Prologue

17th January 1961

Dominic Shaughnessy was brought into the world, middle son of a trawler mechanic and a Methodist housewife, in Hull General Hospital. While Dom and his mother were enduring the trauma of birth, and his father drank and smoked in the pub across the road, somewhere many thousands of miles to the south, a man who’d tried to bring peace and freedom to his country was being tortured, mutilated and murdered, his body later dissolved in a bath of acid. Whilst the long labour drew on, many thousands of miles to the west, the man who had said that the victim should be eliminated, was giving his farewell speech as departing president to the American people.

There are images. And words. Many words. With power.

Three speeches to resonate, three speeches to call out.

Patrice Lumumba on Independence Day for his country. Tears, Fire and Blood. Refusing to listen to the young Belgian King praising the horrors of Leopold’s private fiefdom. There in that dank world of dignitaries, paternalism and plush curtains he speaks of the atrocities that have occurred and calls on the people of the Congo to make a just and free land, calls for the transformation and liberation of Africa.

It was a speech that humiliated the Belgian King Badouin by confronting him with undiplomatic honesty and terrified the American powers that be, afraid that integrity in a leader would somehow drive him into the arms of the Soviet Union. Caught in a political struggle and a grasping for the Congo’s mineral wealth, Lumumba, the former beer seller, was already condemned.

On the day Lumumba was finally murdered, flickering images of the old man speaking. And the tone of the voice. He sounds like the wise scientist character from a Fifties Sci-Fi film. He’s warning us, not of giant radioactive mutant ants or the unavoidable approach of another planet on a collision course with our own, but warning of the dangers of the Military Industrial Complex. He warns us of the ever-spreading power of the permanent war machine, warns against its acquisition of unwarranted influence. Urges the citizenry to educate themselves and remain alert.
Eisenhower addressed the American people through the still relatively new medium of television; a 19th Century man never knowing the way future presidents would be broken into 10 second chunks by the medium he used. A complex man, a soldier who bossed the CIA and a Republican who ordered paratroopers to Little Rock. The first man to accept the constitutional resignation of the American Presidency, you watch the fearful footage of the speech and wonder if he knew, even as he spoke, what was happening in the Congo?

Dom was born in the early hours of the next morning as the future shape of the world was being sealed.

Two days later. Another speech. Another old image of a man, this time stood on a lectern surrounded by men in hats, lecturing in that strange mix of oratory and hectoring. Speaking of the heirs of revolution, the revolution of hope. Telling the people in the huts and villages around the world that America would not let one colonialism be replaced by another. But speaking always through the cracked prism of the Cold War, of a conflict beneath the surface in which he believed intently, which he saw as imminent. Not tempered by war but traumatised it seems.

The new young president elected on a wafer-thin majority told his nation that they should not ask what their country can do for them, but what they can do for their country. Told the world to demand America be held accountable to the high standards they demanded of the rest of the world. He would initiate the path into Viet Nam that led thousands of Americans and millions of Asians to make the ultimate sacrifice for his country and its military-industrial complex. And Kennedy, of course, would survive as leader barely longer than had Lumumba.

So events occur, unremarked by the vast number of the planet’s peoples. Years down the road, chains of consequence can be teased out by those who take the interest, who have the audacity to consider they might have the right to make decisions for themselves. But most see simply the whirling vortex of chaos and the capricious hands of distant powermongers impacting their lives and can only whisper “So was it ever”.

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