Peck’s Personal Lumumba: The Maternal Voice in Death of a Prophet

Abstract

The camera’s low angle captures the face of a man distorted by hatred. He raises a rock above his head to strike his victim, who is revealed in a reverse angle shot to be a bare-breasted woman. These African figures sculpted in black rock are still on display at the Royal Museum of Africa in Tervuren outside of Brussels. The woman’s nudity exposes the exoticizing gaze of the artist while the subject matter constructs African masculinity as brute savagery, no doubt offering justification for colonial efforts to “protect” African women from African men.1 These shots, preceded by those of the Congolese fauna on display at the museum and followed by a weather vane sporting the laughing faces of Tintin2 and his dog Milou, highlight Peck’s interrogation of images in Lumumba: La Mort du Prophète. By filming persistent icons translating attitudes and ideologies associated with a bygone era, Peck opens “a window onto a different way of thinking about the past” (Rosenstone 63). But Peck made two films about Lumumba. In opposition to this engagement with the past from the standpoint of the present, in his feature film he aims to tell “a true story” that represents only the past, foreclosing the possibility of exploring the construction and dissemination of images of Lumumba and of the process of decolonization.