Colin Kinniburgh: A Season in the Congo, which chronicles the rise and untimely fall of Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba, is the third of four plays written by Césaire (1913–2008), the anticolonial visionary and figurehead of négritude. Hailing from the French Caribbean island of Martinique, Césaire was an internationalist whose literary project was guided by his close relationship with Léopold Sédar Senghor—a fellow poet and politician who became the first president of independent Senegal in 1960—and other leaders of decolonization. He had never travelled to the Congo when he wrote A Season in 1966, but recognized, in the story of its independence leader Patrice Lumumba, a wider crisis that he invested with the full force of Greek tragedy. Lumumba’s trajectory lends itself well to the form: assassinated by his fellow countrymen after a Belgian- and U.S.-backed coup, only months after becoming his country’s first democratically elected leader, he has become iconic of the crushed promise of a truly emancipatory decolonization. […] Incidentally, last week’s performance also coincided with the State Department’s release, after a twenty-year-long declassification review, of a trove of documents detailing U.S. involvement in the Congo from 1960–68. The newly released documents, according to the State Department’s own press release, chronicle “the pervasive influence of covert U.S. Government policies in the newly independent nation designed to install a pro-Western regime and limit Soviet influence.” First and perhaps foremost, they relate CIA plans to assassinate Lumumba with poison, which came very close to fruition in the late summer of 1960—a CIA scientist was sent to Leopoldville with presidential approval and the appropriate “biological materials”—only to be pre-empted by Mobutu’s coup on September 14. Four months later, Lumumba was executed by Congolese rivals with Belgian officers on hand. (The United States celebrated with shipments of military aid to the new regime.) When Aimé Césaire wrote A Season on the Congo in 1966, Lumumba’s death was still fresh in popular memory and Joseph-Desiré Mobutu was just consolidating his dictatorial grip over the Congo. Almost fifty years later, the play’s depiction of this cataclysmic moment of decolonization, tinged alternately with hope and deep cynicism, feels as relevant as ever… More here.