Aime Cesaire's Play About the Tragedy of Patrice Lumumba: "A Season in the Congo"

Aimé Césaire (1913 -2008) the Martinican poet, surrealist, founder of the Negritude movement in Francophone literature, and founder of the Martinique Independent Revolution Party is best known for his book-length poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, 1939) written after his return to Martinique from France. In 1945 Césaire was elected mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy to the French National Assembly for Martinique and was president of the Regional Council of Martinique from 1983 to 1988.

His major critique of colonial racism and hypocrisy, Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism) (1950) was a foundational work in the anti-colonialist canon, and Franz Fanon was a student of Césaire in the literal/classroom sense.

His Brechtian epic about the transformation of the Belgian Congo into a civil war in which the Belgians supported secession of the mineral-rich Katanga province and the martyrdom of Patrice Lumumba (1925-61), Une Saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo) dates from 1966, before Césaire's revisionist (Caliban-heroizing) A Tempest (1969).

I don't know why the play has one season, since it begins before independence, which was on June 1960, and extends to Lumumba's murder (with US and Belgian complicity), 14 September 1960. Lumumba was deposed after just six months, but isn't that two seasons? Perhaps not in the long-term perspective?

The play is a series of tableaux with many characters, including UN secretary-general Dag Hamarskjold, who was slow to realize the Belgian role in the Katanga secession. Lumumba sought and received military aid from the Soviet Union, which further alarmed the Eisenhower administration. (US complicity with the notably brutal Belgian exploitation of the Congo dated back to 1885, when the US was the first country to recognize King Leopold's claim of the Congo as his personal property. And Eisenhower told CIA head Allen Dulles that Lumumba must be eliminated. At least two attempts to kill him were made by the CIA.*) Lumumba advocated neutrality in the Cold War, said he found colonialism and Communism to be equally deplorable, and declared "We are not Communists, Catholics, Socialists. We are African nationalists."

Césaire considered the Soviets as colonialists not devoid of racism and shows the fiery orator Lumumba as impolitic at home and abroad, notably in his speech not making nice to the Belgian king at the independence ceremony, failing to anticipate the venality of the other leaders of the independence movement once in position to exploit government office, and alienating the army (by giving pay raises to everyone in the government except them). The prime beneficiary of the early crisis in which prime minister Lumumba and president Joseph Kasa-Vubu both ordered the Chief of Staff of the Armée Nationale Congolaise (ANC), Mobutu Sese Seko, to arrest the other. Mobutu renamed the country "Zaire" and looted the country much as King Leopold had from 1965 until 1997. (This is beyond the end of the play: it ends with Lumumba going to his death).

Reading the play, I wondered how it could be staged with so many different locations and such a large cast, but it has been staged in New York City twice in the last two years (Youth Onstage! In 2009, the Rico Workshop in 2010), so it must be playable!). Lumumba has more than half the total lines in the play, which may account for the most recent production splitting the role between four actors... though the span of time between the beer salesman/orator to the martyrdom is closer to a season than to showing the central character at different ages.

Although I think that the West should have given Lumumba a chance, given the track record of other African independence leaders - including another of the founders, with Césaire, Leopold Senghor - of dictatorship, nepotism, and kleptocracy once in power in place of colonial regimes, even if Lumumba had remained pure of heart, it is difficult to believe that he would have been any more successful at improving the lot of ordinary Congolese than fellow pan-Africanist (and socialist) Julius Nyerere (1922-99, president 1964-85) was in Tanzania.

There are a lot of tragedies in Africa and Césaire was writing about one, and from only five years before, He was not presenting a comparative analysis of post-independence African governments (for that, see Alberto Memmi's The Decolonized and the Decolonizer, the sequel to his The Colonized and the Colonizer).

Césaire's play is a good read from a perspective very sympathetic to Lumumba. Raoul Peck's 2000 movie "Lumumba" shows the same time-frame: from beer salesman to martyrdom.

There is a new translation of the play by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2009, which is more readily available than the British edition in the epinions database.

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* William Blum's Killing Hope, p. 158. Also see John Stockwell's In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story, p. 105