A Season in the Congo
This play by renowned poet and political activist Aime Césaire recounts the tragic death of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Republic of the Congo and an African nationalist hero. A Season in the Congo follows Lumumba’s efforts to free the Congolese from Belgian rule and the political struggles that led to his assassination in 1961. Césaire powerfully depicts Lumumba as a sympathetic, Christ-like figure whose conscious martyrdom reflects his self-sacrificing humanity and commitment to pan-Africanism.
Born in Martinique and educated in Paris, Césaire was a revolutionary artist and lifelong political activist, who founded the Martinique Independent Revolution Party. His ardent personal opposition to Western imperialism and racism fuels both his profound sympathy for Lumumba and the emotional strength of A Season in the Congo.
Read the Guardian review of the staging of A Season in the Congo at the Young Vic, London, with Chiwetel Ejiofor as Patrice Lumumba.
Aimé Césaire was born on 25 June 1913, in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, a French colony in the Caribbean. Césaire won a scholarship to travel to Paris in the early 1930s and studied literature and philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure. Césaire is a recipient of the International Nâzim Hikmet Poetry Award, the second winner in its history. His volumes of poetry include Putting in Fetters, Lost Bodies, Decapitated Sun and Miraculous Arms. His plays include The Tempest and The Tragedy of King Christophe, and he is also the author of Discourse on Colonialism, a classic text of French political literature, and helped establish the literary and ideological movement negritude, a term Césaire defined as ‘the simple recognition of the fact that one is black, the acceptance of this fact and of our destiny as blacks, of our history and culture’.
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