Word: lumumba
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...intellectuals in Africa and the African diaspora seek their own explanations for the failures not only of post-independence Congo, but also of post-colonial Africa more widely, there is renewed interest in the story of Patrice Lumumba. Haitian-born director Raoul Peck's powerful new film, "Lumumba," uses the story of the Congo's first and last democratically-elected prime minister to graphically and explosively explore Western complicity in the Congo's slide into chaos following its independence...
...Even then, Lumumba was not an easy subject to tackle. In the two months he served as prime minister before being overthrown in a coup and eventually executed, Lumumba had managed to alienate the outgoing Belgians, the United States and the U.N. Worse - from a Western point of view - he deigned to flirt with the Soviets at the height of the Cold War. The accumulation of propaganda against Lumumba was so damning that Peck initially found it hard to focus on the man. "I couldn't feel any sympathy for Lumumba," he says. "It took me time...
...killing of Congo strongman Laurent Kabila was yet another chapter in a long history of chaos that began with the death 40 years ago of the newly independent country's first, and last, legitimately elected leader, PATRICE LUMUMBA...
...last time Patrice Lumumba was seen alive by anyone but his captors was Jan. 17. It was the low point in the career of a man who had dreamed of bossing a united Congo. . . He had failed, but as a Western diplomat put it, 'being the best demagogue around, he kept anybody else from running it either.' Taken from a military prison in Thysville, where in typical fashion he had almost fast-talked his guards into mutiny, Lumumba was flown to Elizabethville, hauled out and savagely beaten by Katangese soldiers, then driven off to jail, his hands bound behind...
...till 1961. However, he reached only the rank of corporal and was assigned to radio duty. He was further embittered by serving as part of a U.N. peacekeeping force in the Democratic Republic of Congo in a civil war that saw the assassination of that country's leader, Patrice Lumumba, whom Sankoh admired. After a brief and unhappy stint as a cameraman in Britain, Sankoh supported a 1971 coup attempt in Sierra Leone, was found guilty of "failing to report a mutiny" and was jailed for seven years. The humiliations were the kernels of his revolution...