The Black Holes of History: Raoul Peck's Two Lumumbas

The Haitian director Raoul Peck has made two films about Patrice Lumumba's brief tenure as the Congo's first elected prime minister after independence, achieved in June 1960, and his subsequent murder in January 1961. The two films are so different in their style and method, not to mention their genre, that it is almost difficult to conceive that both are the products of the same director. The first film, Lumumba: la mort du prophète/Lumumba: Death of a Prophet (CH/DE/FR, 1992, hereafter cited as Death of a Prophet), is often described as a classic "essay film," at once personal in its quest to portray Lumumba as well as reflective about its own means of signification. This film rather obliquely and indirectly portrays an event—Lumumba's brief time in power and his murder—that in many ways and for many reasons defies any attempts at representation or reenactment, for Lumumba was the object of contentious and skewed media representation during his time and he was killed under conditions of great secrecy, with the participation of a variety of parties, some of whom to this day still deny any complicity in the act. The film was made, notably, long before the publication in 1999 of Ludo De Witte's scathing and authoritative examination of the circumstances of Lumumba's death, The Assassination of Lumumba,¹ and almost a full decade before Belgium's official apology in 2002 for its portion of responsibility for Lumumba's death. As such, a certain impossibility lies at the very core of the film and it is precisely from this impossibility that the film draws a great deal of inspiration as well as emotive and rhetorical power. The second film, titled simply Lumumba (BE/DE/FR/HT, 2000), bears almost no formal resemblance to the first: it is a fairly conventional biopic, made, as Peck himself says, "to look like Spielberg, only without Spielberg's budget,"² using the gamut of means familiar to the genre: reconstructions of a detailed and historically accurate mise-en-scène, condensations of multiple historical events as well as of multiple historical figures, a strong narrative drive, as well as reenactment of famous events in the main character's life. The sense of impossibility of representing this event, which courses throughout the first film, is nowhere to be found. Indeed, it is denied from the outset of the film, which opens with a montage of black-and-white archival photographs of the Belgian Congo, clearly intended to document the brutality of Belgian colonial rule, intercut with color footage, shot for the film, of "contemporary" scenes of the ceremony five years after Lumumba's death when Mobutu declared him a national hero. The argument this montage makes is clear: that the images created for this biopic are as authoritative as any of the archival images; what unfolds here is an authoritative account of history. So that this may not go unnoticed by the spectator, the opening montage concludes with the title card: "This is a true story."

Such confidence is missing from the first film. In a sense, Death of a Prophet is a film about failure itself; it is deeply marked by the great historical failure of Lumumba's project for Congolese independence and national unity, something that has to be considered a failure as such even if it was defeated, as the first film implies (and the second explicitly argues) by neocolonial conspiracy. The trauma, anxiety, and sense of loss that emerge from this event—and Death of a Prophet clearly wants to represent Lumumba and the social movement he embodied as a historical event proper in some sort of existential-philosophical way, as an event which inaugurates a dramatic historical turning point which cannot be excised from History until the consequences of its social potential have been fully worked through—figure in the film in a number of ways. In the first place, there is the sense of loss surrounding the figure of Lumumba himself and his symbolic and real role as a political leader in the...