Why NOW is the moment.
Starting in July, 2023, events from the 1960s have drawn unusual attention.
- The film Oppenheimer (July 2023) was an unmitigated success. Though the atomic bomb was created in the 1940s, Christopher Nolan’s film is framed with Oppenheimer’s status in the 1960s, when his alleged “Communist” alliances brought him into the anti-Communist fear mongering. The decision of Lewis Strauss to refuse Oppenheimer a security clearance is particularly important, inasmuch as Senator John F. Kennedy subsequently opposed Strauss’s appointment to the Cabinet, feeling that Strauss had betrayed Oppenheimer.
- Stuart Reid’s fine book The Lumumba Plot was released in October 2023 and received stellar reviews. I predict that others will be motivated to make a film about Lumumba after this book’s success—which is one reason why we must move quickly.
- The sixtieth anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination, November 22, 2023, has also drawn unexpected attention, with documentary films abounding and a hit podcast series by Rob Reiner and Soledad O’brien about compelling theories surrounding Kennedy’s assassination.
- On Christmas day 2023, a film about Dag Hammarskjold, secretary general of the United Nations, who also had significant interactions with Lumumba, will be released. This trailer shows how central Lumumba is to the film.
- In January 2024, a book about Frank Carlucci, written by his daughter, will be released. Carlucci was stationed in the Belgian Congo just prior to its independence and had significant and harrowing encounters with Lumumba.
Though slowed by COVID-19, we are now ready to shoot our film, which will be mostly made in the DR-Congo and will feature Lumumba as he really was—the son of a farmer in a small, rural town, who became the most consequential man in Africa.
The script is ready to be shot, and we have done much location scouting. We have visited places where we know Lumumba walked, and found them all stunningly beautiful. The setting itself will be like a character in the film.
2025 is the ideal year to release our film, inasmuch as it will mark the 100th anniversary of Lumumba’s birth and the 80th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs over Japan. We plan to premiere our film at a conference on mining in Lubumbashi, DR-Congo from August 6-9, 2025.
The Congo supplied the majority of uranium for the atomic bombs and is still being exploited for its lithium, coltan, cobalt, and even mercury—which, despite its health risks—tends to be handled without protection. This must all be addressed forthrightly.
The Oppenheimer film never mentions Lumumba or the fact that the Manhattan project depended on uranium from the Belgian Congo. Likewise, the renewed fascination with Kennedy’s presidency and assassination acknowledges the independence movements in Africa but does not go into detail. In fact, Patrice Lumumba was murdered just three days before Kennedy’s inauguration, with American and Belgian complicity. That was certainly intentional. Kennedy was known to be leaning in favor of African independence movements, and the idea that Communism would take over the world one country at a time was prevalent. (We will never know if the travesty of the Viet Nam war would have happened had Kennedy not been killed.)
Though Carlucci and Hammarskjold both knew that Lumumba wasn’t a Communist, articles about their interaction with him often suggest that he was. Lumumba is described thus in an article about Carlucci:
Carlucci discusses the Congo’s volatile communist regime under Patrick Lumumba, where soldiers pressed a bayonet against his daughter and where violent crowds stabbed him in the aftermath of a car accident.
We have no way of knowing how Lumumba would have guided the country which elected him its prime minister. He was in office just a few months before he was assasinated. We do know who he is now to the DR-Congo: a martyr. This gives him unprecedented power to unite not just the Congo but all of Africa. Such unity is long overdue.
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