Eriq Ebouaney stars as real-life Zairean activist Patrice Lumumba. Photo courtesy Remstar Corp.

'Lumumba:' The Rise and Execution of an African Leader

by Esther Iverem
SeeingBlack.com Editor and Film Critic

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"Lumumba" is a powerful and important film that seeks, with some difficulty, to tell the heinous story behind the rise and execution of Patrice Lumumba, the freedom fighter and first leader of newly independent country of Zaire. The documented complexity of what happened in the Congo—including chaos among the country's soldiers, intervention by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the presence of more than 400 foreign correspondents—means that it is challenging to tell an all-encompassing story in two hours. Complete books have been written, for example, focusing on solely the United States' role or the experience of the men who ultimately cut up and burned Lumumba's corpse.

Director Raoul Peck, who also produced a riveting documentary on the same subject in 1992, has focused on the crisis from the perspective of Lumumba. Peck, who received a standing ovation after the screening at Filmfest D.C., said he made his film in part because there are few movies that show history and Black heroes through the eyes of people in the Third World.

Featuring a brilliant performance by Eriq Ebouaney, the film makes an important contribution to understanding what Lumumba saw and experienced in his short tenure as leader before his murder. It is unsparing in its portrayal of the residual pathology of a country under 80 years of colonial domination by Belgium. It is all laid out here, in all its sickness, for us to see: the conditioned response of a people trained to hate themselves and trained to trust Whites, trained to betray each other to get ahead, trained to be suspicious of radical thought. Peck does not flinch from the issue of African complicity and rises above nationalism and even Pan Africanism to embrace the global importance of a liberated Africa.

While the film's finale is its strength, its beginning is its weakness. There is no narrative—not even a flashback—about Lumumba's formative years. We are given no clue about the influences—familial, social or educational—that shaped him into an important thinker about African independence. There is another gap in explanation when Lumumba arrives in the capital as a postal employee, winds up selling beer and then makes the seemingly sudden transformation into a political leader. Finally, while depicting the heat of political combat, it seems as though it was easier for Peck to dramatize the brutality toward Whites by the country's Black soldiers than it was to dramatize the cumulative effects of colonialism on the Congolese people, or the plotting and scheming by Whites against the young nation and leader.

Peck has created a human hero, one with a wife and child. But the focus is more on the external political crisis than Lumumba's family or emotional life. The first cut of this film was at three hours in length. I can't help but wonder what nuance and detail was sacrificed for the sake of cutting it down to a conventional running time. Despite its flaws, Lumumba is the must-see Black film of 2001.

Screened at Filmfest D.C. 2001.

-- May 17, 2001

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