Under
African Skies
LUMUMBA
In his short life, Patrice Lumumba couldn't change the world.
With Eriq Ebouaney, Alex Descas
Co-written and directed by Raoul Peck
FOR TWO MONTHS in 1960, before his enemies could assassinate him, Patrice Lumumba served as the first prime minister of the newly independent Congo, a Belgian colony since 1885 and now, in the 21st Century, a strife-ridden country called Zaire.
In Raoul Peck’s lean and modest drama, we meet Lumumba (Eriq Ebouaney) at the end of his short but significant life: He’s sitting quietly, a bit beaten up, in the back of a car that’s part of a convoy slipping quietly through the African night, taking Lumumba to his preordained death. He narrates his journey in voiceover, even after he’s in a body bag, and even while his captor/killers chop him up with an ax and saw off his limbs so they can burn the evidence in a campfire. Dead now, he worries about what lessons his children will learn some day, and whether his dreams for his beloved country will ever come true.
Despite the incendiary history it recounts, Peck’s film never gets much grimmer than this powerful but eerily muted opening: Lumumba is largely a drama of words and ideas that goes behind the scenes of the political maneuverings that led to Congolese independence, which almost immediately began to unravel as factions and individuals vied for power and their own vision of their new country. It’s a low-keyed film with quick flares of excitement and - for Western audiences ignorant of the African struggle - it’s a handsome dramatic history lesson.
After showing us Lumumba’s grisly destiny at age 36, Peck winds back in time six years as the hopeful (if uncertain) 30-year-old arrives from Stanleyville in a rural town where he becomes a manager of a beer manufacturing plant. But soon, for reasons we can only intuit, he gets involved in politics. Self-taught and well spoken, he doesn’t agree with those factions who want an independent Congo to separate into autonomous federal regions (he counts 250 political parties in his country). He wants a unified nation where people all just get along.
Determined, articulate, civil and only a little bit headstrong - more confident than stubborn, more orator and idealist than politician - Lumumba is thrown in jail on the very day the Belgian king announces his country’s independence. Six months later, after what we presume are regular beatings, he’s suddenly freed and flown to Brussels, where the country’s foregone first president, Joseph Kasa Vubu (Maka Kotto), has gone to negotiate the transfer of power.
But Lumumba’s stock has grown during his time in jail, and so Kasa has no choice but to name him prime minister. The two are wary comrades from the start, and on June 30, at an independence day ceremony, Lumumba undercuts Kasa’s conciliatory inaugural address with a cool, fiery speech of his own.
From there, it’s politics as usual in a country of competing interests and the omnipresent former colonial landlords. Every step Lumumba takes threatens him like a land mine, and he handles it all as skillfully as any sincere man of conscience possibly could. Some army factions don’t want white officers to rule them. White people begin to die at the hands of rebel soldiers. The Belgian army waits to move in and keep order if Lumumba can’t. And so as things grow tense, Lumumba appoints his old friend Joseph Mobutu to top job in the Army. Within a year Mobutu led a quiet coup to become his nation’s dictator, a job he would hold for more than three decades.
As history has shown us over and over, it takes more than a common race and a hatred for something to bring a people together. And so the characters in Lumumba are all too tragically human, and the morass that envelops them seems almost insurmountable. There’s also the issue of their context: As often happens in post-colonial places, years of servitude make the servants so impassioned about freedom and so intractable in their vision that bitter conflict is virtually guaranteed, specially with Russia lurking about the periphery, and with American capitalists working behind the scenes to stir things up even more.
All of these strains winnow through Peck’s low-keyed script, which draws its tension from the everyday conflicts between its politicos and their antagonists. Filmed in brilliant African sunlight, it’s perpetually dark and subdued about the edges, with an understated performance by Ebouaney that paints Lumumba a man of conscience and no regrets, and even more sinewy interpretation by Alex Descas as Mobutu, the man who finally sealed his country’s fate.