Black Panther and the Memory of Patrice Lumumba
I have not read comic books since I was very young, though I really loved them at the time. But I still dig all manner of super-hero TV shows, cartoons and movies. As a child, I watched Superman in black and white. As a teenager and young adult, I watched him again in color. I’ve seen almost every DC- and Marvel-comic film that has come out, though I don’t like them as much as I liked the old comic books, movies and TV series. The new films are a bit too much about global destruction, existential threats, and the imperiled survival of the comic book figures themselves for my tastes. I prefer episodic treatments that always seem to begin anew as the hero uses his or her wit and superpowers to thwart the villain and save the city or some other weaker being. And I guess it never really bothered me that superheroes and their ideology were always so relentlessly white and white supremacist. That’s just par for the American course. African Americans have learned to watch these oppressive fictions with their own, racial suspension of disbelief. Shit, in the past, we rooted for Tarzan (the original super hero) battling cannibalistic savages, for cowboys killing Indians, for the quixotic battles of Confederate soldiers, and for all of heroes in those films that were embedded with the deep racism that we knew to expect from entertainment destined to prepare American audiences for their unique role in the world.
So, I was a bit surprised by my reaction when a few years ago, my best friend called me up and told me to watch immediately something that had just popped up on Netflix: the Black Panther (2010) cartoon. I didn’t even know of the existence of the Stan Lee comic book. And its culturally-appropriating name made me wary of an intellectual trap. Since their arrival on the American scene in the mid-1960s, the Black nationalist Black Panther Party had withstood nothing but ridicule and condescending disdain from the popular media. Meanwhile, local and federal law enforcement treated them like the 1960s equivalent of Al-Qaeda. In fact, at some point, I saw a documentary that presented an interview of Edwin Meese, a former attorney general and a close friend and advisor of President Ronald Reagan. He helped clarify the thinking of the then Governor of California about the group when it first began making newspaper headlines in their beleaguered state. According to Meese:
Well, I’d say it was very serious for its time. You had a number of criminal gangs like that around the country. You had the SDS, so-called Students for a Democratic Society. They had their violence-prone group, the Weathermen. You had the Black Liberation Army. You had the Symbionese Liberation Army in Alameda County and in Northern California which killed a number of people. They were involved in a shootout with the Los Angeles police at one time; they kidnapped Patty Hearst.
So the Black Panthers were one of the earlier groups like that that posed a real threat, and in their time, they were as serious as terrorist groups would be today.
Ultimately, such thinking led American law-enforcement to all but annihilate Black Panther Party leadership.
It all began in the mid-1960s, when the panthers emerged as Black internationalists projecting a cool, unexpected iconography. No one knew what to make of them. They appeared as courageous, ascetic, gun-toting, NRA-loving revolutionaries in dark sunglasses, Basque berets and sleek leather jackets, who had an exotic agenda that also supported the anti-colonial struggles of the non-Western world. Meanwhile, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover executed the agendas of men such as Meese and declared war on the Panthers, delivering on President Richard Nixon’s promise of a return to “law and order.” Throughout the country, the police began kicking in doors and gunning down Black men. In December 1969, they summarily executed the Chicago Black Panther Party chairman, Fred Hampton, and his aid, Mark Clark, who were among the nearly thirty members of the party killed within a little over a year. Soon afterward, The New York Times published a column stating that American law enforcement had nakedly declared an "open season" on Black Panther Party membership. Black lives didn't matter.
Then, during the ensuing years, the mainstream media, through newspapers, television, and film, completed the job, mocking, ridiculing, satirizing, demeaning, trivializing, and infantilizing the Panthers, while rendering the murderous police killings of their leadership acceptable if not comically enjoyable. Journalist Tom Wolfe (who also wrote the elegy to white American machismo and exceptionalism — The Right Stuff) led the way with an over-the-top, irreverent piece of “new journalism” that simultaneously lampooned white liberals and quixotic Black radicalism, firmly anchoring the latter in the comforting and recognizable American tradition of raucous minstrel performance. These articles presented the attire and the Marxist lexicon of the Panthers as echoing the stuttering malapropisms of the the home-grown, pretentious, intellectually-challenged, swallow-tailed-coat wearing and citified dandy of the minstrel show: Zip Coon. In fact, in entertainment throughout the latter part of the 20th and early 21st century, Hollywood and the mainstream media continually subjected the counterculture and radicals of the late 1960s to the this type of caricatured and dismissive treatment — from The Big Lebowski (1998), to Forrest Gump (1994) to The Butler (2013), where the character played by Oprah Winfrey slaps the chip off the shoulder of her rude, beret-wearing son for disrespecting the job of his obsequious father.
These representations worked on the American imagination, rendering the extermination of radical leadership almost pleasurably orgasmic. They buttressed the Cold-War imagination, underscoring the notion that people from the oppressed world, and particularly Africans and their New-World descendants lacked the historical standing, intellectual capacity and sense of consciousness necessary to take a sophisticated position against their own exploitation and the destructive expropriations of global capitalism. Like figures of the minstrel show parody, they were childish, devil-like pawns — little black sambo dolls — recklessly caught up in a more serious and manly conflict between adult nation states. In one article I read, a journalist openly scoffed at the pretensions of non-territorial Black nationalism. What nation? he snidely asked.
For him and others, the Panthers easily incarnated the made-for-colonialism, "half devil and half child" image presented in Rudyard Kipling's famous 1899 poem, "The White Man's Burden." As an emissary of empire, Kipling penned the poem to welcome a new nation into the membership of the select club of colonial powers. He wrote it for the United States, a country originally born in a revolutionary struggle against a premier member of that club, but which had just acquired its first overseas colonies (Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippine islands) through the Spanish-American war.
Take up the White Man’s burden —
Send forth the best ye breed —
Go send your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild —
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child
Accordingly, such "sullen" and captive figures — desperately in need of parental and Christian-moral guidance — were easy prey to the once devious Soviet Union. The scheming agents of this country pantomimed anti-racist positions and used groups like the Panthers as part of its discredited, utopian but fundamentally self-serving battle against the right-headed, realistic, and triumphant capitalist-order of the neo-colonial Western nations and multinational corporations.
So, I was deeply wary of a super hero comic perhaps ironically named Black Panther and any representation of a group that the popular American media had done so much to help eliminate. Still, like I said, I loved my superheroes and cartoons — Spiderman or The Hulk, and then Batman Returns, Teen Titans, and Avatar (The Last Air Bender and Korra). As a grown man, I nearly forced my children to watch them with me on Saturday mornings while we ate donuts (which for some reason were also not as good as they used to be). And I even began seeing some figures from the margins with superpowers and who looked more like us — iterations of Green Lantern, Storm, Cyborg, etc. And, I deeply trusted my friend, who wouldn’t have steered me toward some more racist bullshit on which to waste my precious doughnut mornings. So, one Saturday, I again bought my bland-ass donuts form a nearby supermarket, fixed a pot of coffee and sat down to see what East-St. Louis, almost-homeboy Reginald Hudlin had done with Black Panther, a superhero comic book that I knew nothing about.
How is it possible to express the satisfaction of that Saturday-morning-binge-watching-near-fulfillment-of-ancient longings imagined by that brother from a devastated Midwestern black community — perhaps the blackest city in America — who was the same age as me, and who had grown up with one foot anchored in the mess of the 20th century and the other somewhat awkwardly setting down in the chaos of this one? Today, some intellectuals use the term Afrofuturism to describe this type of aesthetic work; this type of imaginative production of the Black "nation" that eluded mainstream journalists. According to Wikipedia, Afrofuturism:
combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, Afrocentrism and magic realism with non-Western cosmologies in order to critique the present-day dilemmas of black people and to interrogate and re-examine historical events.
Yet, before I knew that term, I had experienced the magical world of the African American "nation" through surviving remnants of the world the slaves had made. It filtered into my quasi-suburban, 1970s-world on the subtle cultural retentions of my Southern-born parents and the food, talk, dance and music of the teenage Black American atmosphere. Hudlin and I grew up amid a consciousness that already had a utopian language that was disseminated in the 70s on records and the radio by George Clinton and his funk bands Parliament and Funkadelic. Those musicians conjured the anti-nation through utopian worlds that flippantly took our minds on a detour of a re-imagined cosmos of funky Black power, psychedelically picking up where the ambitions of the murdered nationalists movement of the late 60s left off.
In school, I was surrounded by many of Funk’s devout acolytes who spoke its language and memorized its lyrics like sacred texts engendering funkatized galaxies, and afro-nauts that bumped their booties through black utopian worlds. Clinton stretched our imaginations, placing them on a spaceship of music that opened up the cosmos as a place for black imagining — of dark matter — that understood codified white utopian nations as just another mask for white supremacy slickly directed into the future. Clinton's music reveled — without shame — in a funky blackness invigorated by physically moving, deeply disruptive rhythms and the other-worldly bass of former James Brown musician, Bootsie Collins. This wasn’t the white man’s silent Newtonian universe — but a place that vibrated with the sounds and rhythms of the big-butt bang. It celebrated the secretes of joy, struggle, endurance, freedom, improvisation, creativity, open sexuality and a black way of being in the world that rejected hierarchy and oppression. It expressed the magic of black longing that I would later find in the tales of High John the Conquer as saved in the the writings of African American novelist and ethnographer Zora Neale Hurston. Later, in the 1990s, I also found it in the always great, always challenging, disciplined yet dogmatically free music of the afro-mystic musician, Sun Ra. The same friend that suggest I watch Black Panther had introduced me to Ra — who was born on Saturn, the funkiest of planets, who taught his musicians not to know things, and who self-consciously embodied the living myth.
So, African Americans are no strangers to the codes of comic book fantasy, or the language of re-imagining a better, blacker, funkier universe as far removed from European aggression and the hardships of underdevelopment. To the contrary, our imaginations have sustained us, and enabled us to find a way to live in a dystopian nightmare that has structured and confined our world (and that of everyone else) for the last 400 years.
And Hudlin’s Black Panther felt like a remnant of that fantastic imagination. It remained anchored in the tropes of most conventional comic-book cartoons, so it didn’t quite reach the recombinant power of Ra or Clinton, but it was kind of funky and also funny as hell. It gave back to me the Kingdom of Wakanda as the proud, nostalgic, fanciful, re-imagined Africa of anti-nationalist Black American nationalism that had tantalized us since Hi-John began walking the earth as a natural man and Jamaican Marcus Garvey responded to that evocative call in the 1920s through the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Their brave new and ancient world was rich, beautiful, African, Black, funny, fun, and funky — way beyond that square, basic, cynical shit of capitalist consumerism now presented as the glittering end point of all of human life and endeavor. This vision told us that blackness did not just represent a lack of something that belonged more properly to Europeans. We were not created by them for their use, enjoyment and eventual disposal. We were not just guilty-at-birth, expendable victims, or dusky menacing threats, easily tossed onto the rubbish heap of history, beaten, gunned down and left to lie in the streets for hours like a piece of rotting trash. We were Wakandans.
Then, word got out that African American director Ryan Coogler planned to direct a film version of Black Panther. Daaag. Amazing choice. As I said, Hudlin belonged to my age cohort, as do Spike Lee, Wynton Marsalis and Barack Obama. We grew up admiring that previous, truly greatest generation of older Black young folk who finally and coolly took to the streets and wouldn’t let nobody turn them around in the Civil Rights and Black Power struggles. Still — not quite growing up in Jim Crow — we all had a foot in that other world as children who knew people who had known slaves, and we often felt the sting of slave-world whippings by parents who also hailed from somewhere near there. Meanwhile, Obama turned out to be a disappointing liberal reformer. Marsalis was outright reactionary, calling funk “bubblegum music.” And Spike Lee, no matter how hard he tried, still struggled on the Hollywood margin (a Black, bad-boy version of Oliver Stone), never really breaking through the stymieing codes of Hollywood racist representation in his work. Coogler, however, seemed to be part of a newer, bolder, fresher generation that had come of age with the renewed radicalism of the discredited Occupy movement and was now taking it to the streets again with a resolve that I had not seen since I looked at the faces of the militants in old black-and-white, Civil-Rights era films.
Coogler's Fruitvale Station (2013) was a masterpiece that carefully and deftly remained within the codes of popular entertainment, yet presented something that had hitherto escaped its grasp: a doomed but non-pathetic African American main character. I never felt for a moment that Coogler made the film to “humanize” African Americans for a white audience. Instead, it poetically presents a main character whose life is based on Oscar Grant, a young, struggling African American trying to live and enjoy life, but who was killed by a transportation-system police officer in San Francisco in 2009. Then, Coogler made Creed (2015). And this time, he subtly reversed the Hollywood codes, taking, reworking and “humanizing” the inexorably patriotic and white-supremacist theme of the entire Rocky franchise — of Sylvester Stallone's whole oeuvre! And that’s no easy feat. Almost alone (with some now disowned help from the popular media) , Rocky ridiculed and domesticated for popular consumption the Muslim, exotic, Black heroic nationalism of Mohammad Ali the way that the black exploitation films took the radically fresh and unexpected figure of Angela Davis (an armed-and-dangerous, brilliant, revolutionary Black-woman-on-the-run) and turned her into a harmless sex pot: Pam Grier, the eponymous main character of Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974).
Coogler, however, seemed to remain faithful to many of the codes and structures of the patriotic genre that the Rocky franchise established, but he stripped away much of its structural and oppressive racism. Although a work of popular entertainment, it revealed the sensibility of a new generation, perhaps demonstrating on an aesthetic plane that President Barack Obama didn’t really have to give in so much to Wall Street and neo-conservative pressure when he assumed the presidency. Instead of battling insurgent Black pride, Coogler showed old Rocky taking his fight to cancer and mortality — eternal issues of human existence. Meanwhile, a young African American is shown as having an equal intellect, work ethic and drive to excel — but excel, in the anti-national sense advocated by Martin Luther King. In his last, 1968 sermon titled “The Drum Major Instinct.” King produces this imagining in a paraphrase of a lesson delivered by Christ to his apostles.
“Oh, I see, you want to be first. You want to be great. You want to be important. You want to be significant. Well, you ought to be. If you’re going to be my disciple, you must be.” But he reordered priorities. And he said, “Yes, don’t give up this instinct. It’s a good instinct if you use it right. (Yes) It’s a good instinct if you don’t distort it and pervert it. Don’t give it up. Keep feeling the need for being important. Keep feeling the need for being first. But I want you to be first in love. (Amen) I want you to be first in moral excellence. I want you to be first in generosity. That is what I want you to do.”
Creed seemed to take the patriotism and the whole thrust of the Rocky genre and invert it, much the same way that King says Christ inverted the ambitions of the apostles.
So, who better to transform the original imagination of Stan Lee and Marvel comics' Black Panther hero? I was ready for the film. I couldn’t wait. And then, the original the teaser trailer for it blew my mind. The vision seemed Wakandan, using the $200 million budget of a major Hollywood film to celebrate an ancient Black vision that finally broke the codes of that original dystopian Hollywood-blockbuster, Birth of a Nation (1915), which set the racist pattern for nearly every successful American film in its wake. Something in me stirred to the stylish images of beautiful people of Africa and of African dissent the way that the original Garveyite, UNIA parades must have stirred the imaginations of the people of Harlem — just a generation or two and a train ride away from slavery — in the 1920s. The teaser didn't seem made up, made in and made for the oppressor's imagination. Even the syncopation of what almost sounded like the tapping of empty liquor bottles from the second-line parades that I used to enjoy in New Orleans got to me, fooling me, telling me that this film might really bump to a different rhythm.
So, I was ready, chatting with all the African Americans I knew about the film before it came out. One friend asked me if I was going to "dress-African" for the premier. To some people (like my older sister) this seemed ridiculous. But to me, it was like having the chance to show some pride and solidarity in that old, futuristic Black vision, like the parading people in Harlem who proudly wore the uniform of Garvey’s UNIA. I didn’t have the clothes, but late one night, I stole away to the movie's opening.
And now, I come to the end of my ability to describe my impressions. No doubt, for Africans and people of African descent, the film was a cultural event. Maybe it represented a promise of overdue recognition and provided a sense of pride for a still struggling people desperate to see that something remotely related to Africa could cost $200 million, show beautiful styling-Black people instead of poor dying victims, and have a refashioned place in the 21st-century imagination. And no doubt, Coogler managed the often contradictory and overwhelming task of trying to contain the inherently resistant and magical funkiness of Blackness in the constraining structures of a Hollywood blockbuster.
But the film also seemed to fake the funk.
It barely incorporated music from Kendrick Lamar's, Black Panther: The Album. And the Wakandans could barely dance — not even a Byoncé twerk or a Michael Jackson moonwalk. Too dignified. I dug some of the styling, but I also wanted to see emanations of what African American novelist Ishmael Reed called in his brilliant novel Mumbo Jumbo (1971), the “black mud sound” or even hear remnants of the tinkling liquor bottle that syncopated the teaser trailer. The trailer and the cartoon were better.
Furthermore, it was simply hard to digest and defend (as an honorary Wakandan) the representation of that nation as a typical, monarchical, militaristic place of supremacy. It was first among first — just another bloody nation. I suppose the cartoon also represented Wakanda this way. But I excused those Wakandans. They were so cold-blooded, they were funky, like Stackolee, another immemorial figure of the bad Black anti-nation.
Then, there were the figures of Michael B. Jordan, as Erik Killmonger, the emotionally conflicted villain, and of Martin Freeman as Everett K. Ross, the white, CIA agent hero. How could I defend that, no matter what projected intentions I dreamed up for Coogler, whom I had come to trust so much?
The fit, African-American Killmonger infiltrates the film, sneaking in from Fruitvale Station and Creed. And he comes with an agenda fomented by the same "half devil and half child" imagination that guided the popular media misrepresentations of Black radical and liberation movements of the 19th, 20th and and now 21st centuries. Poor despised Killmonger. He had a rough childhood of disinheritance and stolen privilege — like the tragic mulattoes of early African American fiction. A resentful victim of society, he has a chip on his shoulder. Furthermore, his crippled, stunted imagination fails to understand the true nature of neo-consertive, realpolitik or the rationalized manly reserve of conflict between nations. He doesn't even seem to understand the rigorous codes of the film he is in. Instead, he is a blood thirsty, psychopathic murderer with no respect for tradition, who is bent on revenge. His unyielding narcissism projects his own deeply personal grudge onto the suffering wretched of the earth. Meanwhile, the insular Wakandans, who come from that non-Western world, don't have the same psychological complexes, resentfulness or past of exploitation and endured wrongs. His simple-minded methods and agenda don't fit in with their world view, the desires of the audience, or the organizing principles of the Marvel universe.
In fact, the very structure of the film and Coogler’s plot trigger conventional desires in the audience that align against Killmonger. Mobilizing Wakanda — the most powerful and advanced country in the world — for a revolution against racial oppression threatens the very sustainability of the fiction and the imagined security embracing Western audiences, who could have suddenly found themselves as the figured villains of a narrative that desperately needed their approval for its blockbusting viability.
It was "Barack Obama’s choice": Wall Street on one side and the enraged, expropriated-masses-with-pitchforks on the other.
Such a plot threatened the stability of the Marvel fantasy world — the Marvel Cinematic Universe. After all, it was just one film of exposition in a continuing saga that was more about the gathering of infinity stones by a much larger evil force than about my Black American dreams of Wakanda. The film threatened to implode. To rescue it, African American audiences found themselves once again rooting against their own liberation as they always had when they cheered on Tarzan, John Wayne and all of the other barbarian-fighting heroes of Hollywood, Birth-of-a-Nation-progeny.
So, obscenely, we rooted for an American CIA agent (an otherwise harmless, renegade, pipsqueak-hobbit also infiltrating from other films), as he systematically shot down the Wakandan vessels transporting ours and Killgore’s dreams of finally shifting some of the power to the just side — to the oppressed — in what had been a radically asymmetrical, centuries-old struggle against the lives, liberty and happiness of Africans and people of African dissent.
Maybe Coogler was using the film as a strange, carnival mirror to comment on actual history. From its revolutionary beginning, one of the most powerful nations in the world used its might to foment coups and counter-revolutions throughout the world (from Haiti in 1804 to Chile in 1973); here, Killmonger, a black-ops trained renegade, finally attempts a lone reversal. That's why using the CIA to heroically shoot down his dreams was just to too historically accurate, too blatant, too obvious for Coogler not to intend. He must have been using Wakanda to work another plot and provide seeds for another film that will one day make this okay. Or maybe, surreptitiously, he just wanted to make us remember.
Still, it wasn't okay.
How could I ever forget another, real dream of African empowerment and the proud historical figure of murdered and martyred Patrice Lumumba, who served as the first Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo in 1960? In Thomas Giefer's 2000 documentary, Death Colonial Style: The Execution of Patrice Lumumba, the murdered leader's friend, journalist Jean Van Lierde, describes Lumumba's miraculous spirit, calling him “ a free man."
And people found it so original to see a Black man who didn’t lick the feet of colonialists, that they instinctively perceived him as a threat. And it was that freedom of his that turned him into a kind of meteorite flashing through the sky and then he disappeared.
Lumumba had led the movement leading to his country’s independence from Belgium. Then, in his first speech as prime minister, he openly insulted the Belgian King, condemned colonialism, and gave witness to the century of humiliation, murder, maiming, and torture that characterized Belgian rule. According to an actual American CIA agent interviewed in that film, Lumumba spoke too bluntly and truthfully, upsetting the Western nations and the multinational corporations that claimed the Republic's wealth as their own.
Although the original Kingdom of Kongo didn't have vibranium, it did have uranium and other vast resources that were strategically needed and desired by the armies and consumers of the Western world. Unfortunately, it tragically lacked the magical, covering invisibility of Wakanda. Instead, from the 16th century onward, Europeans ravaged the kingdom — fragmenting it; enslaving, packing and shipping away its people; colonizing it; and rapaciously claiming its copper, gold, diamonds, cobalt, uranium, coltan and oil. Its copper and brass encased nearly all of the shells fired during major battles of World War I. Extracts of its uranium helped set off the nuclear bombs that the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even Smart phones today depend upon its abundant coltan deposits.
So, Patrice Lumumba became premier of one of the largest and most mineral-rich countries in the world. Meanwhile he stubbornly wanted to use those resources for African development. To Africans and the people of the African diaspora, he seemed like a real super hero defying the forces of oppression. If allowed to thrive, he could could have become the leader of the one of the earth's largest, richest and most powerful countries — a real Wakanda.
But, instead, he refused to behave. He insulted the Belgian King. He scared Westerners with his large, bespectacled eyes, goatee beard, prison history, and angry, anti-colonial speech. Journalists and Western intelligence agents literally referred to him as the Devil and Mephistopheles. From the beginning, the Western powers and multinational corporations undermined Lumumba, refusing to let him lead his country or allow its people to enjoy and preserve for themselves the abundant fruits of their ancestral land. Meanwhile, the Western media insulted, ridiculed, infantilized, and often caricatured as cannibalistic savages the people of the Republic, relentlessly imaging them as Kipling's "half devil and half child" or as too uncultured, too backward, too uncivilized, and too unready for Western-style freedom.
In the wake of this relentless destabilization, soldiers rebelled, areas of the Republic succeeded, the Belgian military came back and Lumumba lost his grip, appealing for help to anyone who would listen — the United Nations, the United States, and then the Soviet Union. The latter was a fatal mistake, said Larry Devlin, an actual CIA agent stationed in the Republic and interviewed in Giefer’s documentary. By threatening to allow the Communists access to the strategic riches of the Republic, Lumumba had chosen "the wrong side." He had to go.
The United States acted. According to an eyewitness, United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower said he wanted Lumumba “eliminated.” And this resulted in the actual images that I, many Africans, the descendants of African throughout the globe, and the people of the oppressed struggling world have of the heroic, Cold-War-era CIA, shooting down their dreams of liberation and self-determination. It is, in some way, the unacceptable, nefarious side of the plot of Black Panther.
On August 26, 1960, Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, sent a slightly coded, top-secret telegram and $100,000 to the agency's operative in the Republic.
In high quarters here it is the clear-cut conclusion that if [Lumumba] continues to hold high office, the inevitable result will at best be chaos and at worst pave the way to Communist takeover of the Congo with disastrous consequences for the prestige of the UN and for the interests of the free world generally, consequently, we conclude that his removal must be an urgent and prime objective and that under existing conditions this should be a high priority of our covert action.
Other Western organizations, including, the United Nations and James Bond’s MI6, followed Ike’s lead and contributed huge amounts of cash to the effort, funding dissident soldiers; fomenting chaos and armed rebellion.
Perhaps when those soldiers inevitably arrested the lithe, once proud body of Lumumba for the cameras of Western news crews, Europeans (particularly the insulted Belgians) and Communist-fearing Americans felt the same thrilling, nearly orgasmic surge of relief that audiences experienced as the charming CIA agent, Everett K. Ross, thwarts the devilish and childish plans of Erik Killmonger, and shoots down the all-but-unstoppable Wakandan vessels headed towards World liberation struggles (and the unwanted destruction of the Marvel Universe narrative). But the horrid black and white images of the arrest, humiliation, and abuse of the brilliant nationalist and pan-African leader, Patrice Lumumba, stand out as one of the worst crimes against humanity in history, and as a witness to what happens when a proud African dares to imagine that African lives matter.
In those news reels, the eyes (that once terrified European journalists) look like those of a frantic beast in the minutes before slaughter. The soldiers slap him around, handling his once precious, dream-laden body like an inert sack of nothing — like the cargo of the captured and enslaved once shipped off by the millions from the Kingdom of Kongo to the New World. The film even presents soldiers humiliating him as they try to shove a crinkled ball of paper into his mouth. The narrator whimsically observes that they are literally making him eat one of his once fiery speeches. Later, under cover of the night, Belgian mercenaries and dissident soldiers murder Lumumba before chopping his body into pieces, burning it with fire and acid, and sewing his parts throughout the land. In the documentary on Lumumba’s assassination, one of the Belgian perpetrators even proudly claims to have kept some of the assassinated leader's teeth as a grisly sentimental keepsake taken from the bullet ridden and dismembered body of a man who had insulted his King.
Since then, the world has all but ignored the cataclysmic dimensions of what happened to the real Kingdom of Wakanda, which sadly neglected to hide its vast human and material wealth from centuries of European plunder. It's lands are now the site of what one article calls, “The Great War of Africa.”
The Democratic Republic of Congo is potentially one of the richest countries on earth, but colonialism, slavery and corruption have turned it into one of the poorest, writes historian Dan Snow.
The world’s bloodiest conflict since World War II is still rumbling on today.
It is a war in which more than five million people have died, millions more have been driven to the brink by starvation and disease and several million women and girls have been raped.
And it was all in a days work for the American agent who helped bring about one of “bloodiest conflict[s] since World War II." When asked whether he feels remorse, former operative Larry Devlin shrugs: “You’re busy. Here’s one problem gone, now what’s the next problem.”
