Haïti and Zaïre share more than an umlaut. They share a common language and a long history of suffering under sovereignty. Specifically, they share Raoul Peck, a Haïtian director of the Belgian film Lumumba (2000), featuring the 2 month reign of Patrice Lumumba, before he was "disappeared" by the CIA. It was filmed in Zimbabwe and Beira, Mozambique. Lumumba's comrade-in-arms, Mobutu, would take over and rechristen the DRC as Zaïre.
Apparently, the Belgian Congo and subsequent Democratic Republic of the Congo felt it would be a wise decision to recruit French-speaking professionals from Haïti, since the Belgians had done little to create leadership from within the Congo native population. Born in Port-au-Prince in 1953, Raoul joined his father in Léopoldville at 8 years of age, shortly after independence in June, 1960. Peck attended schools in the DRC (Léopoldville), in the United States (Brooklyn), and in France (Orléans), where he earned a baccalaureate, before studying industrial engineering and economics at Berlin's Humboldt University. He spent a year as a New York City taxi driver and worked (1980–85) as a journalist and photographer before attending and receiving a film degree (1988) from the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB) in West Berlin.
Watching the film, I could not get over parallels between Lumumba and Aristide, both popularly elected and at odds with the U.S.
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