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 antilynching 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