The crocodiles gathered

Neal Ascherson

  • The Assassination of Lumumba by Ludo De Witte, translated by Ann Wright and Renée Fenby
    Verso, 224 pp, £17.00, July 2001, ISBN 1 85984 618 1

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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[*] Reviewed in the LRB, 1 April 1999

Vol. 23 No. 19 · 4 October 2001 » Neal Ascherson » The crocodiles gathered (print version)
Pages 17-18 | 2895 words