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Books by
Marvin X
Love and War: Poems /
In the Crazy House Called America /
Woman: Man's Best Friend /
Beyond Religion Toward Spirituality
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Lumumba: A Film by Raoul Peck
Reviewed By
Marvin X
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Note: We send out
this review on the 50th anniversary of
independence in the Congo.
Lumumba said he was fifty years ahead of his time, and so it is. But even
fifty years later the same problems of
poverty, ignorance, and disease remain. The
Europeans are still there stealing the
wealth, although the Chinese have entered
the drama. Hopefully, with the Chinese, in
exchange for precious minerals, there shall
be construction and reconstruction, although
we don't understand with a population of
seventy million mostly unemployed why
Chinese laborers are needed. There seems
little jubilation among the population. One
Congolese said, "After fifty years of
independence, happiness has come to the man
in charge and those around him—they eat well
and are well paid."—mx |
My African
consciousness began with the murder of
Patrice Lumumba.
After high school graduation, I enrolled at Oakland's
Merritt College and found myself in the midst of the
black revolutionary student movement. Students Huey
Newton, Bobby Seale, Richard Thorne, Maurice Dawson,
Kenny Freeman, Ernie Allen, Ann Williams, Carol Freeman
and others were rapping daily on the steps at the front
door of Merritt College. Some of them wore sweatshirts
with Jomo Kenyatta's picture, sold by Donald Warden's
African American Association, which held meetings on
campus, and sometimes Donald Warden, renamed Khalid
Abdullah Tariq Al Mansour, rapped. The theme was often
the African independence struggle, especially the Mau
Mau's in Kenya.
But a frequent
topic was the 1961 brutal murder of the democratically
elected Congolese Prime Minister,
Patrice Lumumba.
The brothers were well read and in their raps they
documented the facts and figures of the African
liberation struggle. They gave reference to such books
as Kwame Nkrumah's
Neo-Colonialism: the last stage of imperialism,
where he documented the riches of Africa, especially the
Congo, that the West coveted and committed mass murder
to maintain. Patrice Lumumba was the first African
leader I'd known about who was assassinated, and the
brutal way he was eliminated helped expedite my African
consciousness, especially learning how his so-called
comrades betrayed him to continue the Western world's
plunder of the Congo's vast mineral riches.
On one level, it
was hard to believe, since I was attempting to get
blackenized and didn't want to face the reality of black
treachery. As students, most of us were Black
nationalists, not yet the revolutionary black
nationalists we would soon become, that allowed some of
us to employ a class or Marxist analysis to the Pan
African struggle, which Nkrumah's writings brought to
the table.
The brothers
leaning in the Marxist direction were Ken Freeman, Ernie
Allen, and maybe Bobby Seale, all of whom were
associated with SoulBook magazine, a
revolutionary black nationalist publication featuring
the writings of LeRoi Jones, James Boggs, Max Stanford,
Robert F. Williams, Sonia Sanchez, Askia M. Touré,
myself and others, although I was a budding writer, just
out of high school and knew nothing about Marxism.
If I had, it would
have helped me understand the class nature of Lumumba's
final days. I couldn't comprehend how Mobutu, Kasavubu,
and Tshombe could be so wicked to conspire with the
white man to kill their brother. It would take the black
hands of Malcolm's murderers for me to begin to
understand.
Actually, I
wouldn't fully understand until years later after
reading a monograph by
Dr. Walter Rodney, himself the victim of
assassination in Guyana, South America, entitled
West Africa and the Atlantic Slave Trade, in
which he carefully deconstructed African social classes
and their role in the slave trade, detailing how the
political, military, judicial, and even religious
institutions became corrupt and expedited our removal
from the Motherland.
Amiri Baraka sings to us:
|
My brother the king
Sold me to the ghost
When you put your hand on your sister and
made her a slave
When you put your hand on your brother and
made him a slave
Watch out for the ghost
The ghost go get you Africa
At the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean
Is a railroad of human bones
the king sold the farmer to the ghost. . . . |
It is hard to
believe it has been forty years since the death of
Lumumba, maybe because in the interim we've had
innumerable cases in Africa and even in America of
similar acts of treachery. Supposedly black ministers
were involved in the death of Rev. Martin Luther King,
Jr. Black elected politicians have been selling out the
black community for at least the past thirty years,
especially since the 1972 Gary Convention of the
Congress of African People. We have no choice but to see
our struggle as class struggle, race being incidental.
We cannot have any
illusions that a black face will save us, only black
hearts. Those who study the Bible and Qur'an know the
history of all men is the story of treachery, deceit,
lust, greed, jealousy, envy and murder—but the glass can
be seen as half full: the history of man is also about
good transcending evil, liberation defeating oppression,
ascension after crucifixion, joy after sorrow, victory
over defeat. Yet, how many prophets survived? How many
righteous people survived and continued in their
righteousness, rather than succumb to iniquities?
Men of Lumumba's
character are rare upon the stage of history, men
dedicated to the liberation of their people, men who are
confident that no matter how great the odds, freedom
will come soon one morning.
Raoul Peck's film
was depressing because it showed a leader in an Indiana
Jones snake pit full of vipers and cobras of the worse
sort, snakes who danced to the rhythm of Western drums,
not those of the mighty Congo, for Lumumba's mission
appeared doomed from the start, he said himself that he
was fifty years ahead of his time. This may have been
the truest statement of the movie, for only ten years
remain before the half-century mark in the modern
history of the Congo or Zaire. Maybe in the last ten
years of his prophecy, the people of Zaire will become
truly free.
What the movie
failed to give us were the deep structure motivations
for the behavior of men like
Kasavubu,
Tshombe, and
Mobutu. Yes, the Europeans were there, had been
there stealing the wealth, especially of Katanga
Province which held 70% of the nation's riches, but we
needed to see the very beginning with Belgium King
Leopold's butchery, including his role in the European
carving up of Africa at the 1890s Berlin Conference. We
need to know the custom of chopping off limbs so in
vogue today with diamond seeking armies in Zaire, Sierra
Leone, Liberia, and elsewhere originated with King
Leopold. Only then can the unaware and unread understand
what demonic forces created such inhuman beings as the
three main characters that surrounded Lumumba and
ultimately brought about his downfall. From the movie we
are tempted to say his own people did him in, but we
know better, we must know better—think of diamonds,
chrome, uranium, plutonium, cobalt, zinc, and other
minerals.
Look at Zaire today
with several competing armies from neighboring countries
(Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, et al) warring over the same
minerals for the same European masters who instigated
the treacherous actions of Kasavubu, Tshombe and Mobutu.
Their names have a poetic ring that we should remember
forever as the sound of death in a people, the sound of
condensation and the lowest rats in creation, but
understand they represent class interests and their
class mates are visible throughout Africa and the world,
even in the American political landscape: we have
Clarence Thomas, Ward Connelly, and Colin Powell—new
world rats, but rats none the less, who are every bit
the measure of the Congo Three.
And let us not
forget the reactionary behavior in the black liberation
movement, the murder by incineration of Samuel Napier in
the Black Panther fratricide, the assassination of
Bunchy Carter and John Huggins by the US organization in
the BSU meeting room on the campus of UCLA, the Muslims
setting a prostitute on fire in San Francisco and other
terrorists actions such as the Zebra killings.
Even the Black Arts
Movement had its psychopathic shootouts with the wounding of
Larry Neal and
other acts we need not list. Shall we neglect to mention
the hip hop generation also has its catalogue of madness
such as the east coast/west coast killing of rap giants
Tupac and Biggie Smalls. Let Lumumba be a lesson for us
all. Let's learn from it and move to higher ground. Some
of our madness is simply that—we cannot attribute all
evil acts of man to white oppression, although white
oppression is inexcusable. We must take responsibility
for Black Madness.
We are happy the
director created a screen version of this historic
drama. The actors made us feel the good in Lumumba and
the evil in his associates, black and white, for the
whites performed their usual roles as arrogant,
paternalistic colonial masters whose aim was to hold
power until the last second as we saw when they released
Lumumba from prison to attend independence talks in
Belgium. We saw the stark contrast of character in the
speeches of Lumumba as prime minister and Kasavubu as
president. Lumumba was strong, Kassavubu capitulating
even on the eve of freedom, signaling his intent to
remain a colonial puppet.
For those who came
away like myself, and one could sense the sad silence in
the audience as they departed the theatre, a friend
remarked that we must not give up hope because the enemy
will never tell you when you are winning.
© 2002 by Marvin
X
For more writings
and/or information on Marvin X go to
BlackbirdPressNews /
Parables and Fables of Marvin X
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Lumumba: A Film by Raoul Peck
Raoul Peck tells the story
of the African freedom fighter
Patrice Lumumba
with fire and grace. The opening scene sets the vérité tone with
the sound of a saw cutting through bone; two Belgian soldiers
are breaking down Lumumba's body and incinerating it in a
ten-gallon drum. From there, the film backtracks to the origins
of the Congolese independence movement and proceeds to explain
how a man's legacy could be considered so threatening. Peck
handles all of this, including the atrocities, with refinement,
and lets the drama of Lumumba's story run smoothly, free of
heavy historical detail. Eriq Ebouaney is extraordinary in the
lead role, the production feels emotionally true, and the
speeches generate spontaneous applause. Only the ending comes
off as too hopeful, as we know that with Lumumba's death, the
regime of Mobuto began. In French and Lingala.—Michael
Agger,
The New Yorker
Made in the tradition of
such true-life political thrillers as MALCOLM X and JFK, Raoul
Peck's award-winning LUMUMBA is a gripping epic that dramatizes
for the first time the rise and fall of legendary African leader
Patrice Lumumba.
When the Congo declared its independence from Belgium in 1960,
the 36-year-old, self-educated Lumumba became the first Prime
Minister of the newly independent state. Called "the politico of
the bush" by journalists of the day, he became a lightning rod
of Cold War politics as his vision of a united Africa gained him
powerful enemies in Belgium and the U.S. Lumumba would last just
months in office before being brutally assassinated. Strikingly
photographed in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Belgium as civil war
once again raged in the Congo, the film vividly re-creates the
shocking events behind the birth of the country that became
Zaire during the reign of Lumumba's former friend and eventual
nemesis, Joseph Mobutu. This is the English-dubbed version of
the film.—Amazon.com
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Cuba An African Odyssey
is the previously untold
story of Cuba's support for African revolutions.
Cuba: An African Odyssey is the story of the Cold War
told through the prism of its least known arena: Africa. It is
the untold story of Cuba’s support for African revolutions. It
is the story of men like Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral,
Agosthino Neto and of course Che Guevara who have become icons,
mythical figures whose names are now synonymous with the word
revolution. This is the story of how these men, caught between
capitalism and communism, strove to create a third bloc that
would assert the simple principle of national independence. It
is the story of a whole dimension of world politics during the
last half of the 20th century, which has been hidden behind the
facade of a simplistic understanding of superpower conflict.
Cuba: An African Odyssey will tell the inside story of
only three of these Cuban escapades. We will start with the
Congo where Che Guevara personally spent seven months fighting
with the Pro-Lumumbist rebellion in the jungle of Eastern Congo.
Then to Guinea Bissau where Amilcar Cabral used the technical
support of Cuban advisors to bleed the Portuguese colonial war
machine thus toppling the regime in Europe. Finally, Angola
where in total 380,000 Cuban soldiers fought during the 27 years
of civil war. The Cuban withdrawal from Angola was finally
bartered against Namibia’s independence. With Namibia’s
independence came the fall of Apartheid… the last vestige of
colonialism on the African continent.
Cuba: An African Odyssey unravels episodes of the Cold
War long believed to be nothing but proxy wars. From the
tragicomic epic of Che Guevara in Congo to the triumph at the
battle of Cuito Carnavale in Angola, this film attempts to
understand the world today through the saga of these
internationalists who won every battle but finally lost the war.
Credits: Written,
directed and narrated by Jihan El-Tahri / Edited by
Gilles Bovon / Photography by Frank-Peter Lehmann
Sound
Recordists: James Baker, Graciela Barrault / Produced by
Tancrède Ramonet, Benoît Juster, Jihan El-Tahri
Source:
Snagfilms
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King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed,
Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
By Adam Hochschild
King Leopold of Belgium, writes
historian Adam Hochschild in this grim
history, did not much care for his
native land or his subjects, all of
which he dismissed as "small country,
small people." Even so, he searched the
globe to find a colony for Belgium,
frantic that the scramble of other
European powers for overseas dominions
in Africa and Asia would leave nothing
for himself or his people. When he
eventually found a suitable location in
what would become the Belgian Congo,
later known as Zaire and now simply as
Congo, Leopold set about establishing a
rule of terror that would culminate in
the deaths of 4 to 8 million indigenous
people, "a death toll," Hochschild
writes, "of Holocaust dimensions." |
 |
Those who
survived went to work mining ore or harvesting
rubber, yielding a fortune for the Belgian king, who
salted away billions of dollars in hidden bank
accounts throughout the world. Hochschild's fine
book of historical inquiry, which draws heavily on
eyewitness accounts of the colonialists' savagery,
brings this little-studied episode in European and
African history into new light.—Gregory
McNamee
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Black Arts
Movement (Kalamu)
The Black Arts Movement (Smethurst)
The Black Arts Movement
(Larry Neal)
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Marcus Garvey "Africa For The Africans" /
Look For Me in The Whirlwind
Marcus Mosiah
Garvey /
Marucs Garvey Speech
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 1
July 2010 |
