Every time you decide that systems have to change, you are proud and insolent; you are out of your place. This is not where you are supposed to be. The order of the world ordains that Africans take a certain position. This is how the world is supposed to be. And the day that you rise up and begin to define it differently, you will end up in the Lumumba situation.
His problem is that he deviated to find a different order at the wrong time. He was way ahead of his time because the architecture of the world had not afforded him the possibility of really making that successful. The problem is that we are now in a world in which the architecture provides opportunities to make it successful today and if you decide to change it, you will end the vices.
I was in Congo sometime ago. I saw a documentary on television. They interviewed an old white guy who lives in Belgium and he had five of Lumumba’s teeth in a bottle in his house. He was a policeman who actually was in charge of arresting him. They beat him, put him in a truck and drove him around the city. Then they put his body inside a barrel of sulphuric acid.
Before he died, the guy took a pair of pliers and ripped all five of his teeth. He put those teeth in a bottle and he has that bottle with his teeth on his mantelpiece in Brussels today. He is being interviewed in this documentary and he is showing the bottle with Lumumba’s teeth. That’s what happens. That was done as a sign to “Don’t rise up. Don’t try to be free. Don’t break the system. This is who you are supposed to be.
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