The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

issues about image‐making and auto/biographical production that went beyond
questions usually asked in the public domain about lives and their narration. 137
But perhaps the most significant curatorial project of biographic representation was
Patrice Lumumba in Urban Art, which explored Lumumba’s political career and tragic
death as they had been represented through Congolese urban painting. By the 1970s
and 1980s, Lumumba had been turned into a symbol of hope, and was much more
popular with ordinary people than with the government, for whose policies his
memory represented a threat. Paintings of Lumumba represented a challenge to the
official version of history, and became an indirect way of levelling criticism against the
government. As a genre of representation, they constituted one of the variety of
forums through which “the trials and tribulations of this political figure [were] retold
and reinterpreted”. Their visual language enabled Congolese to “construct the mental
maps” required to negotiate ways through different narrations of history and “to
actively engage with contemporary understandings of collective memory”. As such
these paintings served “as an archive of imagining and reconstructing unofficial
versions of a shared and lived history”. A Congo Chronicle showed how memories of
Lumumba “were transformed into a powerful visual narrative of a cultural hero”. 138
137 David Kunzle, Che Guevara: Icon, Myth, and Message, pp 57.
138 A Congo Chronicle: Patrice Lumumba in Urban Art (Clark Atlanta University Art Galleries, Atlanta, 20
January – 15 March 2002, curated by Bogumil Jewsiewicki), exhibition texts; Bogumil Jewsiewicki et al,
A Congo Chronicle: Patrice Lumumba in Urban Art (New York: The Museum for African Art, 1999);
Elizabeth Harney, ‘A Congo Chronicle: Patrice Lumumba in Urban Art’, Nka: Journal of Contemporary
Art, No. 11/12, Fall/Winter, 2000, pp 96‐97; ‘Clark Atlanta University Art Galleries present A Congo
Chronicle: Patrice Lumumba in Urban Art’ (Pamphlet, Clark Atlanta University Art Galleries, 2002).
Apart from Lumumba biographies told in stories, the turn of the 21 st century saw the re‐emergence of
forensic approaches to Lumumba’s life and death, through publications, film and a Belgian
Parliamentary Commission of Enquiry. These focussed especially on the brief, turbulent seven months
of his premiership, and the forces behind his murder in 1961; see Ludo de Witte, The Assassination of
Lumumba (London: Verso, 2001; first published in Flemish in 1999) and Lumumba (Director, Raoul
Peck, JBA Production, Paris, 2000). As an intellectual committed to recovering Lumumba’s life history
and legacy, Peck had also made a documentary on Lumumba’s murder in 1991; see Lumumba: La Mort
du Prophete (France/Germany/Switzerland, Directed by Raoul Peck). Following the finding of the
Parliamentary Commission that the Belgian government had a “moral responsibility” for Lumumba’s
murder, in 1992, the Belgian government formally took responsibility and apologised to Lumumba’s
family and the Congolese people for its role in the murder. The Belgian government also announced
its decision to establish and finance a “Patrice Lumumba Foundation”, to “prevent conflict, strengthen
justice, and target the youth” (). The
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