We are sitting in the room one evening when Kambi comes in. The look on his face is one I would prefer not to see again.
In a hollow voice, he says, ‘Patrice Lumumba is dead.’
I think: the floor is going to cave in and we will crash two storeys to the ground. I look at Kambi. He isn’t crying; he isn’t shaking his fist; he isn’t cursing. He is standing there helplessly. That is a common sight in this country: standing there helplessly. Because you’ve become a minister and you don’t know what to do. Because your party has been shattered, and you don’t know how to put it back together. Because you are waiting for help, and help isn’t coming.
Kambi sits down and begins repeating over and over, mechanically like a rosary: ‘It was the Belgians, it was the Belgians, it was the Belgians …’
I listened for the sounds of the city. To hear if they have started shooting. If the revenge has begun. But Stanleyville is dark, dead and mute. Nobody is lighting fires under stakes. Nobody is unsheathing the knives.
‘Kambi, did you ever see Lumumba?’
No. Kambi never saw him. But he can listen to him. He and his friend Ngoy bring in a tape recorder which they plug in and start playing.
It is a speech of Lumumba’s in parliament.
Kambi turns up the volume. Patrice is in full swing. The windows are open, and his words spill out into the street. But the street is empty. Patrice is speaking to an empty street but he can’t see that: he can’t know that: there is only his voice.
Kambi listens to the tape constantly. Like music. He leans his forehead on his arm and closes his eyes. The tape turns slowly, making a slight rustling sound. Patrice is calm, begins without emotion, even drily. At first he informs, presenting the situation. He speaks clearly, with a strong accent, enunciating each syllable diligently, like an actor mindful of the cheap seats. Suddenly his voice soars, vibrates, becomes piercing, tense, almost hysterical. Patrice attacks the forces of intervention. You can hear a light pounding — he is pounding his hand against the lectern to reinforce that he knows he is right. The attack is violent, but brief.
The tape falls silent except for the wavy rhythm of the machine. Kambi, who has been holding his breath, now gasps for air.
Again Patrice. His voice quiet, slow, with pauses between the words. A bitter tone, disillusioned, the words catching in his throat. He is speaking to a quarrelsome hall, like a Renaissance congress of nobles. In a moment they will be shouting.
They don’t shout.
The hall falls quiet. Patrice has them in his hand again. He explains, persuades. His voice drops to a whisper. Kambi leans over the reels. He can hear the confidence of the leader. Whisper, whisper, the rustle of the tape and whisper. The sound of breathing. You cannot hear the hall. The hall is silent, the street empty, the Congo invisible. Lumumba is gone; the tape keeps running. Kambi is listening. The voice regains its tone, strength, energy. The agitator is standing on the platform now. His last chance: to convince them, to win them over, to sweep them away. He stakes everything on that last chance. The tape spins: a maddening invasion of words, l’unité, l’unité, a crush of arguments, stunning phrases, no turning back, we have to go there, there where our Uhuru is, our straight spine, hope, and the Congo, victory, l’indépendence.
Now the flame is burning.
The tape flies off the reel.
I have heard how Nasser speaks. How Nkrumah speaks. And Sekou Touré. And now Lumumba. It is worth seeing how Africa listens to them. You have to see the crowd on the way to a rally, festive, excited, with fever in their eyes. And you need strong nerves to endure the moment of ecstatic screaming that greets the appearance of one of these speakers. It’s good to stand in the crowd. To applaud together with them, laugh and get angry. Then you can feel their patience and strength, their devotion and their power. A rally in Africa is always a people’s holiday, joyous and full of dignity, like a harvest festival. The witch-doctors cast spells; the imams read the Koran; the orchestras play jazz. The wind snaps the colourful crêpe, women vendors sell rattles, and the great ones talk politics from the rostrum. Nasser speaks tough, forceful, always dynamically, impulsively, imperiously. Touré banters with the crowd, winning it over with his good cheer, his constant smile, his subtle nonchalance. Nkrumah is turgid, intent, with the manner retained from his days preaching in the American black churches. And then that crowd, carried away by the words of its leaders, throws itself in exultation under the wheels of Gamal’s car, lifts Sekou’s car off the ground, breaks ribs trying to touch Kwame’s car.
Meteoric careers, great names. The awakened Africa needs great names. As symbols, as cement, as compensation. For centuries the history of the continent has been anonymous. In the course of 300 years traders shipped millions of slaves out of here. Who can name even one of the victims? For centuries they fought the white invasions. Who can name one of the warriors? Whose names recall the suffering of the black generations, whose names speak of the bravery of exterminated tribes? Asia had Confucius and Buddha, Europe Shakespeare and Napoleon. No name that the world would know emerges from the African past. More: no name that Africa itself would know.
And now almost every year of the great march of Africa, as if making up for the irreversible delay, new names are inscribed in history: 1956, Gamal Nasser; 1957, Kwame Nkrumah; 1958, Sekou Touré; 1960, Patrice Lumumba.
None of them has laboriously climbed the ladder of government promotions, pinching votes and bowing to patrons. A wave of liberation struggle has carried them to the top: they are the children of storms and pressure, born of the longings and desires not only of their own countries, but of the whole continent. Thus, each of them becomes a sort of pan-African leader. Each of them will long to make his capital the Mecca of Black Africa.
This quartet is never to meet: Lumumba will not make it. Everything in the biography of the man comes down to the formula: he will not make it. In the years when a Kasavubu or a Bolikango is painstakingly fitting his clientele together, Lumumba is nowhere to be seen because he is either too young or is sitting in prison. Those others are only thinking of their own backyards, anyway, while Lumumba is thinking of the whole Congo.
The Congo is an ocean; it is a gigantic fresco of contrasts. Small clusters of people live scattered across a great jungle and a vast savannah, often unacquainted, knowing little about each other. Six people per square kilometre. The Congo is as big as India. It took Gandhi twenty years to cover India. Lumumba tried to cover the Congo in half a year. Absolutely impossible.
And for the Congo, as for India, the only way is to cover the whole country. Call on every village, stop in every small town, and speak, speak, speak. People want to have a look at their leader; they want to hear him at least once. Because what if he’s the leader of some bad cause, some godless affair? You have to see for yourself, let him speak, and then decide if he’s a leader or not. In other countries leaders have the press, radio, film and television at their fingertips. They have personnel.
Lumumba had none of this. Everything was Belgian, and there was no personnel. And say he had a newspaper: how many people would have been able to read it? Say he had a radio station: how many houses had radios? He had to criss-cross the country. Like Mao, like Gandhi, like Nkrumah and like Castro. Old photographs show all of them in simple peasant attire. Mao tightening his belt around a padded coat, Mahatma’s skinny legs sticking out of his dhoti, Kwame throwing an ornamented kente over his shoulder, and Fidel standing there in a threadbare partisan’s shirt.