Mini-Renaissance of the Memory of Lumumba

Introduction By Mukazo Vunda

The following article was posted to me by a visitor to this site with the subject: "What do you make of this?"

I think that the article speaks for itself. It is a brilliant piece of writing that, however, raises more questions, than answers in its wake.

Rather than delve into these beforehand, I would like to give free reign to the reader's (your) imagination. At the end of the writing, I give my comment in the article titled "The Haunting Memory of Lumumba".

Mini-Renaissance of the Memory of Lumumba

Business Day (Johannesburg)
OPINION
September 5, 2001
Posted to the web September 5, 2001
Johannesburg

If you wish to ascribe Africa's misery to colonialism, neocolonialism and other -isms practised exclusively by wicked white men, you will probably want to wave about the metaphorical bloody shirt of the Democratic Republic of Congo's first, and only, democratically elected prime minister.

Patrice Lumumba took office at independence in July 1960, to be deposed and detained by Colonel Laurent-Desire Mobutu in September. Lest he mount a comeback, he was handed over to the separatist Katangan president, Moise Tshombe, the following January, tortured, shot and finally, by a thorough pair of Belgian policemen, saponified with acid.

His memory is enjoying a minirenaissance quite coincidental to, but surely reinforced by, the latest international event in Durban. There is a film, Lumumba, in general release, and a new book, The Assassination of Lumumba, by a Dutch writer, Ludo de Witte.

The movie has caused a ripple in Washington. That is because it has a then-young American diplomat named Frank Carlucci sitting in on a Mobutu-chaired meeting in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) at which Lumumba is sentenced to death.

Each participant is polled, including, lastly, the Carlucci character, who declines to cast a vote on the grounds that the US does not interfere in the affairs of sovereign states. This line, a turgid stab at irony by the sreenwriter, always gets a titter from audiences at the sort of art house where the movie plays.

The real Carlucci is today a Washington eminence, having gone on from his stint as second secretary at the US embassy in Leopoldville, to top positions throughout the federal government, including under-secretary of health and deputy budget director, national security adviser and secretary of defence.

Contrary to myth, he was not with the CIA in Leopoldville, though he did later serve as the agency's deputy director. He is now a partner in the Carlyle Group, the prodigiously successful Washington-based merchant bank, and on a slew of Fortune 500 boards. His portrayal in the film, Carlucci says, is libellous; he might even sue if he could prove Haitian-born director Raoul Peck inserted him in the Mobutu meeting, itself a fiction, with malicious disregard for the truth (that being the threshhold that libel plaintiffs who are "public figures" must attain in US courts).

The record is clear that President Dwight Eisenhower, fearing Congo would become a Soviet colony, instructed his CIA chief, Allen Dulles, to do something about Lumumba, for whose removal a vial of toxin was prepared and delivered to the agency's station officer, Larry Devlin.

Devlin behaved bravely and honourably: he turned a blind eye on his orders, orders Carlucci also considers to have been wicked and ultimately most poisonous to the CIA.
Carlucci does not feature in De Witte's book; Devlin only fleetingly. In fact, Washington plays little part.

De Witte's research has prompted a Belgian parliamentary committee to revisit the affair. He documents, meticulously, how the Belgian establishment meant to retain post-independence control of Congo, or at least the valuable bits like Katanga, via complaisant puppets beholden to expatriate muscle and advice; then had Lumumba killed when he threatened those arrangements.

It is, as most of Congo's history has been from the time it became the personal property of the Belgian royal house, a revolting tale, and Brussels' culpability is in no way diminished by the fact the hands of the Lumumbists were never spotless either.

Sadly, both De Witte and Peck are so engrossed with the death of Lumumba that they tend to gloss over such questions as: what, specifically, was his programme? How did he propose to carry it out? Did he, beyond his charismatic oratory, have the political talents, or the homegrown legions, to forge a nation out of Africa's vast, etiolated midriff?

Peck's Lumumba, played brilliantly by Eriq Ebouaney, only seems masterful when delivering the famous independence day speech which put Belgium's grossly condescending and racist King Baudouin in his place. The rest of the time, his leadership style is strangely reactive.

De Witte writes that not only was Lumumba "physically eliminated", but his killers were determined that "his life and work were not to become a source of inspiration for the peoples of Africa, either."

If that was the wish of the assassins, the author does little to thwart it 40 years later. His Lumumba, except as a martyr, is not particularly inspiring.

To the contrary. Lumumba, the committed De Witte suggests approvingly, was an African Robespierre whose "Jacobinism his absolute determination to achieve political power met the demands of the anticolonial revolution in the Congo in 1960". Now there's a thought that deserves more elaboration than the author gives it.

All can agree that what, stripped to the essentials, Lumumba stood for was a unified Congo run by and for the Congolese. The realisation of that ambition, and the creation of such a nation, De Witte seems to be saying, cried out for Jacobinism.

Does that mean the tragedy of Congo was that Lumumba was cut down before he was able to administer the terror, totalitarianism and tumbrels required for its Fanonesque liberation?

If so, one has to wonder whether Congo really would have been a happier place had Lumumba been rescued and restored to power before delivery to the tenderness of Tshombe and his Hercule Poirots.

The Haunting Memory of Lumumba

I think that it is appropriate to engage in educated speculations, even posthumously, of an assassinated leader's political agenda, and make conjectures about how he would have gone about actualizing his aims, how the land and its people could have fared under his program, even if this speculation remedies nothing, but I find it a little far fetched to go to great lengths trying to prove that the man was more a charlatan than a blessing for his own people, had he lived on.

Attempting to say this is nearly stating that the loss of the man was a desirable occurrence. There is, behind this, a more sinister message that has been repeated time and again by opponents of African freedom and development. This implicit message is that Africans have no hope of ever producing competent leadership from within their own blood groups. They just do not have it in their genes, the voice behind, in the shadows, always seems to be saying.

A case of African historicity.

This kind of assertion is right up there with supporters of the banana republic setup who claim that, if not for the providence of the colonial hand, Africans could have fought themselves to extinction, tribe for tribe, clan for clan. They claim that Africa will surely be visited by this spectre if the inheritance is dismantled.

The fact that this spectre has visited us, in its worst form, within the setup, doesn't make our obdurate friends reexamine their conviction.

Fooled for life.

It is possible to fool some people sometimes, but it is impossible to fool all the people all the time.

There is so much knowledge about Africa's history that it strikes me as strange that people, in light of all this knowledge that proves the contrary, will still want to impose these modes of thought on the people of this continent. It is now common knowledge that prosperous, pluralistic empires flourished on this continent long before the north ever knew of the term pluralism. In these empires, people of different political beliefs, denominations, and tribes lived side by side in peace and harmony, ruled obviously by competent, wise, intelligent men and yes, women too. These Empires are known to have existed for longer than the period that the west has dominated this planet.

Besides, if Africans were really tribal barbarians from the "get go", why is there still such a large diversity of ethnic groups, of genetic types on this continent to date, the greatest diversity the world over, after all these thousands of years of opportunities at genocide? If anything, the place scientists claim is the place where all of mankind originated seems to be more tolerant of tribal diversity than any other place on earth. We can blame these other places of having engaged in genocide in the not too distant past. Why is such a vast land like China, or Europe, only full of people with common genetic strains. How is it that the particular strains have been the sole survivor in these climes. Surely not for the reasons that scientists propose.

Present Rwanda is a case that proves the rule. Tribe is a human condition. A "modern" western national entity works for the west, or the east for that matter, because each nation is in fact a single tribe, or a number of tribes properly decentralized to avoid conflicts. The majority group who comprise a single tribe, who, in some of these countries, are officially called the autochthonous, extend their imprimatur to the minority groups of immigrants, who do not form a tribal whole, which is also autochthonous, as is the case in almost all African countries. Do not be fooled by the fact that Europe is uniting. The unification of Europe is a unity of economic and international political policy, which leaves the arrangement of autochthonous to allochthonous intact.

This arrangement is also not fool proof. As has been noticed in recent developments, when push comes to shove, the minorities will bear the brunt of the autochthonous.

In Africa, the continent of genetic diversity, it is no surprise then that genocide is always lurking around the corner. The need to remove from the face of this expansive, roomy planet, those who are unlike one's race seems to have curiously become an integral part of our existence. The Rwanda tragedy, a novel occurrence on this part of the planet, was only possible because of the geographical divisions that the colonial masters left, and still callously give international legitimacy to. The Rwanda genocide is actually a western creation.

A shackle on good sense? Who's good sense is shackled, and who's good sense is doing the shackling?

Crooked ways.

An observation: war, conquest, subjugation and colonialism are not phenomena restricted to our times. In the not too distant past, the likes of the Moors or the Romans, traversed the world and did the same. They, however, brought new things to all those they touched. They brought a richer cultural heritage: they gave names to men without any, and made possible the cooperation that builds gigantic structures (imagine how northern people could have managed to create, when they could only refer to each other by appearances or qualities). They also brought technology. Though it is indisputable that the Napoleonic spirit motivated the west in their conquest of the world, the west seems to have acquired in full only this aspect of Roman culture: the worst aspect. The worst aspect when, and only when it is divorced from all else that ameliorates its beastly extremes.

In their dealings with third world people, the west, unlike the Romans, refused to share, but took, and down-pressed, and are still taking, and destroyed anything that could possibly make the concerned group an equal competitor. They left polio ridden natives, poverty, genocide, pain, misery and underdevelopment. The only groups on this planet that were spared these ravages were those who could stand up to western armies and keep them at bay.

With this in mind, it would be perfectly sane to conclude that Africa would have developed rather rapidly if the west had not been so heavy handed in their dealings with defeated peoples. Knowledge and technology would have been gained and incorporated into the existing economic and social structures. In fact, today, both sides would have been much the better, richer, wiser.

It is possible to envisage a modern descendant of a thatched hut renovated to fit modern technologies; with lighting, gas and sanitation facilities installed, with televisions and computers on board, and a mode of transportation parked outside. It is possible to envisage African cities with an African look to them, or a combination of all influences, African systems of rule with borrowed aspects, with healthy, radiant black people all around, if the natural process of acculturation had been given free reign.

The fate of Africa was sown when technical innovations by Africans, for example gun smiths, in reaction to contact with the west, were sought out and thwarted. Prudent and wise Kings, and chiefs who sought to replace the slave trade with direct trade in the very same commodities the slave trade produced, were systematically attacked and removed. The list of attacks on innovative, competitive ideas originating from black minds, acts which are today coined "Unfair Competitive Practices", and are punishable by law, go on and on, and continue, unfortunately, into the present in the form of global apartheid against, and only against people of the third world.

Facts of history.

The result of this vanity is this world we live in today, a world made by people who, not surprisingly, are not only destructive to like beings, but to their own environment as well. Witness a planet about to cough up blood. "And please do not make my stomach turn talking about migrating to mars in case the earth becomes uninhabitable. You mean you know that you cannot control yourself in the present and have made plans to go somewhere else, taking the self you cannot control with you?"

It's there for all to see.

Frictions between tribes, and genocide, will persist in Africa as long as Africans continue to live in setups that ignore the fact that "tribe" is a human condition, and so too will the freedom fighter. More ghastly episodes of Lumumbas will visit us, time and time again, until we change the setup.

Though the letter above does no such thing, the dirtying of Lumumba's memory, and of all who have fallen fighting a like evil, follows usual patterns, and, obviously, comes from the same circles of those who are either working in the same organizations that do the dirty work of elimination, and are feeling guilty that their plan of action backfired, or are part of those whose economic monopoly is maintained by such means. The assassination of Lumumba has backfired on these people. They didn't realize that it would be so difficult to really wipe his memory from the face of this planet. Rather than accept this fact, they are back for a second elimination, wanting to do the job properly this time.

Are they, by asserting that he could have turned out worse than Africans have so far imagined, trying to convince us that he was useless for us, that we should not honour, nor mourn his passing. This is an obvious attempt to destroy the martyr status that the man has slowly, and increasingly, acquired over the years.

We need to remind all those who think like this that we will keep honouring and mourning the man, and others like him, and are unconcerned whether we would have fared better or worse with them around, which may be true in some instances. The issue of whether they would have turned out good leaders or not is impertinent to the matter of their untimely death, and the fact that they died for us. This manner of thought can simply turn our attention inwards to ourselves, and try as our foes may, they will not make us look the wrong way again. The fact is that we know the true nature of the Lumumbas, and do not appreciate a world in which such a gifted, evidently peaceful, and caring spirit is extinguished for, what? an auto firm? a whore house? an oil firm? vanity? men who cannot take care of themselves and need others to clean up their behind?

Africans detest a past and present of interference from external, vain powers. In this setup, Africans know that it is impossible to determine their own destiny. Every seed they plant is killed before it grows.

We admire the Lumumbas for simply having been there in the heat of battle, for not having hesitated to fight, and die for us, and even though it is tragic, we know by this sacrifice what they meant to us, we also know by their murder what they meant to the enemy. They may not have been bright, they may not have been strong, they may not have been aware of the costs, but the act of murder makes us aware that they made the enemy uncomfortable. Men like Lumumba give us hope for the future, because, despite all attempts to make us lose faith in ourselves, to place the blame for our misery on our lesser capacities, we know there are those on our side whom the enemy fears.

It becomes apparent to us that the Lumumbas represent the best in us, and in honouring and mourning them, we honour and lament the loss of the best in ourselves.

Murders like this show us that the battles of this world are fought for the elimination of seeing eyes, of intelligence, and we are made aware time and again that we have a lot of this in our ranks. In fact, we have so much of it that we have to be beaten to a pulp, and kept like this, half dead (our communities flooded with heroin or arsenic, or simply kept adversely poor or sick), for our enemy to take advantage of us.

Our fight is as such a fight between light and darkness. On the one side are those who want to keep the veil, not only on the faces of their victims, but, by vice of the particular stupidity, on themselves as well, going to amazing lengths to avoid the truthful mirror; to keep our bodies weak and unable to act, to make true the man's last cries: "the spirit is willing, but the body is weak", by engulfing our every waking day with hardships - the devils - and on the other side we stand, the side of those who want to let the sun shine in.

Yes! We will honour and mourn the Lumumbas for as long as it takes. They are our prophets, our heroes, our manhood. We know, and will make sure that they didn't, and do not die in vain.

We are not stupid. We know why Pharaoh killed the first born sons of the Jews.

Here, I should not forget to commend and thank all those who have gone to great lengths looking behind the scenes, uncovering evidence about such episodes, revealing to us the means employed, the motivations and agendas of the evil men who step over themselves straining to remove the likes of the Lumumbas from the "world" political scene. We catch them in the act, as it were. This goes a long way in helping the victims see, be vigilant, and protect themselves from such vain, but powerful foes.

Mukazo Vunda.

Read more revelations on the Lumumba episode here!