Lumumba: La Mort du Prophète (The Death of the Prophet)

70 min. 1992. In French with English subtitles. Tues., Sep. 16, 2008. 7 p.m. Calhoun Hall 100.

In 1964 Malcolm X called Patrice Lumumba "the greatest black man who ever walked the African continent." Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, selected for Oprah’s Book Club in 1999, shows, through an American missionary family’s experiences in the Congo during the election and assassination of Lumumba, some of the problems that arise when governments interfere in the government of other countries.

The European co-production of La Mort du Prophète, winner of the Procirep Prize at the Festival du Réel in Paris and the Best Documentary award in Montreal in 1992, reconsiders decades of international manipulation of the image of Congo writer, eloquent political orator, and prime minister Patrice Lumumba (1925-1961), leader of the National Congolese Movement, a party with pan-African goals that did not favor any particular tribe. Lumumba inspired movements of self-determination in the Americas and in Africa.

Because of the support by the United States of Lumumba’s removal from office, brutal imprisonment, and assassination, this is an appropriate choice to follow the first film in this series, “Celluloid for Social Justice,” which focused on the anti-lynching song Strange Fruit.

Later in this film series, on Wednesday, October 8, we will see excerpts from Aimé Césaire’s 1966 play about Lumumba, Une Saison au Congo, in Part III of A Voice That Goes Down Through History. Césaire’s play stresses how the Belgians “gave independence [to their colony, Congo,] with their right hand and took it with the left,” to cite a line from the film Lumumba: The Death of the Prophet. In this film, Serge Michel, retired anarchist, says: “Lumumba was a mystic of freedom, like the revolutionaries of the 18th century: a layman shows the victory of words over evil.”

Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck pieced together this film shortly after two years as Minister of Culture of Haiti, using footage from home movies of his boyhood in the Congo. His father, a Haitian professor, was recruited in 1962 to help with development, and his mother was secretary to the mayor of the capital city, Leopoldville, until she resigned in 1966 to protest a requisition for materials for another political assassination planned by military dictator Mobutu.

1960s photographs and archival footage from various countries are blended with contemporary interviews in which Lumumba’s daughter and other European intellectuals recollect the past. Henri Lopes’ poem “Du côte du Katanga” frames the film, and background music represents the cultures involved in this tragedy, including the jazz piece “Indépendance cha-cha” and Leporello’s aria about his master’s conquests from Mozart’s Don Giovanni as well as traditional African music.

Now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, this third largest country in Africa, setting for Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, was explored by Henry Stanley in the 1870s and 1880s under the sponsorship of the U.S. and British press and then developed by Stanley for King Leopold II of Belgium, using forced labor. The king made the land his private property at the Conference of Berlin in 1885. Lumumba’s campaign for freedom began in 1955; he was elected Prime Minister in May 1960 and the country declared independence on June 30, 1960, one of sixteen African countries to do so that year.

Joseph Mobutu, appointed by Lumumba to lead the Congo army, managed a coup financed by the United States and Belgium. Lumumba was forced out of office in September 1960, 67 days after he came to power. He did not receive sufficient help from the United Nations or the Soviet Union. Because he did receive planes and trucks – and possibly guns—from the Soviet Union, he had played into the hands of the U.S., British, and French cold warriors. They cooperated with the Belgians and Africans who wanted to kill him.

Lumumba was turned over by his former friends -- including the country’s first president, Joseph Kasavubu; his own private secretary, Joseph Mobutu, who would rule the country for the next 37 years; Moise Tshombe, leader of the rich secessionist province Katanga; and Katanga’s prime minister, Godefroid Munungo -- to his worst enemies, both Belgian and African, to be executed on January 17, 1961. In 1965 Mobutu deposed Kasavubu and remained ruler until he was forced out of office by Laurent Kabila, a self-proclaimed Lumumbist who did not succeed in establishing democracy.

The United States and Belgium have both begun to acknowledge to some extent the role that they played in the brutal assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

This film will be shown in

Celluloid for Social Justice: The Legacy of 1968 in Documentaries

Mini-Film-Series Honoring the 40th Anniversary of California Newsreel; http://www.newsreel.org consisting of documentaries provided by California Newsreel

The film series precedes 1968: A Global Perspective --

An Interdisciplinary Conference at the University of Texas at Austin

October 10-12, 2008; http://www.1968conf.org