Raoul Peck's Lumumba : A Film for Our Times

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 he was drawn to the story of Lumumba as an exemplary tale about the extraordinary moment of independence in African around 1960, and the context of international intrigue, greed, and accommodation in which it unraveled. Peck, a member of an educated Haitian bourgeois family and fluent in four European languages, spent his teenage years from 1961 on in the Congo, after his family moved there to escape the Duvalier dictatorship. In the eighties he studied and lived in Berlin, and after a stint driving a taxi in Manhattan he returned for training at the Berlin Film and Television Academy. His student film, Haitian Corner, about a political refugee from Haiti living in Brooklyn, was included in the Berlin Film Festival in 1988. A liaison in those years with the first African woman filmmaker, Safi Faye, was influential in his discovery of and commitment to film. Peck began work on a personal memoir of growing up in the Congo around Independence, and his connection to Africa that became a 69-minute documentary entitled Lumumba—Death of a Prophet. In 1992 it was awarded the prize for best documentary in festivals in Montreal and Paris. Peck then returned to Haiti and spent the mid-nineties as minister of culture in the government of Jean-Baptiste Aristide. Increasingly disillusioned with its corruption, he joined a mass resignation from the cabinet in 1996 and wrote an exposé denouncing Aristide.

Peck finished the script for Lumumba with Pascal Bonitzer in 1999, after the publication of De Witte's indictment of the assassination, which the film parallels in its focus...