The crocodiles gathered 
Neal Ascherson
- The Assassination of Lumumba by Ludo De Witte, translated by Ann Wright and Renée Fenby
When Patrice Lumumba was murdered, on 17 January 1961, white women all over Western Europe, North America and the ‘settler’ countries of Africa began to see him in their dreams. I have met women in London and Cape Town, Berlin and Los Angeles, who talked about this haunting. Sometimes he was a black priapic bogeyman; more often, he was a dark and reproachful presence who inspired unbearable guilt and terror. It seemed not to matter whether the dreamer was a ‘liberal’ who by day marched in the streets to protest against his death, or a right-winger who regarded him as a Communist agitator who had got much what he deserved. Something about Lumumba penetrated the skin of rationality and released chaotic, repressed emotions about ‘the other’. His spirit began to walk at night, climbing into the bedrooms of double-locked bungalows.
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Neal Ascherson has reported from Central and Eastern Europe since the 1960s. He is the author of Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland, The Struggles for Poland and Black Sea.
Other articles by this contributor:
On with the Pooling and Merging · The Incomparable Tom Nairn
Oo, Oo! · Khrushchev the Stalinist
Hitler’s Teeth · Berlin 1945
The Media Did It · Neal Ascherson remembers the Wall
Diary · Neal Ascherson among the icebergs
What Sort of Traitors? · the British Spy Opera
After the Revolution · Neal Ascherson reports from Georgia
Even Now · The Silence of Günter Grass
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