SBS TV in Australia showed the docudrama Lamumba on the evening of 30 July 2010.1 I had never really got a handle on the events of the historical crisis associated with the legendary African leader Patrice Lamumba, events which took place when I was in my mid-teens. Lumumba is a 2000 film directed by the award-winning Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck(b. 1953). It is centred around Patrice Lumumba in the months before and after the Democratic Republic of the Congo achieved independence from Belgium in June 1960. Raoul Peck's film is a coproduction of France, Belgium, Germany, and Haiti.
Lumumba dramatises the rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba. In late October 1959, just days after I joined the Baha’i Faith at the age of 15, Lumumba was arrested for allegedly inciting an anti-colonial riot in the city of Stanleyville where thirty people were killed.2 He was sentenced to six months in prison. His name was just a news item on the distant periphery of my life, immersed as I was in a smalltown culture in the 1950s, in Ontario Canada, in its day-dream of Mr. Clean, Doris Day, General Ike, luxury without stress, without negroes or genitalia.3
The plot of this docudrama is based on the final months of the life of Patrice Lumumba in his role as the first prime minister of the Congo. His tenure in office lasted for the summer of 1960 until the army chief-of-staff, Joseph Mobutu, seized power on 14 September 1960. Joseph Kasavubu was sworn in alongside Lumumba as the first president of the country. Together they attempted to prevent the Congo from succumbing to secession and anarchy. The film concluded with Mobutu on the throne, so to speak, with the support of the United States, after CIA-sponsored coup.2
In January 1960, Congolese political leaders had been invited to Brussels to participate in a round-table conference to discuss the independence of the Congo from Belbium. Patrice Lumumba was discharged from prison for the occasion. The conference agreed to grant the Congolese practically all of their demands: a general election to be held in May 1960 and full independence on 30 June 1960. During the crisis mercenaries were employed by various factions. Mercenaries also helped the United Nations and other peace keepers. A rebellion started in the city of Thyssville in July 1960 and it quickly spread to the rest of the Congo. In September 1960 president Kasavubu deposed prime minister Lumumba who was then arrested. In January 1961 Lamumba was flown to the rich mining province of Katanga which, by that time, had seceded from the Congo. Katanga was under the leadership of Moïse Tshombe and Tshombe had active support from Belgium. Patrice Lumumba was brutally murdered on or about 17 January 1961.-Ron Price with thanks to 1SBS TV, “Lamumba,” 30 July 2010 and 2Wikipedia and 3D.T. Miller & M. Nowak, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were, Doubleday & co. Ltd., NY, 1977, p.302.
While I was playing baseball
and hockey and football that
big-wide-world was in crisis,
in the midst of the tempest of
which I was scarcely aware in
the chrysalis of suburban life
as I was with the complacent
trinity of: school, sport and an
endless entertainment which
seemed to be my right as if
some endless indulgence, some
fun culture would keep coming
my way until the end of time.
And Lamumba was just a bite
of sound on my little blue radio.
Ron Price
1 August 2010
married for 43 years, a teacher for 35, a writer and editor for 10 and a Baha'i for 51(in 2010)
where Africa comes to you..
