Assassinated by the imperialist powers with the complicity of his political opponents, the Congolese Patrice Lumumba haunts our collective imaginations. His tragic fate has inspired many l…

A literary hero named… Patrice Lumumba

Patrice Lumumba, Prime Minister of Congo-Kinshasa, arrested in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa), on November 1, 1960.

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Text by: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

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Assassinated by the imperialist powers with the complicity of his political opponents, the Congolese Patrice Lumumba haunts our collective imaginations.

His tragic destiny has inspired many books, essays but also literary works with cathartic ambitions.

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Sixty years ago, on January 17, 1961, Patrice Lumumba, the newly independent Prime Minister of Congo, died.

This death haunts our collective imagination because the revolutionary leader died almost in front of the viewers of his time.

According to historians, the assassination of the Congolese was perhaps the first major event in postcolonial Africa reported by international media.

Photos of the ousted Prime Minister's downing to Elizabethville (Lumumbashi) to be displayed as a hunting trophy by his bloodthirsty opponents, before he was shot down that same day, toured the world, revealing to the general public the secret stakes of the decolonization of the former Belgian Congo.

In the days that followed, demonstrations took place around the world to protest this barbaric crime, which had been orchestrated by the Western imperialist powers.

This tragedy made the Congolese leader the "

martyr of the world revolution

”, as Che Guavera declared at the time in his homage to the deceased.

Lumumba has become "

all of Africa
"

The posterity of the Congolese revolutionary does not stop at the reactions and tributes recorded in the wake of his death.

During the sixty years that have passed since, Lumumba's tragic destiny has inspired many books: essays, analyzes, but also literary texts.

These works have made it possible to perpetuate the general public's interest in this essential figure of modern Africa, which has today become a global symbol of the struggle of oppressed peoples.

The long essay published in 1963 by the French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre presenting the life and work of Patrice Lumumba (1) and the poetic-epic drama with the Rimbaldian title

Une Saison au Congo

(2), under the pen by the great Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, undoubtedly remain to this day the two greatest texts that have been devoted to this figure of African nationalism.

With his death, Lumumba ceased to be a person, he became the whole of Africa

", writes the French philosopher.

Separated into two parts entitled respectively "The company" and "The reasons for failure", the Sartrean essay offers a sociological analysis of the meteoric trajectory of the Congolese leader, according to a Marxist reading grid.

Une Saison au Congo

is a three-act play.

Its author, Aimé Césaire, was one of the greatest French-language poets of the twentieth century and leader of the negritude movement with his friends Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon-Gontran Damas.

His magnificent piece on Lumumba makes his hero's political vision resonate poetically and invites us to read his death as a tragedy with both Shakespearean and Christian accents.

"The Political Thought of Patrice Lumumba"

Sartre in 1964 Dominio público

Published in the pages of the journal Présence Africaine in 1963, Sartre's essay served as a preface to an anthology of Lumumba's speeches published the same year, under the title “The political thought of Patrice Lumumba”.

Sartre did not know Lumumba.

It was during the independence of the Belgian Congo on June 30, 1960 that the French writer really discovered the Congolese revolutionary leader, his attention being retained at the time by the Algerian conflict, as the articles testify. which he published in his review

Modern Times

The colonial question occupied a central place in Sartre's reflection on the human condition.

In the 1940s, the philosopher approached the African writers and intellectuals who militated in Paris for the cultural and ideological emancipation of their countries.

In 1948, at the request of Alioune Diop of Présence Africaine, he had prefaced the

Anthology of the new Negro and Malagasy poetry in the French language

published by Gallimard by Senghor.

Entitled “Black Orpheus”, this preface announced the emergence of modern African poetry in French, drawing attention to the subversive power of this literature which envisages both cultural alienation and poetic liberation.

The text indirectly posed the problem of colonialism, building bridges between the existential conception of man and the being-in-the-world of the Negro, victim of racism and political domination.

The era of neo-colonialism

In the years 1950-60, the political situation changed profoundly in Africa, with the former colonized countries gaining independence.

Africa entered the era of neo-colonialism which was the new form of domination and exploitation imagined by the imperialists to keep their grip on the colonized countries.

Situating the emergence of Lumumba in what he calls "

the zero degree of Congolese history where whites no longer command, but continue to administer, where blacks are in power but do not yet command

", Sartre analyzes with a professorial lucidity the reasons for the failure of the revolutionary project of his subject.

They are three in number, according to the master.

First, the naivety of Lumumba who had refused to play the game of neo-colonialists, even before having measured the balance of power which was then largely unfavorable to him.

Second, the contradictions inherent in the petty-bourgeois origins of the Congolese leader and his calls for a unitary Congo.

Coming from the advanced class whose corporate claims he had long supported, he did not know how to find a

modus vivendi

between his universalist Jacobinism which will cut him off from his class and from the "three million black proletarians of the Congo", confused.

Finally, arriving at the prime minister's office without a real revolution since independence had been granted and not conquered, Lumumba had no popular base and owed its power to the ruling class which had allied itself to international capitalism.

On July 1, 1960, Lumumba, leader of a majority cartel and head of government is alone, powerless, betrayed by all and already lost

", writes the French philosopher, comparing the Congolese revolutionary to Robespierre, a black Robespierre, without revolution and soon without an army following the defection of its chief of staff ... a certain Colonel Mobutu.

Organized like a funeral oration, the Sartrean account of the successes and misfortunes of Lumumba is also a consecration of the politician erected as an intellectual, ahead of his time, dead too early before the synthesis which would have enabled him to rise to the- above its contingent contradictions of class and origin.

Sartre had no literary intention, but his Lumumba, which is defined by his "

unhappy conscience

", is reminiscent of the heroes of the "ambiguous adventures" that so many first generation African novelists recounted in novels that have become classics.

Triptych on the condition of blacks in the world

Aimé Césaire is the author of eight collections of poems, two essays and four AFP plays

Aimé Césaire wrote

Une saison au Congo

five years after Lumumba's disappearance.

It is a play of incomparable power of imagination and writing which in the space of three brief acts (exhibition, crisis, outcome) reveals the historical and ideological stakes of the ephemeral triumph, the agony and death of the former Congolese Prime Minister.

“

You have to consider my plays as tragedies,

” claimed the author.

In this case, it is a question of a tragedy, in the Greek sense of the term: "

lyrical and dramatic work in verse, representing some great misfortune that has happened to famous characters in legend or history, and capable of exciting terror or pity

”(Le petit Robert).

Carried by its language, the play is also a reflection on the time of history and its fortunes and misfortunes, which suggests the title of the drama with Rimbaldian reminiscences.

“

Césaire came to the theater after 1960, in a second stage of his literary career, after making himself known as the great poet of the anti-colonial revolt with the publication in 1939 of his opus

Cahier d'un retour au pays natal », Recalls Romuald Fonkoua, biographer of Césaire and specialist in his literary work.

“

Césaire's dramaturgy is founded

, adds Professor Fonkoua,

on the poet's concern to show the struggles of black peoples to emancipate themselves.

Une Saison au Congo

is the second of three texts for the scene written by the Martinican poet.

It was published by Éditions du Seuil in 1965 and was performed for the first time in Brussels in 1967, before being staged in the French capital by the poet's favorite director, Jean-Marie Serreau.

In an interview with the newspaper

Le Monde

at the premiere in Paris, the playwright explains that his play is part of a dramatic triptych that he had undertaken to write on the condition of blacks in the world.

His first play

Le roi Christophe,

whose action takes place in Haiti, was the West Indian part, Une saison au Congo was the African part and the third part, which had not yet been written, was to focus on blacks in the United States.

A Tempest

will appear in 1969.

History becomes mythology

By choosing to devote the African volume of his triptych to the tragic events in the Congo at the time of decolonization, which he saw as emblematic of the situation of black men in Africa, Césaire confirms the symbolic significance of his play.

Unlike Sartre's essay, this one does not dwell on the social origins of its protagonist or the beginnings of his political career, to focus on the last years of his life.

Césaire did not know intimately the eventful life of the Congolese Prime Minister either, but he had made inquiries with those close to him in order to be able to reconstruct the overall outline of this exceptional destiny.

This results in a text of great significance, with an almost cosmic dimension.

Brechtian in its refusal of psychology, the play proceeds by poetic and metaphorical comparisons, erecting its hero into a man-symbol, symbol of the tragedy of “

decolonization without independence

”.

Césaire seizes Lumumba in his dimension of prophet who goes to the fore of History.

He is Prometheus, symbol of the revolt of men against tyranny, marching towards his death, which is a necessary sacrifice for the rebirth of Africa.

“

In this cathartic process staged by the playwright

,” explains Romuald Fonkoua, “

the hero's death is not seen as a defeat, it becomes the very condition for the emancipation of the black man.

This is how art transforms history into mythology.

(1)

La Pensée politique by Patrice Lumumba

, in “Présence Africaine”, July-September 1963.

(2)

Une saison au Congo

, Aimé Césaire, Editions du Seuil, 1966.

Framed

African literature and history: 3 questions for Boniface Mongo-Mboussa

RFI: How does African literature relate to the history of the continent?

Boniface Mongo-Mboussa: Modern African literature has a fruitful relationship with the history of the continent.

Consider the rewriting of

Thomas Mofolo's

Chaka

(South African historical novel) by Senghor, Tchicaya U Tam Si, Seydou Badian, etc.

Then came

Soundiata

by Djibril Tamsir Niane on the genesis of the Empire of Mali,

Doguicimi

by Paul Hazoumé, historical and ethnological novel on the kingdom of Abomey in Dahomey,

Sarraouinia

by Nigerien Abdoulaye Mamani, who evokes the colonial expedition of Chad- Niger, the play

Béatrice du Kongo

by Bernard Dadié devoted to Kimpa Vita's resistance to the kingdom of Kongo in the 16th century against the Portuguese,

Les Bouts de bois de Dieu

by Sembène Ousmane retracing one of the episodes of the railway strike from Dakar Niger in 1948, the play by Boris Boubacar Diop on the demands of the skirmishers at Camp Thiaroye, and which would become the beautiful film by Sembène Ousmane.

There is

Monné Outrages and challenges

of Kourouma on the colonial conquest in the nineteenth century without forgetting the beautiful project

"Rwanda 1994: Writing by duty of memory

" initiated by the Chadian Nocky Djedanoum and Maimouna Coulibaly, etc.

What was the literary posterity of Lumumba, a figure of Congolese nationalism in Africa?

Two images on the banks of the Congo River.

There is like a sharing of roles.

On the left bank, that is to say in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the politician is represented by popular art.

He gives of him the image of a black Moses, of a cultural hero and of a sacrificed Christ.

This is eloquent in Tsibumba Kanda's painting.

On the right bank, Lumumba is a martyr, a myth.

We see it in Henri Lopes' poem,

Du cote de Katanga

A sort of funeral oration where the name of Lumumba is never mentioned.

Or in

Léopolis

, the story of Sylvain Mbemba.

Lumumba here is called Fabrice Mfumu (which means chief, king, in Kongo language).

This mythical character is the subject of an academic research by an African-American Miss Nora Northom.

Let's say we're at the edge of the cliff.

We do not fall into hagiography, but we are on the crest.

Finally, there is the Lumumba of Tchicaya U Tam Si. A dreamed Lumumba.

How is this very strong relationship that Tchicaya maintained with Lumumba explained?

African and diaspora intellectuals experienced Lumumba's disappearance like an earthquake.

And their reactions were equal to the event.

Frantz Fanon, who was very close to him, said "do not forgive yourself for this death", Césaire gave A season in the Congo to read.

However, of all the writers and artists, none has identified with him so closely as Tchicaya U Tam Si. There are four reasons for this.

The young Tchicaya worked alongside the politician as a journalist.

Lumumba confused Gerald-Felix Tchicaya (name of the poet in the civil status) and Jean-Felix Tchicaya, the poet's father, who was the first Congolese deputy (from the right bank) at the Palais-Bourbon.

Secindo, Lumumba died within a day of the death of the poet's father.

Finally, Lumumba is shot dead along with two of his followers, Mpolo and Okito.

Tchicaya identified his death with that of Christ, living in a colonial context, and betrayed by a loved one like Mobutu.

However, betrayal is a major theme in Tchicaya's work.

All these reasons make Tchicaya privatize the mourning of an entire continent.

* Boniface Mongo-Mboussa teaches French literature at Sarah Lawrence College in Paris.

He is also the biographer of the poet Tchicaya U Tam'Si, whose complete works he coordinated for Gallimard editions.

A literary hero named… Patrice Lumumba

A literary hero named… Patrice Lumumba

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