"The Curse of Lumumba" (Pius Ngandu Nkashama)

Fifty-one years ago this day, Patrice Emery Lumumba, 36, was cowardly assassinated at Elisabethville (Lubumbashi).

I won't be rehashing the gruesome story here, which now belongs to the annals of history and filmography (both documentary and feature-length fiction)--except to point out that no one, among those who participated in the murder conspiracy, has ever been brought to justice. In fact, in Lubumbashi, the main plaza of the city is named after the man who ordered Lumumba's and two of his ministers' unlawful execution by firing squad (manned by Belgian officers), Moïse Tshombe.

And in Kinshasa, Etienne Tshisekedi, who, as deputy justice minister in the cabinet Mobutu formed after his first coup in September 1960, wrote the illegal brief demonstrating to Mobutu the legality of putting under arrest the country's first elected Prime Minister--thus arguably the trigger of the murder conspiracy--is alive and kicking. And in keeping with his ingrained habit of flouting state laws, Tshisekedi has recently illegally proclaimed himself the president of the DRC.

After Tshisekedi's self-promotion to the presidency, two schools of thought have emerged. Those (including myself) who dismiss the move as self-delusional gimmickry; and those for whom this shows that Tshisekedi has real political moxie. Well, both camps need to put the kibosh on their sneer or their praise. For Tshisekedi's theatrics might be the telltale sign that something ominous is afoot on this land: a rot at root and branch of the Congo...

I didn't come up with this notion--mind you! This mystical take comes from Pius Ngandu Nkashama.

Though literature has vanished in the Congo, there are however great Congolese "littérateurs." There are two major Congolese fiction writers, both of them lost to the American university systems: Vincent Yves Mudimbe and Pius Ngandu Nkashama. Nkashama is my favorite. He is one of the most prolific African fiction authors writing in the French language. Before Katrina disaster in New Orleans, he was teaching Francophone literature at the University of Louisiana (he may still be there, by the way).

A character in one of Nkashama's fictional texts, in explaining the unending misfortune of the Congolese nation, surmises that the "Curse of Lumumba" might be on the land. Just imagine, the character goes on to say: the founding father of the nation is summarily shot in the bush, buried, then disinterred, chopped to pieces, plunged into acid bath, and the scarce remains left burned and dispersed in the night of the Katangan savannah--his ghost condemned to wander the land without any hope of respite. As long as Lumumba's ghost wouldn't have been propitiated, this country will be doomed. No propitiating sacrifices would do: all the bits and pieces of Lumumba's body have to be collected, gathered and properly buried! An impossible undertaking, as it were, the foundational metaphor of the aporia dubbed "Congolese nation-state"!

Nkashama's "Curse of Lumumba" haunted me today as I watched on TV the queue of the regime dignitaries laying wreath after wreath at the foot of the ugly giant monument of Lumumba on Boulevard Lumumba in Limete, in eastern Kinshasa, not far from the residence of Tshisekedi, whom I've just called above the "trigger" of the conspiracy to assassinate Lumumba. That massive monument is no propitiation. The ghost of the national hero and founding fathet continues to wander the land, mad at the injustice wreaked on his soul...

This begs the following question: If the 5 million dead of Africa's World War weren't enough to propitiate Lumumba's vengeful specter, in what lustral waters need the nation to be cleansed for its lasting recovery?