The Soccer War

LUMUMBA

That man was here yesterday. They came in a muddy car, four of them. The car stopped in front of the bar. That man went in to drink beer. The other three wandered into town. The bar was empty; that man sat alone drinking beer. The bartender put on a record. Bill Haley sang ‘See you later, alligator.’

‘We don’t need that,’ said the one at the table. The bartender took the record off. The other three came in. ‘Ready?’ the one who was drinking beer asked. They answered ‘Ready,’ and the four of them left. There were people standing in the square, watching the four approach: the tall, slender man in front and behind him the three stout ones, with long arms.

Two girls started nudging each other because they liked that thin one. The thin one smiled at them, then at everyone, and began speaking. We didn’t know who he was. We usually knew everybody who came to speak, but we were seeing this one for the first time. Before, the white used to come. He would swab at his forehead with a handkerchief, muttering various things. The ones standing in the front had to listen carefully and then repeat what was said to the ones standing further away. In the muttering there was always something about taxes and public works. He was an administrator, so he couldn’t talk about anything else. Sometimes Mami came, our king, the king of the Bangs. Mami had a lot of beads and bracelets that gave off a hollow sound. Mami didn’t have any power but used to say that power would return to the Bangs. Then the Bangs would take revenge on the Angra, who had pushed all of them away from the banks of the fish-filled Aruwimi River. Mami would shake his fist, and you could hear that hollow jangling.

But this man spoke differently. He told us that our tribe was not alone. There was a whole family of tribes and that family was called la nation congolaise. All must be brothers; there lay strength. He spoke for a long time, until night fell and the darkness came. The darkness took away all the faces. You couldn’t see anything except this man’s words. Those words were bright. We could see them distinctly.

He asked, ‘Any questions?’

Everybody was quiet.

The speeches used to end this way, and whoever asked a question was beaten up afterwards. So it was quiet. Finally somebody cried out, ‘You! What’s your name?’

‘Me?’ That man laughed. ‘My name’s Lumumba, Patrice Lumumba.’

There he was: tall, lithe, rubbing his forehead with long nervous fingers. He had a face that they find attractive here because it’s dark, but the features were European. Patrice was strolling the streets of Leopoldville. He stopped, turned around and started walking again. He was alone, composing his great monologue in his mind.

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.

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.