Lumumba is always studiously elegant. The glowing whiteness of his shirt, his starched collar, his cufflinks, the stylish knot of his tie, his glasses in expensive frames. This is not the popular touch. This is the style évolu of the would-be European. When Nkrumah travels to Europe he demonstratively puts his African costume on. When Lumumba travels to an African village he demonstratively puts on European dress. Perhaps this is not even a demonstration of anything. But it is read that way.
Anyway, he doesn’t spend a lot of time in the villages. Patrice was not the peasant-leader. Or the working-class leader. He was a product of the city, and the African city is not as a rule an agglomeration of the proletariat, but of bureaucrats and petits bourgeois. Patrice sprang from the city, not from the village. Not from peasants, but from those who were peasants yesterday. There’s the difference. A person coming straight from the jungle to the Boulevard Albert in Leo reels around like a drunk. The contrast is too great, the jump too violent. Back there, he lived quietly in his tribe, and everything was comprehensible. Whether he liked it or not, the tribal organization gave him one thing: a balanced life. He knew that if he found himself in situation X, he should resolve it by method Y. Such was the custom. But in the city a man found himself alone. In the city there are the boss, the landlord, the grocer. One pays you, and the others have to be paid. There are more of the latter and that’s when the trouble starts. Nobody cares about anybody else. Work finishes and you have to go somewhere. People go to the bars.
To tell the truth, Lumumba’s career begins in the bars. In the clay-hut districts of Leo you can find 500 of them. The African bar has nothing in common with, for instance, the Bar Lowicki back home in Warsaw. In the Lowicki a guy stands in line, gets a shot of vodka, munches a pickle and disappears. If he wants another drink, he has to stand in line again. A crowd, haste: cultural life is out of the question.
My favourite bar in Africa is called Alex. Often the names are more suggestive: ‘Why Not?’ ‘You’ll Get Lost’ or ‘Only You’. Recently, more high-flown signs have been hung out, like ‘Independence’, ‘Freedom’ or ‘The Struggle’. Alex is a small one-storey shack but decorated like an inn for a country wedding — gay and extravagant. It stands in the shade of the palms, among billboards advertising Coca-Cola, Martell and Shell. In the morning it’s virtually empty, but in the evening it draws a swarm of people. They sit on tin chairs at tin tables and drink beer.
There has to be beer. A lot of bottles and a lot of glasses. The bottle caps ring against the floor. From these caps the black pussy-cats make belts, which they wrap around their hips. The pussy-cat walks and the caps rustle. This rustling is taken to be exciting. There has to be jazz. And raspy Armstrong. The records are so worn out that they no longer carry melody, only that rasping. But the bar dances. It makes no difference that everyone is sitting down. Look at their feet, their shoulders, their hands. You can talk, argue and flirt, do business, read the Bible or snooze. The body always dances. The belly undulates, the head sways, the whole bar sways until late at night.
This is a second home. In their own homes they cannot sit around because it’s cramped, grey, poverty-stricken. The women are quarrelling, the kids are peeing in the corner, there are no bright crêpe dresses and Armstrong isn’t singing. Home is constraint and the bar is freedom. A white informer will not go to a bar because a white person stands out. So you can talk about everything. The bar is always full of words. The bar deliberates, argues and pontificates. The bar will take up any subject, argue about it, dwell on it, try to get at the truth. Everybody will come around and put in their two cents’ worth. The subject doesn’t matter. The important thing is to participate. To speak up. An African bar is the Roman Forum, the main square in a medieval market town, Robespierre’s Parisian wine cellar. Reputations, adulatory or annihilating, are born here. Here you are lifted on to a pedestal or tumbled with a crash to the pavement. If you delight the bar you will have a great career; if the bar laughs at you, you might as well go back to the jungle. In the fumes of foaming beer, in the pungent scent of the girls, in the incomprehensible roiling of the tom-toms, names, dates, opinions and judgements are exchanged. They weigh a problem, ponder it, bring forth the pros and cons. Someone is gesticulating, a woman is nursing a baby, laughter explodes around someone’s table. Gossip, fever and crowding. Here they are settling the price for a night together, there they are putting together a revolutionary programme, at the next table somebody is recommending a good witch-doctor, and further on somebody is saying that there is going to be a strike. A bar like this is everything you could want: a club and a pawn shop, a boardwalk and a church porch, a theatre and a school, a dive and a rally, a bordello and a party cell.
You have to take account of the bars and Lumumba understood this perfectly. He also stops in for a beer. Patrice doesn’t like to keep quiet. He feels that he has something to say and he wants to get it out. Patrice is an inspired speaker, a genius. He begins with casual conversations in the bar. Nobody knows him here: a strange face. He’s not a Bangal or a Bakong. What’s more, he doesn’t back any of the tribes. There’s only one Congo, this stranger says. The Congo is a great subject, you can talk about it endlessly without repeating yourself. Such things are good listening. And the bar starts to listen. For the first time the bar falls silent, hushes, settles down. It pricks up its ears, ruminates, compares viewpoints. Our country is enormous, Patrice explains. It is rich and beautiful. It could be a superpower if the Belgians would leave. How can we oppose the Belgians? With unity. The Bangals should stop letting snakes into the huts of the Bakongos. That only leads to quarrels and not to Fraternité. You don’t have freedom and your women don’t even have enough to buy a bunch of bananas. This isn’t life.
Patrice speaks simply. You have to speak simply to these people. He knows them. He too came from the village, he knows these people without timetables, shaken and disoriented, off the tracks, looking for some sort of support in the incomprehensible new world of the city, looking for some oar to grab hold of, for a chance to catch their breath before plunging back into this whirl of faces, into the confusion of the market, into everyday drudgery. When you talk to these people you can see how everything in their heads is tangled up in the most fantastic way. Refrigerators and poisoned arrows, de Gaulle and Ferhat Abbas, fear of the witch-doctor and wonder at the Sputnik. When the Belgians sent their expeditionary force to the Congo, they ordered the infantrymen to change into paratroopers’ uniforms. I kept wracking my brains — why were they all paratroopers? Then it dawned on me: because paratroopers are feared here. In Africa they fear anybody who drops out of the sky. If somebody drops from the sky, he’s not just anybody. There’s something in it, and it’s better not to go too deeply into such things.
Patrice is a son of his people. He too can be naive and mystical at times, he too has a predisposition to jump from one extreme to another, from explosions of happiness to mute despair. Lumumba is a fascinating character because he is extraordinarily complex. Nothing about the man submits to definition. Every formulation is too tight. Restless, a chaotic enthusiast, a sentimental poet, an ambitious politician, an animated soul, amazingly tough and submissive at the same time, confident until the very end that he is right, deaf to the words of others, enraptured — by his own splendid voice.
Lumumba enchants the bars. From the very moment he walks in. He conquers them totally. Patrice always speaks with conviction, and people want to be convinced. They want to discover some new faith, because the tribal faith has become shaky. We used to say, ‘Comrade, don’t just agitate among us, give us something we can feel.’ Lumumba knows how to give the bars something they can feel. He teaches, demonstrates, proves. The people say yes and applaud. Il a raison, they shout—‘He’s right!’ And today in the Congo, when his name is mentioned, they repeat the same thing with melancholy reflection: Oui, il avait raison. Yes, he was right.