Home / Newsletters / Board of Directors / Links / Directories / Join / Announcements / Goals
|
Summer 2001 |
Marge Shannon Snoeren, Editor |
Vol. 5, No. 4 |
A
Bit of Peace Corps Folklore
Kano-Old City, New City, Merged City
War
after Peace Corps
The
World According to VSO
Lumumba
Editor's Note: A staff physician in Ibadan and Lagos during his Peace Corps service, the author is now Director of the AIDS Program at Yale New Haven Hospital where he is a Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology and Public Health, Yale University.
 |
The
HIV/AIDS pandemic was recognized 20 years ago. Today, statistics are staggering:
If current trends do not change, there will be more than 40 million AIDS orphans in Africa alone by 2010. Until recently, most infection and disease was concentrated in Eastern and Southern Africa, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic had appeared to spare Nigeria where reported rates of HIV infection and disease were low. It is not clear whether the facts were underreported by repressive military rule or the introduction of HIV into Nigeria was delayed. But it is now perfectly clear that Nigeria is experiencing an HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Compared to many other African countries, Nigeria's HIV seroprevalence (percentage of the population who are infected with HIV) rate is relatively low; the Federal Ministry of Health reported a rate of 5.6% in 1999. However, hiding under the guise of this rate is the real number of infections in Nigeria. With an estimated population of 130 million, Nigeria now has over 6 million people living with HIV/AIDS. As a country, Nigeria has the second largest number of HIV/AIDS infections in the world. Compare that to the U.S. where a population of 277 million has 700,000 to one million people living with HIV/AIDS. Additionally, HIV/AIDS usually moves from sub-cultures and specific communities into the larger population when the infection rate rises above 5%. Alarmingly, between April 1994 and November 1997, the number of AIDS cases reported by Nigeria increased by 840%. In 1998 alone, half a million Nigerians became infected; 72% of those new infections occurred in people under 40.
The statistics of epidemiology have been called "human beings with the tears removed." These figures only hint at the enormous amount of individual, family, and community suffering and loss that is being experienced as the epidemic matures. It will increase dramatically in the next decade. Nigeria’s population is young: 59 million (46%) of Nigerians are under the age of 15. As in other countries, Nigerian youth are at the greatest risk of infection. Young women are especially vulnerable, in part because many young women tend to partner with higher-risk, older men. Nigeria is experiencing an upsurge of AIDS orphans: more than 600,000 children have lost parents to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Nigeria. As the epidemic grows, there is likely to be a national decline in life expectancy, education, and economic productivity.
Nigeria’s pandemic is complex. A mosaic of smaller epidemics overlap in different areas. Seroprevalence rates are highest in Lagos, Kaduna, Ebonyi, Akwa-Ibom, Benue and Taraba. Heterosexual transmission is the predominant route of infection, although injection drug use has increased in Lagos recently.
Tragically, Nigeria’s official response to the epidemic has been denial and neglect. Past Nigerian governments did little to establish prevention or care policies and programs. A more comprehensive National AIDS Prevention and Control Program was established in 1986, the National AIDS Committee was set up in 1989, but both showed little evidence of political will or resources to tackle AIDS.
In 1991, Head of State Ibrahim Babangida, earmarked N30 million for a highly publicized War Against HIV/AIDS. None of this money was ever disbursed. In 1998, UNAIDS urged President Sani Abacha to make a public statement about HIV/AIDS. He declined. Unfortunately, no Nigerian head of state, including President Olusegun Obasanjo, has made a sufficiently strong public statement addressing the HIV/AIDS crisis in Nigeria.
Hopefully, Nigeria’s re-emerging, fragile democracy will soon insist on a forceful, official response to the epidemic. The UN’s new focus on AIDS as the major health and security issue in the world may help to catalyze such a response. It is not too late. Uganda and Senegal, nations with fewer resources than Nigeria, have had dramatic success combating HIV/AIDS. A democratic and responsible Nigerian government with meaningful levels of help from the developed world can still turn back the epidemic.
There
is much we can do. Our special familiarity with, and affection for Nigeria,
our political activism, skills in health education and community development
and technical expertise--Peace Corps tools--need to focus on HIV/AIDS, the newest
and perhaps most dangerous threat to Nigeria’s future. •
Return to Top
by E. Timothy Carroll, (9) 63-65
When I was a youngster I had a favorite record. Oh, Wouldn't You Like To Be The Doctor? was a song about a child's wish to become the doctor for the joy of poking and prodding the old geezer who administered evil potions to the child.
Haven't a lot of Volunteers in the field, upon receiving some maddening regulation from headquarters wished, just for a day, to be the Country Director? Of course, never in Nigeria. And never in the halcyon period 1965-66. Certainly not while the ebullient and dashing David Elliott was the Country Director, supported so gracefully by his wife, the remarkable Ellen. They were classic Peace Corps leaders, who appreciated the culture around them, understood the Volunteers’ needs, and managed Washington folks with dispatch.
In the 35 years since, I've never heard a single unkind word spoken either of them or their administration. As a Volunteer who served under them, I remember only a well-tempered, laissez faire management style that suited us in the field, leaving us to our own (superior to be sure) devices.
Imagine, if you flash forward a handful of decades, this former Nigeria Volunteer is looking over the roster of incoming recruits to the new Business Program he is administering in Peace Corps Poland.
This was to be second tranche and we had great expectations of them. Hordes of English teachers were well placed, and the environmentalists were beavering away in national parks. But the Small Business Volunteers were facing one of the toughest assignment for which the Peace Corps ever recruited. Dropping U.S. business folks into towns where old communist attitudes still held sway over newly elected post-communist types of all stripes took chutzpah, careful planning and a pile of luck. It was a job only for the bravest, the most skilled, and the most patient.
Enter the Elliotts. Yes, we believe that for the first time in Peace Corps history, Country Director and Volunteer changed places. Peace Corps has not produced another such exchange of roles.
We share the unique exchange. Like Nigeria, Poland was attracting the brightest and the best.
When Pre-Service Training was over and it came time for the site placements to be handed out, the refrain of that childhood tune did, I must confess, come to mind. Just where might the Elliotts be sent, where they might get the FULL Volunteer experience? There was, up in the northeastern part of the country, a major swamp. The poverty, the dispirited population, the miserable history of oppression and neglect seemed to ring out for a couple of Volunteers who were fearless. Need I say more?
 |
| Tim Carroll visited David Elliot (R) at the War Mueum in Bialystok. |
The two years in Bialystok was transforming. Not just for the Poles who benefited by the presence of these two, but for the Elliott's themselves whose stellar performance across the whole community there could only be described as the work of Supervols. It's an accolade few Volunteers could imagine being awarded by any Country Director under whom they had served. But then, the Elliott's had been remarkable from the beginning.
I
suppose there's an outside chance that they will answer the call again and set
out to be Co-Director's in some needy place. I hope they choose carefully, because
what alternative would I have? It would be back to the trenches and the pleasure
of their company. •
Return to the Top
KANO—OLD CITY, NEW CITY, MERGED CITY
by Alan Frishman, (22) 66-69
 |
As I flew into Kano airport in early May, I thought about the time 35 years ago when I first saw Kano: it was in September 1966, on my way to my Peace Corps assignment at Birnin Kudu Secondary School, 84 miles east on the Maiduguri Road.
After three years there as a math teacher, I pursued a doctorate in economics, returning to Nigeria in the mid-1970s to research my thesis on the housing pattern and urban growth of metropolitan Kano. Since then, my job as a professor has enabled me to return four more times (the last in 1993) to study the economy of the Kano region.
Kano and Nigeria have changed in many ways over the last third of a century. Visitors to Kano from the early Peace Corps days would remember the imposing walls and gates, the old city market, the dye pits, Dala Hill, the new city outside the walls and the city’s slow pace.
 |
| Dyers still produce tie-dyed indigo cloth, although in smaller quantities, in newly rebuilt dye pits. |
Today,
the eastern walls adjacent to the new city are gone—washed away by rain, dug
out by builders or bulldozed by the government. Most of the gates, not really
gateways to anything anymore, have been rebuilt with modern structures, and
the city’s two parts have merged into one. The Kurmi Old City Market still
functions but has been completely eclipsed by Sabon Gari Market that has spilled
out of its original confines into the surrounding streets.
Dala
Hill, which is slowly eroding, is still imposing. However, it is now completely
surrounded by housing that has spread throughout the old city to accommodate
the urban area’s nearly two million population. The new part of the city has
also changed dramatically with many new roads, housing layouts, and numerous
high-rise buildings. There is considerable traffic of every kind—trucks, buses,
taxis, cars, motorcycles, bikes, pedestrians and, of course, animals—making
driving an adventure. The bustling city lives up to the slogan “Centre of Commerce"
seen on Kano license plates.
I have been studying Kano’s large- and small-scale industries for the past 28 years. Each time I visited in the 1970s and 1980s, companies were forming and most were expanding. This occurred even after the World Bank/IMF Structural Adjustment Program was instituted in 1986. However, the 1990s were a disastrous decade for the economy of Kano and Nigeria. The military rulers, especially in the Abacha regime, embezzled billions of dollars, wasted billions more on projects--such as the steel industry--that have never been completed, neglected the physical and social infrastructure of the country, built the new capital Abuja, and dramatically increased the number of people in poverty.
One result was the de-industrialization of Nigeria; Kano had close to 400 factories in 1990 but has barely 100 operating today, and many of those are limping along due to the poor economic conditions. The electrical power supply is inadequate and there are rolling blackouts everywhere except in Abuja, which the political elite ensures is always aglow. The urban water supply has not kept up with demand either, leading to the increased reliance on well water. Despite being the sixth largest oil producer in the world, Nigeria has petrol shortages due to low refining capacity, the periodic closure of its four refineries, and the low subsidized price of fuel. There are no plans for additional government refineries, the petrochemical industry is in shambles, and an immense amount of gas is flared off every year. The telecommunications industry is being privatized, but at the moment is terribly inadequate and inefficient.
Imports are rising rapidly to provide the products that people want but are no longer being produced, resulting in the depreciation of the Naira and substantial inflation. In the 1970s, the Naira was worth more than the dollar. Today 135 Naira exchange for one dollar and no one under 30 even knows what coins are. If I remember correctly, I used to live for a whole month in Birnin Kudu in the late 1960s on my PC stipend of 75 pounds, or 150 Naira—today that might buy five loaves of bread. The poverty rate in Nigeria is close to 67%, according to a Nigerian Federal Office of Statistics study, and unemployment is especially high, with the loss of tens of thousands of industrial jobs.
On the positive side, I did not see anyone who appeared to be malnourished or starving. However, most people, both in metropolitan Kano and in the rural areas, are struggling to get by and are living at the same standard as in the 1960s. Although many parts of the old city appear at first glance unchanged, the region has more schools, clinics, roads and trade—so, there has been some marginal progress.
 |
| Kofar Dan Agundi is one of the few remaining old gates to the city. |
One of the wonderful things about returning to Kano is meeting former students. Many had completed university, either in Nigeria or abroad, and were using the math foundation that I helped to build. They thanked me for being their teacher and I found the gesture gratifying. Often, when I went looking for some information, I found the person in charge had been a student of mine. That immediately broke through the barriers that I had experienced so often in the past, and made it easier for me to gather the data that I needed.
Although
I spent most of my time in Kano, with a quick trip to the Yankari Game Reserve
and Abuja, I did spend a morning in Birnin Kudu. The central part of the school
was the same, but there are many more students than the increased classrooms
and dormitories can handle. I found four old friends, two still work at the
school and two I knew from the town. They were surprised by my sudden appearance.
We reminisced about our common experiences 35 years ago and talked about how
things are today. For them, life is only marginally better, while my life as
a college professor in upstate New York seems to be blessed. It was a bittersweet
reunion because as I drove away, I sadly realized that we are all getting older
and this would probably be the last time we would be together. However, I
truly believe that knowing one another and working together changed and enriched
our lives. •
Return to the top
WAR AFTER PEACE CORPS
by David Pritchett, (11) 64-66
 |
| March 1968, the author stands in front of an above ground bunker at 14th Aviation HQ Chu Lai, where soldiers took cover when general alerts sounded. |
Though the Vietnam War is long over and tourists and politicians now visit old battlefields, The Wall has given Americans a focal point for our collective grief. We veterans are aging but the memories, passions, fears, and curiosity are still sharp, and we are still interpreting the experiences. Those of us who witnessed war after Peace Corps have a unique story to tell.
Remember culture shock? We RPCVs who went to Vietnam after Peace Corps got a second and third round. The second round was getting drafted, or volunteering because of the inevitability of being drafted, or volunteering out of a patriotic motive--after all, Peace Corps and the Vietnam War represented our national purpose. At least that is the way many of us remember it. Some of us faced draft boards that looked upon Peace Corps as draft dodging.
Larry Crumrine, (8) 63-65, recalls, “I started recruiting for Peace Corps at universities in the Midwest and western part of the country until it was time for me to depart. I never thought of Peace Corps as a pacifist organization; I joined out of the idealism that we all felt. But the first question from almost all males was ‘Does this get you out of the draft?’ My answer ‘no’ usually saw them walk away. This always disappointed me, but I was happy that those whose only motivation was to escape the draft didn’t sign up.”
When I asked when I might expect my draft notice, the board secretary said, “I don’t know, but the draft board feels it’s time you served your country.” I was working in a UCLA Peace Corps training program when a trainee dropped out because he had been drafted. My notice to report for induction arrived at UCLA, too.
How quickly after returning from Nigeria we got called up depended on a lot of factors like manpower requirements, lotteries, local draft board priorities. Tom Hebert, (4) 62-64, came home and “began to think much about Peace Corps and Vietnam and the why-for's therein. So, after a lot of effort, I eventually got to Vietnam, 1966-68."
Larry Alkire, (24) 66-68, got six months to readjust from organizing Young Farmers Clubs in Nigeria before he was drafted. He served in a personnel capacity with the 173rd Airborne Brigade at Phu Tai. He vividly recalls returning home and tracing his route in reverse…flying back through Japan, Ft. Lewis, WA, and then into the civilian life that awaited. Since 1970, he has been a social worker in mental health or psychiatric settings. And since 1995, he has worked on a PTSD treatment unit. “I had made some attempt to find others with our experience over the Internet with no luck,” he told me. This article may be the connection many of us old warriors are looking for.
The third round of culture shock was being in the war zone. Steve Watson, (16) 65-67, served in Nigeria during the Biafran War. Because of his PCV experience, when he joined the Marines, he was trained in the Vietnamese language and assigned to work with Vietnam locals interdicting infiltrators. "I remember sitting in an ambush," Steve recalls, "with my finger on a Claymore switch, thinking 'I wish I were in Biafra now.' The early firearms in Biafra were not nearly as deadly as the arms we faced just south of the DMZ."
Lucien Maurer, (25) 66-68, was an Army combat engineer also stationed near the DMZ. There they built revetments and bunkers for protection when they came under heavy bombardment. When I heard his and Steve's stories, my tour seemed almost benign. My position behind a typewriter at 14th Aviation Battalion HQ took no hostile fire though we ran to our bunkers a few nights when general alerts sounded on the huge Chu Lai base. I remember watching a NVA rocket hiss across the night sky. In contrast, Steve told me, “Our position south of the DMZ took more incoming rounds than Hue.”
The 60s were a time of racial tensions but in my rear assignment, the only confrontation I remember was during a film--ironically Guess Who's Coming To Dinner--showing on sheets tacked up in the enlisted men’s club. A fight broke out inside the club and I saw an African-American put a restraining hold on a man waving a pistol and carry him out of the club. Those of us sitting on empty ammo crates and used rotor blades, either went to check things out or retired to the relative safety of our hooches. Lying in bed later, I heard boots muffled in sand, clicks of locking and loading, epithet-filled conversations. Young soldiers from my HQ security platoon side of the creek were mostly white. I heard later there was a Grade-B Western pre-shootout confrontation that the NCOs defused. Guns were put away, folks went to bed, and no courts martial were convened.
John Bauer, (10) 64-66, who was wounded in Vietnam remembers, “We had no bad race relations in our company that I am aware of, and certainly not in my platoon. We all fought our asses off together and everyone bonded with everyone.” He went on to tell me about a recent unit reunion he had attended. “The keynote speaker at our reunion was a psychologist, a specialist in PTSD, and he said it was typical that after age 50 all the warriors come out of the closet and want to get together.” We are old warriors, and that was our war. And there is still plenty to talk about.
In contrast to John, I made it a point not to get to know anyone very well. I reasoned it would be too painful to lose a friend. Most of us went to war on chartered 707’s with steak and beer on the menu, and returned alone. Mike Goodkind. (16) 65-67, had a take on war-zone relationships that paralleled my own. “I made life-long friends in the Peace Corps," Mike says. "In Vietnam I always kept a self-imposed distance, as if the place were an anomaly and I wanted to keep it that way.”
Mike was trained to man missiles that were never deployed in Vietnam and found himself in an artillery battery with eighteen year-olds who called him Professor. He was stationed for a while at Landing One Ross, a fifteen minutes chopper ride from Chu Lai where I was stationed but we never met. Mike remembers life on the base as having "largely correct, if not friendly, relations with the Vietnamese women who entered our compound each morning and left before sunset for the village which we suspected the VC controlled after dark.
"I think the young boys who worked for us thought the GIs were cool. We became role models, I suppose. We were big. Some of the guys were strong and skilled in the arts of truck and gear repair, carpentry, group cooking, things a Vietnam teenage boy would find glamorous compared to a fate of farming rice or facing the even more-regimented burden of serving in his own army. Of course, there was always the Vietcong never more than a nightly visit away. I’m sure many of the village boys took a job with them after we left.”
Mike's mention of Vietnamese kids reminded me of a trip I made with some of our company men to an orphanage we supported with payday contributions of piastres. We went to repair screens, fix doors, and play clumsy soccer with shoeless urchins. I remember thinking how ironical it was that we created orphans and then supplied the means to support them.
At the orphanage, my Kodak Retina III, the same camera I used in Nigeria, disappeared from the jeep and suddenly, no one could speak English. I wondered if my camera ended up as a reconnaissance tool for some RVN unit. I bought another new camera when I had R&R in Singapore. R & R, a strange feature of Vietnam--a war with a vacation.
 |
| Ron Neureuther on the day he left Vietnam to come home. |
Ron Neureuther, (16) 65-67, was drafted in 1968 and muses "I often thought a book should come out of my experience of being trained by the same government to help people in Africa and to kill people in Vietnam."
For some of PCV/RVNs our nerves are deadened, some are still sensitive, and many of us still have twitching nerves. John Bauer says, “I have been to The Wall three times, as it is a kind of Mecca for me.” When a traveling model of The Wall came to the Illinois Veterans Home, here in Quincy, I decided not to go.
I did finally get around to watching Platoon and The Deer Hunter long after they had come out in video. I preferred watching them at home alone. Steve Watson hasn't seen the films, or read any of the books like O'Brien's The Things They Carried. “I prefer to live my life looking ahead,” he concluded. But, he added, two weeks after returning to the USA from Vietnam, he had outgrown his silk suit from Singapore. In a way, we RPCV/RVN vets have all outgrown the silk suits from Singapore. But for some of us, they still hang in our closets
Larry Crumrine, made a career out of the military after Peace Corps and retired as a colonel. "While I was in the military, I never met anyone else who had served in Peace Corps and most people’s jaws would drop open when they learned I had. There was that belief that PCVs were pacifists who needed a complete change of thinking to join the military.
"But, it has always been very clear to me. The same idealism that sent me to Nigeria was also the driving force in my military career. Military people are not warmongers. My patriotism encompassed the idea that we alleviated the suffering of people by preventing war. Yes, when prevention failed we were called upon to fight by the same government that gave rise to the
Peace Corps, but only to preserve a way of life that allows a Peace Corps to exist.”
In all the reports from RPCV/RVNs, the unifying thread is that RPCVs who became soldiers did so for the same high idealism that JFK evoked when he said, "Ask not what your country can do for you…” We rose to that challenge, wrestled with the diverse outcomes, and continue to examine the meaning of those two seemingly opposite experiences.
Mike Goodkind summed it up this way. “I have a feeling that Vietnam and Peace Corps offered me some perspective on life. Up to this point, that perspective has not had a major impact on either fulfilling or not fulfilling dreams. Insights are still developing, and the reflection will be lifelong.
“The Army and Peace Corps experience together left me with a moderate perspective. I could no more become a screaming fringe liberal than I could become a neoFacist. Vietnam and Nigeria gave me a useful journalistic perspective. It’s really hard for me to sit in a meeting and feel intimately attached to a viewpoint, whether it is a corporate culture being presented or a dissident viewpoint being advanced. Where do I belong?”
Like Mike Goodkind, I’m still working out the sense of duty, honor, country that I felt in both places. And at this distance, it is not a matter of being personally prouder of one service than the other.
 |
But the experience I still talk to my students about is the one I carried home from Nigeria.
Editor’s
Note: The author is a member of the English faculty, of John Wood Community
College, Quincy, IL. This fall he begins a two-year exchange teaching at the
John f. Kennedy School in Berlin, Germany. •
Return to the Top
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO VSO
by Andy Philpot, VSO 65-67
What was I doing at 20,000 ft somewhere over Spain, heading south? I had about as much knee room as the back seat of my old Austin Mini, there was another six hours to go, and we had just been told we were out of beer. Things were getting better, but 24 hours earlier, it had been a rather different matter.
 |
| Last fall, we published Andy's picture with his Land Rover. Now, here he is with the Austin Mini he had to leave behind when he went to Nigeria in 1967. (Doesn't seem to have a lot of pictures without cars, does he?) |
Shortly before graduating from university two months before, I found myself sitting in front of a VSO selection panel. Lady Blenkinsop*, known for her good work around the city, Major-General Featherstonehaugh (pronounced Fanshaw),* who had served with his regiment in various parts of The Empire, and Dr. Finklestein*, who supposedly had some expertise in tropical medicine, (*names have been changed to protect the innocent.) were trying to determine whether I was a good chap with no particular political axes to grind and whether I wanted to go somewhere hot, warm, or cold. I opted for warm, fancying a year or so on an island in the Caribbean. I did not consider a cold climate, although, at the time, VSO sent volunteers to Labrador.
My own GP asked me to cough, read an eye chart, and assure him that none of my ancestors had had any health problems while serving the crown in far-flung corners of the world. I found out later an uncle had returned from Nigeria in the 1920's with health problems that were to plague him for many years after.
After graduating, I heard I had passed the rigorous selection process and--perhaps as a punishment for dreaming about a tropical paradise--I was being sent to Nigeria. So a couple of weeks before departure, feeling rather like a second-hand pincushion, it was off for a week of orientation at the University of Birmingham.
In one afternoon we were taught more about classroom survival than I ever learned at teacher's college later in my life. Between boiling our lettuce, remembering to take our Paludrin, knowing what to do when bitten by a Gaboon viper, and a special session at the end for us guys, someone from the Red Cross managed to thoroughly scare us. The Regius Professor of Medicine from the university assured us we would come to no harm if we were sensible, didn't go out in the midday sun with any mad dogs, and made sure we wore our pith helmets if we did.
A guy from the British Council who was to be our minder in Nigeria assured us that our postings had been carefully selected for job and accommodation. Little flags on a Nigerian map showed where each of us was going—except me. They couldn't find Sabongidda-Ora.
A quick trip home, and it was time to go. At check-in we found that the 44 lb. baggage allowance included our hand luggage, and if we were over the limit, we had to leave belongings behind. They weighed us as well. The second-hand propeller-driven DC7 would be lucky to reach Nigeria. Every pound would count.
As we were about to board, they found a cracked window on the plane. We had the option of returning to London, staying in a hotel for the night, and leaving at 10 the next morning, or we could hang about the airport and leave when the new window was installed. How long would it take to fit a new window? We decided to stay where we were. What they forgot to tell us was that the window had to come from Germany. At that time, Gatwick was used only for charter flights and had practically no facilities. So, after a very boring and uncomfortable night, we finally left at 11 the next morning.
So there I was, sober as a judge, winging my way to a new adventure that started of the rest of my life.
In 1957, conscription ended in Britain but people, the Duke of Edinburgh included, saw the need for the young to have an opportunity to grow up before entering the real world. VSO was founded in 1958 as a charitable NGO. The plan was to allow high school leavers to spend a year in a developing country, perhaps doing themselves more good than their host. In 1962, VSO jumped on the development bandwagon and introduced G (graduate) VSO for university graduates. By 1970, VSO had 1420 volunteer overseas, more than a thousand of them graduates.
The seventies saw the end of the school-leavers branch as more emphasis was being placed on the developmental effect of the volunteers. Numbers dropped to about 750 but a more professional approach was taken with the one-year contract being lengthened to two and VSO field offices being established.
The
next 20 years saw a steady growth in the number of volunteers and by 1990, 1250
were serving overseas. VSO
Strategic Plan 1998-2002 •Return
to the Top
LUMUMBA!
Film Directed by Raoul PeckReviewed by Ron Singer, (10) 64-67
Almost 12,000 Lumumba entries on the Web suggest that this charismatic martyr continues to speak to our times. With Raoul Peck's new biopic, the voice becomes even louder.
 |
| Eriqu Ebouaney gives an excellent portrayal of Lumumba in this new biopic. |
Peck accurately renders the brief watershed period in Congolese history between June 30, 1960, and January 17, 1961: from independence and Lumumba's election as Prime Minister to his murder in secessionist Katanga. Excellently played by Eriq Ebouaney, this Lumumba is both larger than life and decidedly mortal. While others in the drama are dedicated to profit, vengeance, realpolitik and narrow tribalism, Lumumba is a firebrand fueled by nationalism and pan-Africanism. Loving and lively but ill-educated, without even a plane of his own to fly in, Lumumba seems hamstrung as the reactionaries and profiteers conspire to cut him down. Peck shows that one reason the notorious CIA plot to poison Lumumba's toothbrush failed was because Lumumba was trapped inside a double cordon of UN protectors and soldiers sent by Mobutu to keep him penned while his fate was being decided.
Peck’s Mobutu is the messianic kleptocrat we all know and hate. Ably portrayed by Alex Descas, this Mobutu is as clever as his friend and patron, Lumumba, and initially shares his ideals. But, as crises unfold, Mobutu proves ruthlessly pragmatic, where Lumumba refuses to be, and from this pragmatism in the face of impossible conditions, a monster is born. Ironically, the martyred Lumumba's immense popularity prompted both Mobutu and, more recently, Kabila (pere), to claim his mantle, in vain hopes of invulnerability.
This is a beautifully shaped film. A leitmotif, the disposal of the hero's corpse, is a visceral assault on the viewer's senses in part because (for me, at least) it echoes images of mutilated Congolese from the days of the concessionaire system. The film is about dismemberment. In the Nigerian context, we will all be hauntingly reminded of the many things which have fallen, and continue to fall. •