“If the prophet dies, so does the future,” the director Raoul Peck says early in “Lumumba: Death of a Prophet.” The movie, a personal essay in the form of a history lesson, is as much a poem as it is a documentary.
Made in 1990 and showing for a week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in a 4K restoration of the original 16-millimeter film, “Death of a Prophet” looks and feels newly minted.
Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of the former Belgian Congo, was brought down after a few months in power by internecine rivalry, hysterical anti-Communism and imperialist greed. His fate was sealed in the post-independence ceremonies when he followed the patronizing speech by King Baudouin of Belgium with a blunt j’accuse, citing Belgian racism and “colonial oppression.”
A civil war ensued. With Belgian support, the mineral-rich Katanga province was encouraged by Belgian mining interests to secede, and the white-dominated Force Publique, the Belgian colonial army, revolted. Ridiculed and vilified in the Western press, Lumumba — who would be hailed by Malcolm X as “the greatest Black man who ever walked the African continent” — was killed in early 1961 after being undermined by the United Nations and betrayed by his allies, including his successor, the strongman Joseph-Désiré Mobutu.
For Peck, best known for his essayistic James Baldwin documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” made in 2017, Lumumba is a mythic figure. Peck spent his early childhood in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where, as Francophones, his Haitian parents had been recruited to bolster the post-independence professional class.
As noted by Stephen Holden, who reviewed “Death of a Prophet” in The New York Times when the movie was shown during the 1992 New York Film Festival, Peck “boldly” inserts himself into the film. He not only narrates but often cites his mother’s account of events, puts the exorbitant fee charged by a British newsreel for a few minutes of footage in the context of a Congolese worker’s average salary and explains his last-minute cancellation of plans to film in Zaire, as Congo came to be called under Mobutu.
Consequently, much of the film is shot in snowy Brussels (never more white), and most of the interviews are with aging, often self-justifying Belgian witnesses. The least defensive as well as the liveliest is Serge Michel, a French Jew active in the Algerian liberation movement who served as Lumumba’s press attaché. When a newly arrived Western journalist asked for background material, Michel suggested he read Maurice Nadeau’s “History of Surrealism.”
Indeed, Peck follows suit with his unexpected juxtapositions, as when he scores a tour of Brussels’s Museum of Natural Sciences to Le Grand Kallé’s 1960 Pan-African hit “Indépendence Cha-Cha” or cuts from demeaning Art Deco sculptures of Black colonial subjects with cheerful monuments to the Belgian cartoon icon (and colonial explorer) Tintin. Densely edited but never impenetrable, “Death of a Prophet” is more economical and inventive filmmaking than Peck’s passionately overwrought biopic from 2001, “Lumumba.”
“What is there to say about a 30-year-old murder?” Peck asked in 1990. It has now been 63 years since Lumumba was killed and there’s still plenty to talk about. (Currently making the festival rounds, Johan Grimonprez’s expansive documentary “Soundtrack to a Coup d’État” elaborates on American complicity in Lumumba’s overthrow.)
Lumumba’s only grave, according to Peck, are the trees in the savanna riddled with bullet holes. The prophet’s death haunts us still.
Lumumba: Death of a Prophet
Through Feb. 29 at BAM Rose Cinemas in Brooklyn; bam.org.
