legend, failed or not, lives on. For Peck, the 48-year-old director of the film Lumumba (which will air on HBO on Feb. 16, 21, 25, and 27; its critically acclaimed theatrical debut was distributed by Zeitgeist Films last summer), it represents a legacy of resistance that he has carried with him since childhood.

A handsome, soft-spoken man who was raised in the Congo, the United States and Paris, as well as his native Haiti, Peck traveled to what was then Zaire with his family in 1963, just two years after Lumumba's murder. He was 8 years old when they arrived on African soil. His parents were members of the elite, professional class fleeing the dictatorship of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier. They were one of many such Haitian families recruited to the Congo to replace newly departed Belgians. Peck's father, an agronomist, taught university courses, managed agricultural projects and worked for the United Nations (UN). His mother worked in the mayor's office of Leopoldville (now Kinshasa). Although they were evacuated not long after their arrival, along with other UN workers, Peck's family would return often to the Congo during the next two and a half decades.

"In the beginning," recalls Peck, speaking with a heavy French-Creole accent, "this was a film that had nothing to do with me personally. You have to imagine. I come from Haiti. I grew up watching American movies. As a boy, the only image I had of Africa was Tarzan, and Tarzan was my hero," he says, laughing. "So when I went to Africa, I was going to the jungle, and I was going to be Tarzan. Of course," he adds, smiling gently, "I learned very quickly that was not the case."

"I remember stepping off the plane with this warmth," Peck says. "Because I came from an island where there was always a wind. But [in Africa] you could feel that you are in the middle of a continent and that there are only Black people everywhere. It's big and it's hot and it's Black, and there are all these new feelings. I was curious about everything."

In researching the life of Lumumba for his 1992 documentary, Lumumba: La Mort Du Prophete ("Death of a Prophet"), Peck would often stumble upon such unexpected memories. Finding Lumumba, he discovered, involved locating the public past enmeshed within his own intimate family history. "The mayor's office in Leopoldville was a very, important place," he explains. "That was where you went to get authorization if you wanted to buy land. A lot of politicians went there. It was a power place."

Peck's mother provided invaluable anecdotal background for his research, as well as archival photographs that she had brought from work so many years ago. "The 1992 documentary is, in fact, the story of my family," says Peck. "And of the Haitians who went to Congo. And how a young boy learned through oral history. And what I, myself, give back to my own daughter as a filmmaker."

Even with this wealth of primary research material, however, it would be years before Peck would feel the full emotional impact of Lumumba on a personal level. "I think in every Haitian family, politics is just a daily fact of life," he asserts. "So I knew his name. I knew that there was a Patrice Lumumba Street in every Third World country you went to. But it took a while to come to love and understand" him as a man. In fact, the more he read through press accounts of that period - from French, English and German sources - the less he understood. Nowhere in these reports could he find the glamour or the revolutionary mystique embraced by so many Third World nationalists.

Then he saw the photograph.

"It was one that my mother had brought home," Peck recalls. "I kept this picture as an adult. He [Lumumba] was in a press conference, and he was holding a piece of paper, looking down. There were, like, 60 journalists all around him. And somehow, I felt he was alone. Because I knew, with the information I had of that period, that he was totally isolated at that point. He was just playing at being the leader."

It was through this photograph that Peck began to understand Lumumba as a Congolese Everyman: a visionary who spoke of relatively simple ideas, such as national unity and self-determination for all Africans. But he spoke of these concepts, says Peck, in away that the rest of the world was not accustomed to hearing. "That was the beginning of something I could hold onto," Peck says. "The human aspect of him."

And then there was that famous shot of Lumumba stepping off a plane, after his arrest. It was an image that went around the world, of the soon-to-be martyred figure with his hands tied behind his back and eyes staring into a distant future. "His look was already far away from all of this," Peck recalls. "You would expect someone to be sweating or trembling in that situation. But he just accepted. Some people even say he was like a Christ figure. He gave his body to the dogs. And I felt that very strongly."

How can people of the Third World learn from past mistakes? How can we begin to control our own history? These were questions that haunted Peck during more than a decade of living with Lumumba's story. He set out to answer them through telling it. "Right now," says the filmmaker, "the world is divided ideologically. It's not east and west anymore. It's those who have and those who don't have."

As Peck well knows, these are certainly not questions isolated to a Congolese context. "[The film Lumumba] stands as the symbol of all the Third World revolutionary heroes who fell victim to the Cold War. Peck's story narrates the tragic end of Patrice Lumumba, abandoned by the `Free World' to his enemies. [It's] a reference film for anybody concerned with human rights," says Manthia Diawara, chair of the Africana studies program at New York University (NYU).

Peck says he did not expect the overwhelming reception Lumumba received from both Black and white audiences, a testament to the universality of the film which took the Best Film prize at the 2001 Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles.

Peck worked with a sound editor to create an English-language version of Lumumba that will debut on HBO. The original French version of the film with subtitles will air on HBO Signature.

In part because of his ongoing allegiance to his native land, Peck, who taught film at NYU during the early 1990s, was appointed Minister of Culture for Haiti in 1996. Although he would resign a year later, following President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's abrupt departure from office, the experience confirmed his belief in the political importance of cultural expression. "I didn't come into this profession just for the glamour of it," says Peck. "For me film has always been a way to modestly put our piece of rock in the wall of history. The story of Lumumba explains so much of what is still happening in the Third World today."

Indeed, after 75 years of Belgian colonial rule and 40 years of dictatorship under the U.S.-backed Mobutu Sese Seko, the situation in the Congo is as volatile as ever. "It's like you just put a cover on this boiling pot," Peck says, "and that cover was Mobutu."

In the present climate of the Congo, the struggle, according to Peck, "is about giving the Congolese the right to selfdetermination and helping them to build a free society with free institutions. This is what we have to fight for. I don't know if we will succeed.

"I am, unfortunately, not a prophet."

Kristal Brent Zook is a Los Angeles-- based freelance writer who covers culture and politics.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated Jan/Feb 2002
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