HISTORY AS TRAGEDY : 'Lumumba'.

In the early 1980s I spent two years in Africa, including several months in the calamity formerly known as Zaire. Mobutu's Congo was a wreck, its roads in disrepair, its phones and electricity spotty, its hospitals lacking medicines. Unpaid soldiers freelanced as thugs; if you had an enemy, you could get him beaten up, or his car burned, for $50. There was a zoo in Kinshasa, but most of its cages were empty. People had eaten the animals. Mobutu, meanwhile, busied himself amassing personal plunder. Ridiculous in leopard-skin cap, silk ascot, and dark sunglasses, he stared down from every shop and office wall, a model for the Big Man of V. S. Naipaul's bleak postcolonial Congo novel, A Bend in the River.

One point of solace for Mobutu's embittered subjects was the memory of Patrice Lumumba, Congo's young and idealistic first prime minister, who, after a postindependence coup, and with CIA involvement, was delivered over to his political enemies and murdered in 1961. These agonized events form the subject of Raoul Peck's excellent film, Lumumba. Part bio-pic, part historical narrative, part political thriller, Lumumba fashions the complexities of Congolese independence-era politics into a moving tragedy. While sympathetic to Lumumba--Peck's warm-up for the current work was a 1991 documentary, Lumumba: Death of a Prophet--the film refuses to turn him into the Che Geuvara-like figure he has become for some. We get not the myth but the man, flaws included.

The story begins in 1959, a year, Lumumba writes in his notes, of "fury, enthusiasm, and violence." Congo's transition to nationhood was sabotaged by the extreme racial hauteur of Belgian colonialism. At independence the vast country had just seventeen African university graduates--and not a single lawyer, architect, engineer, or army officer among them. Belgian leaders schemed to ensure that the country's vast exploitable resources--copper, diamonds, minerals--remained in European hands. In Leopoldville (later Kinshasa), we see the Belgian commander spelling it out for his African troops with chalk on a blackboard, "Independance: Apres=/Avant." Before equals after. Neocolonialism, in a single simple equation.

Peck and co-writer Pascal Bonitzer sketch Lumumba's career, a young postal clerk and beer salesman who rose from trade unionism to found a party, the MNC, pledged to Congolese unity. After much infighting, he emerged as prime minister in a coalition government, with the phlegmatic Joseph Kasavubu as president. The fiery Lumumba had little patience for flattering his country's colonial masters, and at independence ceremonies on June 30, 1960, when King Baudoin makes a speech paying tribute to the glorious paternalism of Leopold II, we see him counter with an eloquent and furious indictment of the Belgians. "We have known mockery and insults, blows from morning to night," he charges, denouncing colonialism as "the shame of the twentieth century."

His words inflamed, and helped fuel the violent unrest of the days to come, an ugly venting of accumulated African rage. Belgian settlers were beaten and raped, houses and stores looted; and when the Force Publique--still commanded by Belgian officers--tried to crack down, garrison after garrison mutinied. Events spun quickly out of Lumumba's control, with Belgian paratroopers landing to protect fleeing Belgian nationals. To make things worse, within days, the pro-Belgian leader of copper-rich Katanga Province, Moise Tshombe, declared Katangan independence, and called in Belgian troops to guarantee it. The week-old country tumbled into chaos and civil war. Faced with losing Katanga and 70 percent of the nation's mineral resources, Lumumba and Kasavubu reluctantly asked the UN to intervene. Soon, the Congo became an international flashpoint--a testing ground for the UN and, with the Americans and Soviets lining up behind opposing factions, a potential cold-war theater. Lumumba called on Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold to subdue Katanga by force. But the UN took a far more limited posture: maintain order, and--above all--keep the Congo from being sucked into the cold war.

Lumumba's situation went from uncomfortable to impossible. On one side were his own rioting troops; on another, the Katanga secession, backed by the Belgians and European mining companies; on still another, the rapidly developing ambitions of his own once-trusted chief of staff, Colonel Joseph-Desire Mobutu, now being courted by the Americans. Though in power, Lumumba had no power. When--as a last resort, Peck insists--he turned to the Soviets for military trucks and transport planes, he played right into the hands of American cold warriors. Eventually the Belgians persuaded Kasavubu to fire him, whereupon Lumumba turned around and fired Kasavubu. At the urging of America--"we need a man to take things in hand," says the U.S. ambassador--Mobutu stepped in.

After weeks of house arrest, Lumumba tried to escape to Stanleyville, his own power base in the east. Mobutu's forces caught up with him and brought him back to Leopoldville, where he was paraded, beaten and bloodied, before journalists and UN diplomats. The UN had abandoned him to his fate. Through the connivance of Kasavubu, Mobutu, and the Belgians, and with U.S. approval, Lumumba was flown on 17 January 1961 to Katanga and handed over to his enemies. With Moise Tshombe and other Katangan and Belgian officials present, he and two associates were brutally beaten and then executed by a firing squad, their bodies subsequently dismembered and burned. Patrice Lumumba was thirty-six years old; all in all, he had held office for a little over eleven weeks.

Lumumba was a difficult man--high-strung and unpredictable, at times nearly hysterical, writes Brian Urquhart, former UN representative to the Congo, in a recent New York Review of Books. Where Mobutu cultivated the tough aspect of a soldier, and later the self-mystification of an African emperor, Lumumba resembled a Sunday school teacher: a tall, scrawny figure in white shirt, narrow tie, and heavy black-framed glasses. (The handsome Franco-Cameroonian actor Eriq Ebouaney plays him brilliantly, but his strapping physique undercuts the actual Lumumba's impression of vulnerability.) His reputation was made largely as an orator, through fiery speeches that, as one Belgian noted, gave the impression of a man who could not be dominated. Peck's film presents both the attractions and the limitations of the orator-as-leader, making clear what a hopeless task it was to try to rule a vast, contested, corruption-riddled nation on the strength of a voice alone. In a way, Lumumba is a study in the opposite of demagoguery. Peck identifies passionate oratory with idealism, even naivete. In one scene, flying over Katanga in the presidential plane, Kasavubu looks down at the countryside, brooding darkly on the situation on the ground--while beside him, Lumumba works excitedly on another speech. His words are passionate but ineffectual, his gifts as orator bringing him to a place where his temperament is ill-suited to lead. The Big Man, on the other hand, says very little at all.

The movie gathers power as the man himself loses it. We watch Lumumba's frustration turn gradually to rage, tinged with paranoia (and there was much to be paranoid about--including CIA plots to kill him with poison toothpaste) and a dawning sense of futility. The truth is, few places could have been less hospitable to an idealistic, inexperienced, and divisive young leader than the Congo--a country rich in natural resources and bereft of political ones; a cauldron of tribalism, with foreign interests keeping the flame up high. Lumumba's portrayal in the film as a martyr may carry a touch of sentimentality, but it seems politically accurate. Indeed, his murder hastened the immediate cause he had fought for--a new UN mandate, adopted in the emotional aftermath of his killing, authorizing the use of force in Katanga to end the secession.

Lumumba begins and ends with an ominous procession of headlights through the bush at night, a killing cortege bearing Lumumba toward his death, as his voice reads from a last letter to his wife. "It is not I who matter, it is the Congo, it is our poor people whose independence has been turned into a cage," he says. "History will have its say one day." With bitter irony, Peck interweaves scenes of Lumumba's Christ-like passion with the advent of Mobutu's imperial court--where the dictator, seen for the first time in his new garb, sits on his throne at a huge banquet, serenaded by native dancers and guarded by machine-gun toting red berets, and offers a moment of silence for "our national hero."

It is the cold hypocrisy of a villain. But while Peck's film faithfully records the complicity of those involved in Lumumba's undoing, it also aims at a reality beneath any individual scheming. Forty years later, Lumumba's fall has the look of inevitability; Peck's fine film provides a suggestive glimpse of a moment when history itself set the stage, and the lead figure wandered into the role: a born star, a natural for tragedy.