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.

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[See Soren Dayton's comments.] The film covers the last 8 months of Lumumba's life, in 1960, beginning in prison, continuing with four months' freedom and ending in four month's internment, flight, torture and execution. It centers on the emotional aspects of life at the center of the storm. It shows but does not analyze.

The Belgian Congo was constituted 80 years before through the most extensive use of barbarism then known in the European conquest of Africa. 80 years down the road, Congo's function as a state was primarily the extraction and shipping of mineral wealth and agricultural produce from Africa's richest region (the region drained by the Congo river), with the necessary modicum of services to the people doing the extraction and crop-raising, the blacks.

Lumumba accepted the existence of the Congo state, and postulated a Congolese nation. The state only existed as a machine for exploiting the underground riches and the labor of the "nation", and the nation existed only as defined within that state. It had no common culture, no common language, no common tradition (except Bantu tradition generally) and especially no common structure save that defined by the Belgian-run state.

The task Lumumba defined for himself was squaring the circle. The only way the Congo could be maintained as a state was as it had always existed, through massive violence and systematic inequality, and for the profit of the same class of profiteers as before. The Congo never had any other purpose.

Lumumba believed in his impossible task in part because he felt responsible for, and in a sense shared, the enthusiasm his Licoln-like honesty and courage generated everywhere (in Europe as well as the Congo).

In hindsight what followed, or some variant of it, was totally foreseeable, written in the structure of the state. It is interesting to see how Lumumba's honest friend, Mobutu, comes, one step at a time, to recognize this and to make his peace with it. The last scene, on the June-61 first anniversary of the country, focusses on Mobutu, who is physically the Mobutu we saw take these steps one at a time, but spiritually already the slave of the powers he made his pact with, and for which he will later take the other steps that made him in his time one of Africa's most nauseating dictators.

If the machine left in place by the Belgians and the Western mining industry had not produced Mobutu, it would have produced a clone of him. Lumumba was a human sacrifice to African hopes the machine had no truck with. These hopes were worse than self-defeating the moment "the Congolese state and nation" was accepted as a fact.

11 of 13 found the following review helpful:

LUMUMBA - A must see!Aug 20, 2001
By nicole moore "nicomo@eatmos.com"
LUMUMBA is the story of Patrice Lumumba's rise to power in the Congo in 1960 when revolution kicked the colonial power (Beligium, etc.) out. Here's the reason to see it: Africans speaking the truth about colonialism, African men dealing with the complexities of being a brand new government, seeing powerful revolutionaries having to make choices about how or whether to compromise. Seeing it makes you realize how we never see pictures that show Black people in charge, as competent, complex leaders, etc. So much of what we see is cartoons and caracatures. It also includes tenderness of Black family love.

It is also a very difficult film to watch: it is full of violence, not the gratuitous kind. It doesn't give women enough of a voice and I forgive it this point for all the other things it does.

Though LUMUMBA is not a "feel good" movie, it is inspiring, because I feel compelled to figure out how you could out-organize the forces who worked against Lumumba's fight for independence and unity. And because you see the potential of their vision, if only for moments, it reinspires to work towards that end. And it moves me as any well-executed martyr's story: we must carry on the work.

[P.S. DO NOT see the HBO butchered & English-Dubbed version on this film. They chopped the best parts of the movie out, and in general, ruined a fine film. I have to wonder... was it intentional?]

8 of 9 found the following review helpful:

A part of African history everyone should know aboutJan 25, 2005
By All Things Good
I enjoyed this movie very much. Accoring to most available literature, this movie is historically accurate. Peck is a well respected director and seems to have done a good job presenting the truth. Lumumba is an icon in African history and he represents the hope and optimism of post-colonial Africa. His death was a tragedy and it leads us to wonder "What if...". This is an important chapter in modern African history and we are lucky that such a well-made movie has helped tell this story to the world.

PS. Frank Carlucci's (the second secretary in the U.S. embassy in Kinshasa at the time) name is bleeped out in some versions because his lawyers pressured the film's distributors to remove all reference to him. He of course denies involvement in the assassination of Lumumba. Peck has stated that he has strong reason to believe his movie to be accurate.

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