An Obsession with Lumumba
Our Personal Search
Lately, I've been wondering why certain subjects captivate us, what we are relating to when we find something interesting. Why do I, for example, find religion fascinating, while one of my more brilliant students in African History seems unable to pick up on basic religious concepts? Why do I find Kwame Nkrumah so boring but Nelson Mandela is one of my heroes? Is it something inherent within me or is it the way historians and others have presented the information that has captivated me?
I suppose that as I write about race relations in South Africa, conflict between black and white, I'm somehow trying to deal with my own sudden insertion, as a child of eight, into another culture that was both welcoming and hostile. I've written about this in the past, how I internalized the hurts of the U.S.-Mexico Border, a situation that is reminiscent, though loosely, of South Africa under apartheid.
For Raoul Peck, the question of his childhood and what shaped it prompts him to look at a death that changed the face of a nation and thus, the environment in which he grew up.
As artists and historians, we are somehow facing questions deep within ourselves. Who am I? What does this have to do with me? I remember reading a history of divorce in the United States by a woman who admitted that her own divorce sent her on a search for answers. Was divorce a relatively new phenomenon or was it more common than we had been led to believe by the propaganda of the 1950s? Her personal search was much more obvious than some of ours. What, for example, is my American friend Lynn Thomas's interest in female genital mutilation and the politics surrounding it? Why has she devoted years of her life to studying it? How do we come to the interests we own?
And Back to Lumumba
This obsession-could it be an obsession with bringing healing to the continent of Africa? And wondering if part of that healing is located in understanding the life of Patrice Lumumba and why he was murdered?
The death of Lumumba haunts the continent of Africa. Raoul Peck relates him to a prophet, not just any prophet, but the Christ. He shows a picture where Lumumba is surrounded by people but is clearly alone and he suggests that is a picture similar to Christ. And he asks, "Where
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