The End of the Affair

Sometimes certain moments catch a writer’s imagination because they pose a question: What if history had taken a different turning? One such what-if moment is the brief rule of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, the first and last time that vast long-suffering territory has ever had a democratically chosen leader.

Unlike the British, who had learned in India that colonies are not forever, the Belgians were caught by surprise by the wave of independence fervor that swept Africa in the late 1950s. After they reluctantly permitted elections in 1960, King Baudouin came to Leopoldville to haughtily grant the colony its freedom. “It is now up to you, gentlemen,” he said, “to show that you are worthy of our confidence.” An angry, impromptu speech in reply by Lumumba, the new country’s coalition-government prime minister, caught the world’s attention.

Up to this point, the Belgians thought they had a deal: The Congo would be free, but European and American mining companies would continue to profit from its lucrative supply of diamonds, cobalt, copper and gold. Lumumba, however, declared that political independence was not enough; Africa must be economically free of Europe as well. An earnest, inspired orator, he cut through the granting-of-independence rhetoric and put into words the mixture of humiliation and hope that millions of Africans felt.

To the West, the message of this slight, goateed man with half-rim spectacles was anathema. Lumumba probably knew he was doomed. Less than two months after he took office, a U.S. National Security Council subcommittee authorized his assassination. CIA men couldn’t get close enough to him to carry this out, but the Americans and other Western powers funneled support to Congolese factions that quickly ousted Lumumba and killed him. One of the plotters, Joseph Desire Mobutu, eventually seized power and ruled for 32 years, renaming himself Mobutu Sese Seko, renaming his country Zaire, collecting more than $1 billion in U.S. aid and amassing a personal fortune estimated at $4 billion. As similarly high-handed dictators multiplied throughout the continent, the radical populist vision of Lumumba seemed ever more elusive.

Lumumba has caught the eye of novelists before, but not so memorably as in two recent books, Barbara Kingsolver’s 1998 “The Poisonwood Bible” and the northern Irish writer Ronan Bennett’s “The Catastrophist.” By contrast with Kingsolver’s almost gothic tale that is bold and multi-voiced in form, “The Catastrophist” is stylistically conservative, a modern realist’s accretion of carefully observed detail, drawn out in a taut and intricate plot.

The hero of “The Catastrophist,” James Gillespie, reminds you--a little too much--of Fowler, the journalist-narrator of Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American”: an aging, world-weary skeptic about politics, a shrewd judge of others’ illusions. The heroine is Ines Sabiani, newly arrived in the Congo in 1959 as correspondent for the Italian Communist Party newspaper. Warm, intense, romantic, bereft of guile, she is one of those for whom the world is always divided starkly into light and dark, whether the dichotomy be Italian partisans and Nazis, the IRA and the British, or Lumumba and the Belgians. A third major character, Mark Stipe, the CIA man on the scene, gradually insinuates himself into their lives.

What makes “The Catastrophist” refreshingly different from anything Greene wrote is that Gillespie is wildly, illogically, hopelessly in love with Sabiani; he has come to the Congo in her pursuit. One of Greene’s self-controlled world-weary cynics would never be so foolish. The love affair between the two central characters has a profound political and personal tension at its core, based on differences in belief, age, nationality and temperament--all things, of course, which make love more difficult as well as more alluring. The fate of this love parallels the fate of Lumumba in the face of European and American power. The two impossible dreams echo each other and subtly remind us how close the erotic and the political are: Both evoke passion, worship, hope, betrayal.

Rapidly, events of the time sweep over the unhappy couple along with the unleashing of the Africans’ pent-up desire for independence--first signaled eerily with the ambiguous toss of a single stone against their car, then climaxing in bloodily suppressed demonstrations. Surrounding the two lovers are the shock and despair of the Belgian colonists as their world of shaded verandas and white-uniformed servants evaporates.

The novel’s landscape is dotted with real-life characters. There’s the Belgian Gen. Janssens: “[He] has the barrel-chested aggression of the middle-aged soldier who prides himself on his continuing hardness and regards scornfully the widening hams and girths of his pampered civilian peers; he looks like the kind of man who takes cold showers and throws medicine balls on the beach.” (Janssens, the last commander of the colonial army, later returned to Brussels, stood before the statue of the Congo’s conqueror, King Leopold II, and declared, “Your Majesty, they’ve made a mess of your Congo!” Twenty-five years later he was still publicly fulminating.) And there’s Sidney Gottlieb, chief drug specialist for the CIA, who was sent to Leopoldville with poison for Lumumba. (Wisely, Bennett omits Gottlieb’s subsequent fate: Apparently repentant, he retired to work at hospices in the United States and at a leper colony in India. If this had been said of a character in a novel, no one would have believed it.)

Bennett’s precision of detail rings with the authoritative confidence of someone who knew the Congo during that tumultuous time. But not so, it turns out: In 1960, Bennett was a 3-year-old boy in Belfast. However, he has done his homework well. I spent some five months in central and southern Africa between 1959 and 1962, and Bennett has gotten it unerringly right: the cultured CIA man who convincingly explains his deep sympathy for African aspirations, the liberal-talking white big businessman, the panicky petits colons losing their shops and jobs, the Africans trying to make sense of the different varieties of white men all claiming to be their friends and knowing warily that none of them really is.

When Lumumba is deposed, Gillespie is abruptly arrested, beaten and questioned about the whereabouts of Ines and one of Lumumba’s aides, who to Gillespie’s despair is now her lover. Stipe, it turns out, is controlling the interrogation. The pages about the arrest are some of the novel’s most riveting: the policemen shouting in Gillespie’s face; the stains on the concrete cell walls; the screams from other unseen cells; the voice in Gillespie’s head as he is being kicked by his captors and is trying desperately to keep his story straight: “What do they know? Start there. What do they know? Think. Think. Think.”

Here, it seems, Bennett is writing out of his own experience. At 18, he was wrongly sentenced to life plus 10 years for shooting a policeman during an IRA bank robbery. After he had spent a year and a half in Belfast’s notorious Maze prison camp, his conviction was overturned on the basis of mistaken identification. A short time later, he spent another year and a half behind bars in England on political charges and again was acquitted.

In its most harrowing moments, “The Catastrophist” is the work of someone who knows what it’s like to be brutally interrogated--and also of someone who understands how a powerful political movement, based on real grievances, can be at once inspiring and blinding. This tension is mirrored, brilliantly and convincingly, in the love affair at the novel’s center.

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Near the end of “The Catastrophist” is a Leopoldville crowd scene in 1961: Lumumba has been killed, and his angry supporters take to the streets. Gillespie is knocked down and almost crushed by the crowd. In an agile, subtle twist that resolves the story’s one remaining question of allegiances, he is rescued by an African he knows and is swept along by the human torrent. Ironically, the familiar slogan the crowd shouts is “Depanda!” (Independance!), although independence has now come--and yet has not really come after all.

“And for a moment--a split second only as the sound breaks over me--I think I glimpse the dreams Ines can see.” This skeptic’s brief tribute to idealism is as far as Bennett will allow his world-weary Gillespie to come. Perhaps the tentativeness is fitting for a point in history whose what-if question we will never know the answer to.

Lumumba’s moment in the sun was painfully brief. However brilliantly he articulated his dream for Africa, we cannot know how he would have carried it out. Lumumba came from nowhere: A few years before becoming prime minister, he was a postal clerk and brewery worker. He was murdered at 35. Would he have eventually become a left-wing tyrant like Sekou Toure in Guinea? A pro-American tyrant like Mobutu? Or someone who kept his integrity, did not turn autocrat and in spite of American influence and human frailty, successfully carved out a democratic, more just path for his country?

In “The Catastrophist,” the roles of skeptic and believer are divided between the two major characters, Gillespie and Ines. In this violent century, filled both with massive injustice and with failed utopias that have spawned more injustice of their own, both roles are at war in the soul of anyone who takes politics seriously. Too few novelists today do. And few of these have a voice as clear and as thoughtful as Bennett’s. I hope we will hear much more of it.