Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2014

Vol. 50, No. 4, 398409, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2014.925692

Csaire/Lumumba: a season of solidarity

Julie-Franoise Tolliver*
University of Houston, Texas
In February 1961, Patrice Lumumba, rst prime minister of the independent Congo,
was assassinated. This article analyzes the play written ve years later by Martinican
politician and poet Aim Csaire about Lumumbas short political life and sudden
death, focusing on the ways in which Csaire recuperated the gure of Lumumba
from hostile discourse and transformed him into a martyr, a poet of action.
Csaires gesture, the article argues, is one of transnational anti-colonial solidarity.
Keywords: solidarity; francophone literature; anti-colonialism; Cold War; Aim
Csaire; Patrice Lumumba

On 20 February 1961, a week after the announcement of the death of Patrice

Lumumba, the rst prime minister of the free Republic of the Congo, Frantz Fanon
published a eulogy in Afrique Action:1 The Death of Lumumba: Could We Have Done
Otherwise? The answer, for Fanon, is yes: young African nations should have sent
troops to help Lumumba directly, without working through the restraining channels of
the United Nations (UN) de pays ami pays ami (from friendly country to friendly
country). Fanon writes: Only [African nations] can really and totally help us to realize
our objectives because precisely, the friendship that unites us is a friendship of combat
(Fanon [1961] 2001, 222, my translation).
Five years later, in 1966,2 the poet and politician Aim Csaire, also Martinican,
answered Fanons call to arms and came to the discursive defense of Lumumba in the
form of a play: Une saison au Congo (A season in the Congo).3 The play a telescoped chronicle of Lumumbas electoral campaign in 1958, his short stint as prime
minister and his arrest and assassination represented an attempt at rescuing Lumumba
from the overwhelmingly hostile discourse of the western (especially Belgian) press,
which during Lumumbas life and upon his death characterized him as insane, arrogant,
overly ambitious, even satanic. The historical Lumumba was indeed ambitious (see
Zeilig 2008), but what the west read as arrogance and devilment was for the
pan-African community a strong nationalist conviction, a belief in the right of the
Congolese to political, social and economic self-determination the last panel of this
idealist triptych representing the major obstacle in the eyes of western powers.
Csaires Lumumba is also nationalist, a charismatic tragic gure whose one fatal aw
is his overweening trust in the power of the word.
This article analyzes the three Lumumbas (the historical gure, the devil constructed by the western press, and the martyr created by Csaire) to delineate the solidarity uniting Csaire and his subject, beginning with the question of why Csaire
*Email: jftolliver@uh.edu
2014 Taylor & Francis

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chose to write this play, why at that time, and for whom. It is difcult not to read anticolonial solidarity with Lumumba on the part of Csaire, especially in such moments,
for example, as when Lumumba addresses the Belgian king, speaking for his people on
the day of independence. Apart from a few tropes (mentioning tu rather than vous
as the mode of appellation for blacks, for example, and referring to the new Republic
as being in the hands of its own children), Csaire composes for his Lumumba a
speech that, although it resembles the original in its indignation and denunciatory tone,
remains quite distinct from the historical speech4 actually pronounced by Lumumba on
30 June 1960:5
We are those who were dispossessed [says Csaires Lumumba], struck, mutilated those
who were addressed as inferiors [tutoyer], whose faces were spat upon. Cookboys, chamberboys, laundryboys [translation omits the important phrase comme vous dites as
you say to explain the word lavadres, coined by French-speaking colonists in Africa],
we were a people of boys, a people of Yes, Bwana, and whoever doubted that man
could be not man had only to look at us. Lord [the original French reads Sire Sire],
all suffering that can be suffered, we have suffered it. All humiliation that can be drunk,
weve drunk! (Csaire [1967] 2010a, 30)

The character Lumumba here could be speaking not only for the Congolese masses,
but for all colonized peoples, as Conteh-Morgan (1994, 108) also suggests. The attention to the linguistic detail of the word boy-lavadre (not in the original speech),
which the speaker identies as non-standard French and which he imputes to the
colonizers, aligns with Csaires own fascination with and famous mastery of the
French language.6 Csaire and Lumumbas parallel experiences of colonization and
anti-colonial political struggle, together with Csaires racial identication with Africa
(he invented the term and the concept ngritude), suggest that Csaire felt a particularly
close afnity with his character.
At the conjuncture of politics and imagination, Csaires anti-colonial solidarity is
related to what Jennifer Wenzel (2006) has called anti-imperialist nostalgia, dened
as a longing for what never was, yet a longing that is fully cognizant that its object of
desire is one of the ways it could have gone but did not (16). In rearticulating
Lumumbas ideals of Congolese and pan-African unity, A Season in the Congo does
participate in an anti-imperialist ethics of what could have been, but it is not a gesture of longing or nostalgia; rather, it represents an active engagement with what was
for Csaire contemporary politics Mobutus burgeoning dictatorship, the neocolonial
networks that sustained his regime, and the continued governance of Martinique by
France. Csaire himself was both an author and a politician: he wrote many poems,
tracts and plays, and he was mayor of Fort-de-France for 56 years and Martinican delegate to Paris for 48 years (see Romuald Fonkouas [2010] biography of Csaire).
Authoring A Season in the Congo was tantamount to aligning himself with Lumumbas
vision of true independence, a declaration of the conceivability of self-rule for postcolonial nations, and it inserts itself in Csaires trajectory toward promoting, though
unsuccessfully, Martinican autonomy.7
In this trajectory, Csaire had to contend with the constrained political imaginary of
the Cold War, which had the effect of channeling conceptions of the nation in two
opposite (geographical and ideological) directions the communist east and the capitalist west. Indeed, Csaire and Lumumba in the late 1950s faced a similar ideological
divide in each trying to dene his nations place in world politics. In October 1956,
Csaire resigned as a member of the French Communist Party (PCF), citing in his

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resignation letter (Csaire 2010b), on the one hand, that partys unwillingness to
distance itself from the USSR and Stalinism and, on the other hand, the discovery that,
our struggle the struggle of colonial peoples against colonialism, the struggle of peoples
of color against racism is more complex, or better yet, of an entirely different nature than
the ght of the French worker against French capitalism, and it cannot in any way be considered a part, a fragment of that struggle. (147)

Csaires resignation from the PCF did not represent a turn toward any capitalist alliance; rather, in 1958 he formed his Parti progressiste martiniquais, a political party
inspired by socialist ideals but focusing on the autonomy of Martinique within France.
This ne line that Csaire drew for himself, distinct from European communisms and
yet entirely different from the American superpower looming to the north, is similar to
the choices Lumumba was making at the same time. In 1961, Lumumbas Belgian
friend Jean Van Lierde, who qualied Lumumbas ideology as panafricanist and positive neutralist, cited the speech that Lumumba gave in Accra in August 1958: Whatever your opinions are, I accept your help if you sincerely desire the independence of
my people (quoted in Brichaux-Houyoux 1993, 305). Indeed, in 1958 when Lumumba
founded the MNC, he was forming a political party whose main objective was intertribal and supra-confessional unity outside the metropolitan clichs that European
advisors tried to impose in the pursuance of their own secular quarrels between tired
ideologues (Van Lierde, quoted in Brichaux-Houyoux 1993, 305). In his book Patrice
Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah (1973) likewise wrote,
There is [ ] some truth in the statement that a feature of the national movement in this
phase of the pre-independence struggle was its low ideological content. [ ] On the crucial question of what society would emerge after independence, whether it would be based
on capitalism or on socialism, few gave a forthright answer. (17)

Leo Zeilig (2008) describes Lumumbas pragmatism: Lumumba had decided that there
were certain things to learn from the communists and much ideological baggage to discard (78). And yet the media (e.g. Brady 1960a) and international opinion constantly
measured the Congolese prime minister against the two poles of the Cold War, and ultimately the fact that Lumumba even entertained the idea of Soviet assistance is what
turned the US against him.
A Season in the Congo dramatizes the Cold War conict as a contingence that provides binary outlets to Congolese authorities the prime minister Lumumba, the president Kala-Lubu (Joseph Kasa-Vubu), the secessionist Tzumbi (Mose Tshombe) as
they negotiate the end of colonial rule and the dawn of political and economic autonomy. The local Cold War evolves out of colonialism; the play opens8 with Patrice
Lumumba as a traveling salesman peddling a beer owned by the (Belgian) minister of
the Congo, augmenting Belgian capital but using the public nature of his position to
give anti-colonial speeches (Csaire [1967] 2010a, 58). The naivety of the Congolese
peoples understanding of independence (Its what exactly, your dipenda? Idiot, its
the celebration [ ] when the Blacks / Command and the Whites obey! [ ] How
does it come, dipenda? By car, by boat, by air? [22]) contrasts with the cynicism of
the four bankers, who represent western investment in Congolese mineral resources:
What do [the Congolese politicians] want? Jobs, titles, presidents, deputies, senators,
ministers! So, bribe them! (21). After hearing Lumumbas independence speech, which
expresses clearly the break he intends to make with the former colonial power, the

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bankers plot the secession of Katanga, the mineral-rich province in the south of the
DRC, an event that takes place with the support of Belgian troops and western mercenaries. Csaire dramatizes this turning point in Lumumbas power by disclosing the
Cold War stakes that structure the conict in the Congo: To Moscow! To Moscow,
screams Csaires Lumumba (47). This decisive scene is set on a plane; Lumumba,
Kala-Lubu and their entourage are refused the right to land in Elisabethville, the capital
of Katanga, when Lumumba screams To Moscow! Historically, Lumumba and
Kasa-Vubu were indeed refused the right to land in Elisabethville in July 1960.
Lumumba, however, did not cry To Moscow! during that ight; in fact, it was
Kasa-Vubu, not Lumumba, who insisted on requesting aid from the Soviet Union see
Brichaux-Houyouxs brilliantly researched annotated edition of the play (1993, 313). It
is interesting that Csaire chooses to give voice to Lumumbas cry for help to the
Soviets in that setting. Indeed, eventual Soviet aid came mostly in the form of air transport for Congolese troops; in that dramatized shout from inside a staged plane, Csaire
manages to articulate the nature of actual Soviet support.
The Soviets actually play no part in A Season in the Congo, except as this potential
alternative ally voiced by Lumumba when he nds himself at a political impasse and
also as an almost glib excuse for intervention given by the American powers, represented obliquely by the Great Western Ambassador9:
We are accused of shooting fast, but can one keep to rocking-chair politics when the world
grows restless, for a trie, and peoples reach the boiling point! When peoples do not
behave like decent people, it is necessary that someone make them decent. It is to us that
Providence has given that task! Thank you Lord! [ ] and so, youve heard how he
shouted on the plane: To Moscow! To Moscow! Ah well, people should know that we
are not just policemen, we are also the remen of the world! Firemen designated to circumscribe the re lit everywhere by Communist pyromania! I say everywhere! In the
Congo, as elsewhere! (Csaire [1967] 2010a, 5610)

This caricatural gun- and Bible-toting American ambassador forms the opposing pole
to the shadowy threat posed by the Soviet Union. As the action unfolds, the sway of
the US is less blatant than this speech suggests, but nonetheless determining. Lumumba
calls on the UN for assistance in recovering his countrys lost territory, and Csaires
personalization of that international organization in the character of Dag Hammarskjld,
then Secretary-General of the UN, depicts it as an easily perverted instrument. While
Hammarskjld11 pleads for the neutrality of his position, the US (in particular the
UNs special representative of the Secretary-General, American Andrew W. Cordier
or Matthew Cordelier, as Csaire renamed him) uses that discursive gesture to prevent
Lumumbas army from defending his position, while allowing the Katangan army and
its international mercenaries much more leeway. As Hammarskjld comes to realize,
In sum we [the UN] were keeping [Lumumbas] arms tied while the others were hitting him! (Csaire [1967] 2010a, 140). And it is no accident that Csaires Mokutu
(Joseph Mobutu) speaks of neutralizing (101, 137) Lumumba when he removes him
from power; Mokutu borrows not only the slippery language of neutrality, but also the
betrayal that underlies it, as he barters Lumumba in exchange for a share in the economic status quo. The Cold War is at the heart of A Season in the Congo, although its
two opposing poles are unequally represented: ultimately for Csaire the Soviet Union
serves as a straw villain brandished by western powers to justify their more or less covert interventions in the Congo.

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Csaires focal point as he imagines the Cold War in the Congo remains the person
of Lumumba. To construct his character, Csaire relies on a principle of selection that
allows him, on the one hand, to rescue Lumumba from hostile discourse, and on the
other to emphasize the traits he admires in him. Csaire based the play entirely on published materials, having never been to the Congo or met Lumumba (Dunn 1980, 9).
His source texts (see Karin Sekora 1994), European for the most part, include monographs and newspaper articles. These documents present Lumumba as a crazy, uneducated, ambitious, and corrupt leader (Peck 2010, 106), and the American press was
hardly friendlier: Thomas Brady described Lumumba as angry (1960b) and, two weeks
later, domineering (1960a). From the information gathered in these texts, Csaire creates a very different prole; he presents Lumumbas intransigence as a pure if unviable
impulse honing in on true independence in the context of the inextricably intertwined
international interests that dened the Cold War postcolonial reality.
One of the hostile discourses from which Csaire was rescuing Lumumbas image
is the frequent comparison, in European documents, between Lumumba and the devil.
As Sekora (1994) has shown, Lumumba was frequently characterized by European
biographers and journalists as the devil incarnate (248; see also Brichaux-Houyoux
1993, 142). This representation of Lumumba as Satan makes Csaires choice of title
an ironic metonymy adopting and inverting the decidedly racist metaphors of his European sources. Csaires title refers to the French poet Arthur Rimbauds collection of
poetry in prose and verse, A Season in Hell (1873). For Csaire, the descent into hell is
not the allegory of his own intellectual and creative construction of the Congo, but
rather a mocking deconstruction of the Paris-published texts he had read.
The connection between A Season in the Congo and Rimbauds little volume goes
beyond the title. Formally, the allusion highlights Csaires mixed use of prose and
verse (both caricatural alexandrins and free verse, depending on the speaker) and
makes of the play a poetic object. The parallel goes further: A Season in Hell, it is generally agreed, is in one of its sections a biographical account of Rimbauds stormy relationship with the symbolist poet Paul-Marie Verlaine, the foolish virgin of the poem
standing for Verlaine to Rimbauds infernal bridegroom (Donat 1995). But as David
Dcarie (2004) has argued, this biographical interpretation can also be a poetic one:
Exegetes have found, in the foolish virgin, Verlaine, the biographical model, but can
one not see, behind Verlaine, poetry? [ ] Rimbaud, in loving poets, loves poetry
(259260, my translation). Binding Rimbaud and Verlaine, in other words, is a kind of
contract (the marriage of the foolish virgin and the infernal bridegroom) that constitutes, in fact, a fascination with poetry and language. The connection between Csaire
and Lumumba is also a contract of sorts, revolving around the strategic deployment of
language; Csaires solidarity is an engagement, political and poetic, that has at its root,
I will show, a common interest in language as an anti-colonial weapon.
The attributes that Csaire favors as he interprets his various sources are
Lumumbas charismatic presence, his earnest belief in the possibility of complete independence, and his deance with regard to colonial and neocolonial powers. Csaire portrays Lumumba as a disinterested visionary who refuses to participate in the continued
oppression of a Congolese people that he (and the embodiment of the Congo itself,
the Sanza player) may be alone in understanding as a cohesive unit. The language of
Csaires anticolonial solidarity with Lumumba is what Csaire called, in an interview
with David Dunn (1980), Lumumbas poetry of action.12 In an earlier interview with
Nicole Zand published in Le Monde on the eve of the plays Parisian premiere, Csaire
explains, I refuse the antinomy praxis/imagination. I consider that action occurs

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403

precisely through imagination and through the verb (Zand 1967, 23). Csaires fascination with creative discourse as political action takes on added meaning if we consider
that he, in some ways, speaks in parallel with or through Lumumba. As he explains in
his conversation with Zand (13), prophetism is the rst revolutionary step, and his
own political formation has taught him to reconcile revolution (or action) and utopia
(or imagination). In the context of the Cold War, a poetry of action emphasizing the
importance of creativity and imagination provides a way out of the binarily opposed
horizons presented as limits to the political imaginary.
Within the play, Lumumbas poetry of action is a creative and even procreative
force; it constitutes the method through which the character can motivate action by
transmitting to others his own boundless energy for change. Csaires Lumumba
exclaims to the Congolese people after he has convinced the soldiers (again, the work
of his charismatic poetry) to release him from his rst imprisonment in the play:
My only arms are my words, I speak and I awaken, I am not a redresser of wrongs, nor a
miracle maker, I am a redresser of life, I speak and I give Africa back to herself! I speak
and I give Africa back to the world! I speak and, attacking the very base of oppression
and servitude, I make fraternity possible for the rst time! ([1967] 2010a, 123)

The difference between a redresser of wrongs and a redresser of life is a temporal

one. The wrongs of the past, Csaires Lumumba knows, are beyond his reach; but
reviving his people can change the present and the future. The aim of the accusatory
speech he had made to the Belgian king, therefore, is not to correct the violence that
has been done against his people in the past; rather, it is to set the tone for a future in
which the brutality of colonialism can be addressed (there was a taboo to take out.
Ive taken it out, Csaire has him tell Mokutu [33]). In fact, Csaires Lumumba sees
the Word as giving birth to a postcolonial Africa; he himself fathers a united association of free nations that can assert itself in a global context. This particular gesture has
been qualied by Gregson Davis (1997) as a preposterous claim that reects, not so
much vanity or arrogance as nave trust in the magical efcacy of the word (155).
Essentially, Davis is drawing attention to the plays lack of realism, but realism is
not Csaires chief project here. Through Lumumba, he is stretching the limits of anticoloniality in a ctionalized setting that allows for these limits to be tested, and if
Lumumba (the character) is fomenting fraternity and rallying people to the cause of a
truly independent Africa, it is in the real world, among readers, actors, theater-goers,
journalists, intellectuals. Csaire himself has explained A Season in the Congo as a
race to death and to failure for a Lumumba who knows from the very beginning that
he will fail, but who also knows that his failure will mean transcendence to a denitive
victory (Dunn 1980, 5, my translation). Csaires Lumumbas naivety is a vehicle for a
different kind of truth: anti-colonial solidarity, which survives the historical Lumumba
and goes beyond his political mandate.
The question of where the historical Lumumba ends and where Csaires Lumumba
begins is a vexed one. In fact, Csaire has so thoroughly appropriated his source material that it might be argued that the historical Lumumba fades from the play. For one
thing, Csaire rewrites Lumumbas speeches, re-imagines his reactions to events and
his interactions with others, and generally culls through the facts of his life and death
to recombine them in a nationalist drama of his own invention. And, in addition,
Csaire is drawing his material from the sources that were available to him, sources
that were already at a remove from the historical Lumumba. Raoul Peck (2010), whose

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J.-F. Tolliver

work on Lumumba includes a documentary (Lumumba: Death of a Prophet, 1990) and

a feature-length lm (Lumumba, 2000), has described the difculty of nding the real
Lumumba in published materials about him, even 25 years after Csaire was doing his
own research:
it took me a year and a half before I could begin to accept Lumumba as a sympathetic
character. I couldnt warm up to him, and the reasons for my alienation eluded me. Then I
realized that everything I had learned about Lumumba came from the same sources journalists or politicians from the West who had covered the crisis in the Congo. For them, it
was a fearful, traumatic, and arrogant confrontation and they had responded by investing
their understanding of Lumumba with all the usual, often racist, clichs. I had been contaminated by those clichs. [ ] You must hold the key to your own image-making
because if you dont, other people will. And this is the real problem of storytelling: who
controls your image, who tells your story. (106107)

The negative press that reported Lumumbas story had become his story, until Peck
was able, although he does not explain how, to see through its racist clichs. Peck, and
Csaire before him, took control of Lumumbas image. For Csaire, this meant inserting it into his own autobiographical nationalist struggle and summoning it to participate
in an anti-colonial solidarity that, judging by Lumumbas speeches, accords well with
his own perspective (especially in its call for pan-African unity) but is not equal to it.
Csaire aligns himself with his character by making him a poet-politician in his own
image.
If in A Season in the Congo discourse creates a new, solidary Congo and a new,
solidary Africa, it ironically also creates an image of an a-solidary Lumumba, separated
from the Congolese people. As Davis (1997) points out, Csaires Lumumbas refusal
to wear the traditional leopard skin and the stole shows his increasing distance from
the Congolese masses (154). This representation of Lumumba diverges from the historical record; indeed, when Lumumba was placed under house arrest in October 1960
and the radio was shut off on 6 September 1960, it was precisely because Lumumba
was so effective in drawing enthusiastic supporters by speaking to them directly, both
in person and on the air.13 In addition, the MNC had split into two factions (MNCLumumba and MNC-Kalonji) specically because, as biographer Leo Zeilig (2008)
writes, For most members of the volu14 [but not for Lumumba], political parties
were seen as a method for controlling resources and accessing wealth (34). When the
parties split in July 1959, Joseph Ileo took with him most of the leading members of
the organization. But it was a split without any popular backing. The membership
stayed with Lumumba (8385). So, if any Congolese politician had the backing of the
masses, it was Lumumba, and far from desiring leaders who wore the leopard skin and
stole, the rural masses tended to be radical (Herbert Weiss, quoted in Zeilig 2008,
80) and made demands for concrete social and economic concessions from authorities.
In the play, by contrast, it is not the lack of technical and personal contact that hinders
Lumumbas engagement with the masses; he speaks with them freely, but they are portrayed as seeking a prophet, not a political leader. As the Sanza player declaims, speaking on behalf of the crowd, You are our inspired guide, our messiah! Let us render
glory to God, my children, Simon Kingambu15 is once again among us! (Csaire
[1967] 2010a, 122). After Lumumba refuses the leopard skin and the stole, the stage
directions indicate simply Hesitation in the ranks (123) before the attention shifts to
Lumumba and his companion, Pauline. A Season in the Congo represents the crowd
and its representative the Sanza player as politically immature and focuses instead on

Journal of Postcolonial Writing

405

the transcendence of Lumumbas inspiration. Thus it is that in the play, but not in historical reality, Lumumbas greatest strength his poetry of action is nally his
downfall because it creates a barrier between himself and the masses as Csaire imagined them.
It is conceivable that Csaires choice to represent Lumumba as a poet divided from
his people resulted from the fact that the only sources available to him at the time were
western anti-nationalist documents, and that Lumumba as an isolated dreamer was simply a positive reworking of the image the inimical press had drawn of Lumumba as an
isolated madman. But it is also possible that Csaires decision to portray Lumumba as
he did was the result of the forms of emplotment he chose literary solidarity, unlike
political solidarity, must follow the basic prescriptions of ction. On the one hand, the
drama follows the form of a tragedy: Lumumba as a tragic hero could not be merely a
victim of his many enemies; he needed a character aw (the Aristotelian hamartia) that
would lead to his downfall. Poetic vision inated to the exclusion of political pragmatism functions particularly neatly as tragic aw in this case: rst, because it accords
with the historical Lumumbas charisma, which seems to have been extremely effective;
and second, because it blinds the character to the treachery that surrounds him and
leads him to self-destruction Csaires Lumumba allows himself to be arrested, the
nal time, because he wants to address Mokutus paratroopers with non-violence
([1967] 2010a, 129). On the other hand, and in smaller part, the drama adheres to
another type of narrative that explains Csaires depiction of the Congolese people as
less radical than they actually were and also as somewhat obtuse politically: the
Marxist narrative that introduces a cleavage between the enlightened vanguard and the
slumbering masses. These particular forms tragedy and Marxist revolutionary theory
structure and dene A Season in the Congo: they are the methods by which Csaire
creates a solidarity that is both literary (imaginative) and political.
The performative articulation of this solidarity also denes it and complicates it.
The solidary link, which in its most abstract form links Martinique and the Congo,
takes a detour away from the South Atlantic to Europe Belgium and France, the old
colonial metropoles. In his interview with David Dunn, Csaire explains his goals in
writing Une saison au Congo:
[Did you write it] to shock your audiences?
No! Not to shock. Not at all. But to make people understand. I lived in France at that
time, and the blacks were pretty traumatized by this story because they didnt understand,
and the whites were snickering, You see this savageness, the cannibalism, the magic etc.
etc. That whole period, that whole episode of the decolonization of the Congo, all the
Congolese troubles were really serving racist propaganda. So I wanted to show the truth,
to make people understand this Congolese drama that was in reality a political drama, a
human drama. And what this drama entails in terms of pain, suffering or barbarism is not
at all linked to Congolese barbarism. It is a political barbarism of which the Congolese are
not responsible but of which they are in general the victims. (1980, 6, my translation)

So Csaires staged solidarity with Lumumba becomes a spectacle to ght racist propaganda, to reveal to imperialist Europeans their own savageness. The fact that the play
was performed rst in Brussels in 196616 and then, with revisions, in Paris in 1967, is
both a matter of necessity (Mobutu would hardly have welcomed a production on
Congolese soil) and a matter of clever misappropriation of the very networks of
communication that had demonized Lumumba. If empire is the frame for this play

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about anti-colonial resistance, imperial stages, as the setting for the rst performances,
facilitate the dissemination of anti-colonial sentiment, allowing for an articulation of
solidarity that distinct performances in Martinique and the Congo (had they both been
possible) could not have attained. In addition, the 1967 performance at the Parisian
Thtre de lEst, based on what is now considered the denitive text, included both
African and Caribbean actors playing Congolese characters.
This blurring of the distinction between Africa and the diaspora, possible in Europe
where black actors were (and still are) a minority and where their blackness was more
important, at least in some instances, than their national origin, accentuates the racial
character of the solidarity that drew Csaire to Lumumba. Csaires claim that Africa
is part of [his] interior geography (Zand 1967, 13, my translation) alludes directly to
the African heritage that, together with French heritage, denes his Caribbean island in
his eyes. Csaires engagement with Africa is unabashedly essentialist: Africa: even if
I dont know it well, I feel it. [ ] Often, my work is better understood in Africa than
in the Caribbean. And the African recognizes himself in it (13, my translation). There
is no denying that Csaires kinship to Africa as expressed here relies on identitarianism, but as A Season in the Congo itself shows, the relation is also one of political
resistance. If Csaire identies with Lumumba as a black man, he also identies with
him as a colonis, one oppressed by a similar European colonial regime, but even more
so as an ideological comrade who works for the same kind of true independence.17
Indeed, Csaires spectrum of sympathy, expressed through positive representation,
excludes Mokutu, who shows increasing brutality and who ultimately betrays not only
Lumumba, but also Lumumbas hope for a non-violent, completely independent
Congo,18 and it includes, albeit tangentially (these characters are merely mentioned),
Lumumbas comrades and collaborators the white Spanish Luis (Luis Lopez Alvarez)
and Belgian Van Laert (Jean Van Lierde) who for Csaires Lumumba represent
a friendship beyond blood ([1967] 2010a, 113; une amiti outre-sang in French,
with a play on the adjective outremer that describes the overseas territories of France,
such as Martinique). If, in his interview with Nicole Zand, Csaire privileges
African-ness as a mode of imagining afnities, the fact remains that solidarity in A
Season in the Congo is always anti-colonial.
Almost half a century after the rst performances of Csaires play, the solidarity it
represents (literary anti-colonial black solidarity overladen with the binary complexities
of the Cold War) may seem distant, quaint and irrelevant. Csaire passed away in April
2008 at the age of 94, the retired mayor of a still-French Fort-de-France. But assessing
the political or strategic success of A Season in the Congo is an unfair measure of its
value. Even beyond the immediate context of decolonization during the Cold War, the
alternative networks of afnities represented by black solidarities can serve as an
engine for the kind of liberated dignity that Lumumba and Csaire imagined. If
Lumumbas body was destroyed to prevent his burial site from becoming a site of pilgrimage, A Season in the Congo, through each of its readings and performances,19
becomes a relay point for a solidarity that outlasts its origin. Neil Lazarus (1999)
argues, No matter how great the defeats that have had to be endured since decolonization, the perduring solidaristic signicance of the anti-colonial struggle has not been
erased. Nor can it be (120121). The play is a means of communicating and renewing
this solidarity. Indeed, as the dying Lumumba exclaims, it is an invulnerable idea that
I incarnate [ ]. Invincible, like the hope of a people, like a travelling brushre, like
the pollen moving from wind to wind, like the root in a blind compost (Csaire
[1967] 2010a, 144). The text of the play is the re, the pollen and the root; it is the

Journal of Postcolonial Writing

407

enduring form of a black solidarity that continues to be timely and that will continue to
be so until Lumumbas (and Csaires) ideals are attained.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank participants in the ACLA 2013 panel on The Global South
Atlantic as well as readers of earlier drafts: Lydie Moudileno, Hosam Aboul-Ela, Margot
Backus, Karen Fang and Cedric Tolliver.

Notes
1.
2.

3.
4.

5.

6.

7.
8.

9.
10.
11.

12.
13.
14.

Pan-African magazine produced in Paris by Franco-Tunisian editor Bchir Ben Yahmed.

A Season in the Congo was premiered in Brussels in 1966. The 1967 performance in Paris
of a revised version (which became the denitive print version) shocked not only the
European public, as documented by Csaire scholar Gregson Davis (1997), but also patriotic
Zaireans, who deemed the representation of Mobutu Sese Seko (disguised as Mokutu in
the play) to be too negative (151).
The play was translated into English in 1968 by Ralph Manheim (Grove Press) and again
in 2010 by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Seagull Books). I use the latter translation in this
article.
For the original French speeches and writings of Lumumba, see La pense politique de
Patrice Lumumba (1963; Lumumba Speaks, 1972); this is a collection of much of what
Lumumba wrote between 1958 and his death, including the independence day speech
(1972, 220). For a comparison of the original Lumumba speech and Csaires version, see
chapter 3 of Lhumanisme dans le thtre dAim Csaire, by Rodney E. Harris (1973).
In historical fact, Lumumba had not been scheduled to speak at all on 30 June 1960; in
documentary footage, he can been seen scribbling during the rst two (expected) speeches,
and King Baudouin turns angrily to Congolese President Kasa-Vubu and Belgian Prime
Minister Gaston Eyskens as Lumumba denounces the crimes of colonization and speaks to
the Congolese people in terms of nationalist hope (see De Witte 2001, 2, 36; Zeilig 2008,
95102; see also Raoul Pecks 1990 documentary lm, Lumumba: la mort du prophte).
Andr Breton, for instance, wrote in his preface to Cahier dun retour au pays natal (1947),
here is a Black who wields the French language as no White today can wield it (Breton
in Csaire [1939] 1983, 80). The paternalism and racism of Bretons praise has been underlined by, among others, Fanon (1952, 31) in Peau noire, masques blancs.
For an excellent summary of Csaires attitudes toward departmentalization (his struggle
for, defense of and later opposition to it), see Davis (1997, 9396).
A Season in the Congo takes the form of non-naturalistic (Conteh-Morgan 1994, 110) or
Brechtian (Dunn 1980, 3) vignettes, scenes that follow a general chronological order but
that diverge from it on occasion and that leave out many elements of Lumumbas actual
rule.
Susanne Brichaux-Houyoux identies him as US ambassador Clare Timberlake (1993, 261).
Here, and occasionally elsewhere, I have departed from Spivaks translation to remain closer to the original.
Hammarskjld, who was in reality to die mysteriously in a plane crash between the Congo
and Katanga a mere eight months after Lumumbas assassination, is portrayed by Csaire as
sympathetic, if idealistic and naive. For an analysis of Hammarskjld the Csairian character, complete with examination of a citation from the poet Saint-John Perses oeuvre that
forms part of Hammarskjlds lines, see Roger Little (1990).
Lumumba can hardly be called a poet in his own right, although he did publish a poem,
Weep, O Beloved Black Brother, in his partys newspaper, Indpendance, in September
1959 (Lumumba 1972, 114).
See Zeilig (2008, 119); De Witte (2001, 30); on the importance of the radio, see Heinz and
Donnay (1969).
The volu (evolved) class was a term used under Belgian rule to refer to educated
blacks. For a description of the humiliating process through which Congolese might attain
the status of volu, see Zeilig (2008, 34).

408
15.
16.
17.
18.

19.

J.-F. Tolliver
Simon Kingambu (18891951) was an early nationalist and a prophet of the Church of
Jesus-Christ on Earth (see Brichaux-Houyoux 1993, 264).
The Belgian premiere was very nearly cancelled because the authorities contrived to stymie its production (Davis 1997, 150).
For brilliant analyses of identity-based and political black solidarity in the context of the
US, see Tommie Shelby (2002, 2009).
The 1967 version of the play concludes with a scene taking place ve years after
Lumumbas death, a scene during which Mokutu tries to draw on Lumumbas continued
popularity to validate his reign only to have his soldiers re on the overenthusiastic
crowd, killing, among others, the Sanza player.
Most recently, at the time of writing, a seven-week run at Londons Young Vic theater in
JulyAugust 2013 and a three-week run at Villeurbannes Thtre National Populaire in
October 2013.

Notes on contributor
Julie-Franoise Tolliver is Assistant Professor at the University of Houston, where she teaches
modern and classical languages. Her book manuscript, titled Tongue Ties: Language, Resistance
and Solidarity in the Francophone World, analyzes literary solidarity in the francophone world
during the era of the independence movements.

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