Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.

The country now known as Zaire was the Belgian Congo until 1960 and simply the Congo until 1971. It is land-locked except for one port city, Boma, at the mouth of the Congo River. It lies in the center of Africa in the east-west direction and just a bit south of center in the north-south dimension. The equator runs through the northern part of the country. It has an area about one and three-eighths the size of Alaska with about 38 million people, of which about 60% live in rural villages and 40% in the cities. The capital city is Kinshasa. Most of the people live in poverty, whether as poor farmers (lacking modern equipment) or workers living in the crowded slums of the cities. Ninety-nine percent of the population is black.

To describe the Congo as a country that was raped by Western imperialism is no exaggeration. Portuguese explorers landed at the mouth of the Congo River in 1482 and by the early sixteenth century, the Portuguese began the slave trade with the help of the Kongo Kingdom. Hundreds of thousands of natives from the territory now included in Zaire were enslaved and shipped to North or South America over the next three centuries. At the Berlin Conference in 1885, the European powers divvied up Africa among themselves and Congo became the personal property of Belgium's King Leopold II. King Leopold insisted that he, not the Belgium government, be declared ruler of the Congo. King Leopold's agents instigated a system of forced labor and terror that resulted in the deaths of between five and eight million Congo natives from 1885 and 1908. So brutal was his influence that the Belgium government finally had to take control of the Congo from the royal family under pressure from Great Britain and the U.S. The rule of the Belgian government was less harsh, but continued to revolve around systematic extraction of natural resources from rubber plantations and the mineral rich Katanga province. After Belgium joined the Allies in the war effort in World War II, the Congo was a valuable source of raw materials.

During the 1950's, independence movements began to build in several African countries including the Congo. When riots broke out in 1959, Belgium decided to permit the Congo to move in the direction of independence. The transition posed a serious difficulty, even apart from Belgian foot-dragging, because unlike the neighboring French Congo, the Belgian system had never integrated blacks into any positions of authority. All of the politicians, civil servants, and army officers were white. Long-repressed hostility among blacks from centuries of exploitation was bound to flare up and posed a genuine risk to the fifty thousand mostly Flemish whites living in the Congo. Among the black leaders who had struggled for independence, Lumumba was the most impatient and most committed to genuine independence from Belgian and other foreign influences.

Further complicating matters was that the Cold War was raging in an especially frosty manner when Congo was declared independent on June 30th, 1960. In America, Eisenhower was in the final year of his second term and John F. Kennedy was campaigning against Richard Nixon. The Soviets were backing independence movements in some African countries and acquiring influence.

The first ever general election was held in Congo about a month before independence. There were nine political parties involved and none won a majority. On the eve of independence, the two leading vote-getters, Patrice Lumumba (played by Eriq Ebouaney in the film) and Joseph Kasavubu (played by Maka Kotto) agreed to share power in a coalition government, with Kasavubu taking the title of president and Lumumba prime minister. Within just five days after independence, revolt broke out, first, among troops of the Congolese army, who wanted removal of the white officers, and then spread throughout the country. Government workers fled and the country was soon in chaos. In July, leaders of the wealthy copper-producing Katanga Province, which resented their poor representation in the coalition government, took advantage of the disorder to declare independence. The diamond-producing province of Kasai followed suit in August and Lumumba contemplated asking the Soviets to furnish military advisors.

Leaders of several of the Western nations were all reaching similar conclusions. President Eisenhower directly ordered the CIA to assassinate Lumumba in August of 1960. The CIA concocted a poisoned toothpaste scenario but was beaten to the job by the Belgians. The British Foreign Office, in September 1960, also recommended that Lumumba be eliminated, one way or another. The Belgian military authorities, however, were already in place and began plotting immediately with General Joseph Mobutu (played by Alex Descas), the former friend that Lumumba had appointed as head of the army. Millions of francs were shipped to the Congo to fund what became known as "Operation Barracuda." The Belgian ambassador then ordered Kasavubu to "fire" Lumumba, but Lumumba won two consecutive votes of confidence from the new parliament.

Mobuto then placed Lumumba under house arrest, effecting a coup d'état. Lumumba escaped but was soon recaptured by troops under Mobuto's command. There is documentary footage showing Lumumba being beaten in the presence of Mobutu, then later paraded through Leopoldville, and then beaten again. He was briefly incarcerated in Thysville prison, until the guards there almost mutinied on his behalf. Belgian authorities sent orders for Lumumba to be flown to Katanga province where he was virtually certain to be killed. He and his two closest associates, Maurice Mpolo (played by Théophile Sowié) and Joseph Okito (played by Cheik Doukouré), were so thoroughly beaten on the plane that the pilot became concerned that he might lose control of the flight. In Katanga Province, the three were killed in the presence of Katanga leader Moïse Tshombe (played by Pascal N'Zonzi) under Belgian orders. The Belgian commander of the Katanga police force, Gerard Soete, was assigned the unpleasant task of chopping the corpses up and dissolving them in acid. These events are detailed not only in the feature film Lumumba but in a pair of BBC documentaries entitled Mobutu and Who Killed Lumumba?.

Early in 2002, after an extensive commission of inquiry in Belgium, the Belgian government acknowledged its involvement in the death of Lumumba and issued an apology to the victim's family and the Congolese people. Throughout Zaire, people stopped to read the headlines in the paper on the day the apology was released, though few could afford the price of the newspaper. Lumumba's son, Francois, still fights for the full truth about his father's assassination. At the time of the apology, Lumumba's daughter Julienne was an official in the cabinet of Mabutu successor Laurent Kabila's government, but Kabila has since been assassinated. Kabila described himself as a "Lumumbist." Shortly before Kabila's death, Ludo Martens, the leader of the Belgian Workers Party, claimed that a "Western plot" led by the United States was in progress to destabilize Kabila's government. Perhaps it was more.

After Lumumba's murder, fighting ensued between Kasavubu's faltering government and Lumumba's supporters. United Nation troops were called in and restored order in all but Katanga province by August 1961. The U.N. Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjold, visited Leopoldville in Congo in early September 1961 and flew off for Rhodesia to negotiate with the Katangan rebel leader, Moïse Tshombe, to arrange a ceasefire, but the plane crashed under mysterious circumstances. A year-and-half later, in January 1963, the rebellion in Katanga was quelled and U.N. forces left in June of 1964. Ironically, Moïse Tshombe, who had led the Katanga succession and supervised Lumumba's death by firing squad, became prime minister of the newly reunited country. New elections in March of 1965 produced another unstable coalition, headed by Tshombe. In November of 1965, the Congolese army, still under General Joseph Mabutu, seized control and Mobatu became president. With backing from the Western powers, Mabutu ruled as a brutal dictator for four decades and facilitated the continuing theft of the countries natural resources by the West. He had close personal relationships with French President Jacques Chirac, the Belgian king, and, especially, American President George Bush Sr. In 1969, Moïse Tshombe was kidnapped and murdered in Algiers, with likely Belgian and French involvement. His daughter Isabelle was also a cabinet minister in Kabila's government.

Production Values: Director Raoul Peck had previously made a documentary about Lumumba entitled Lumumba: Death of a Prophet (an excerpt is included on the DVD), so he clearly knows his topic. Lumumba succeeds better on a documentary level than as a dramatic film. Peck has adhered to the facts of the story, as well as they are known, with only minor alterations or dramatic embellishments. The story is one that every citizen in America, Belgium, France, Britain, and other imperialist nations should learn about. Unfortunately, few citizens in these democracies will take the time to understand how their nations interact with and diabolically exploit third-world countries, ensuring that Western leaders will continue to be able to manipulate public opinion in support of corrupt policies.

What Peck fails to provide viewers is any real sense of Lumumba as a person. His rise to a position of influence in the Congo is skirted over very superficially. We learn nothing about his aspirations, about what made him tick. We learn precious little about his wife or his family life. We are given the political leader but not the human being. To his credit, however, Peck doesn't glorify Lumumba excessively. His martyrdom is depicted justly but he is also shown as ineffective at diplomacy and compromise – something of a classic "idealist," with both the good and the bad that the term implies.

Peck uses an odd kind of narrative device to open the film, where he has the already dead Lumumba speaking to his wife from beyond the grave. There is one instance of effective montage editing, where we see Mobutu as dictator using Lumumba's memory to enhance his own stature intercut with footage of him watching Lumumba's execution.

Eriq Ebouaney gives an impassioned performance as Lumumba. He is a French actor who was born in Cameroon. If we are shown little of Lumumba's inner person, we are treated to even less insight into the other characters. They go through the motions of reenactment of the events, but their interior motivations are never revealed.

Bottom-Line: This story of imperialist exploitation of a third-world nation may seem to some like an isolated instance, but it really isn't. American has repeatedly suppressed liberal and socialist regimes offering hope to repressed populations in favor of dictators who will sustain Western interests. With CIA backing, General Carlos Armas ousted Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, the Shah replaced Muhammad Mussadegh in Iran, and Augusto Pinochet took control from Salvador Allende in Chile. Anti-American terrorism exists not because they either envy or despise our freedoms, as Americans are led to believe, but because America has repeatedly sponsored regimes that have taken the freedom away from others, so that we can continue to exploit third-world resources. While the Western powers may have relinquished direct colonial control, they continue to find more subtle ways to maintain political dominance and unfettered access to resources.

It is difficult to fully understand the determination of the Western powers to beat and murder this poor man. Why were they not satisfied with imprisonment? Why not at least a quiet assassination rather than repeated beatings? From a distance of forty-plus years, it is easy to forget Cold War hysteria. That is most unfortunate because the current mood in America is something of a reprise of it. Now as then, America has the sense of being locked in mortal combat with a particular foe and a sense that immoral acts are therefore justified, but immoral acts beget immoral reprisals. Now more than ever, Americans need to understand how their government behaves when it becomes hysterical.

There are two few quality films from or about Africa, so this one is a welcome addition, providing a glimpse into an important chapter in black history and the fight for independence in Africa. I'm rating this film at four stars as a compromise between a five-star message and a three-star production. Lumumba is in French with English subtitles and has a running time of 115 minutes.

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age