In a new film, former UN- Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld is portrayed as a defender of a fledgling postcolonial state. But his role in the Congo Crisis is more complicated.
In typical biopic style, the film Hammarskjöld portrays former UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld as Congo’s valiant defender. In reality, he overlooked the assassination of the country’s first democratically elected leader, Patrice Lumumba. The movie presents the narrative of an idealistic top diplomat who fought for African countries’ right to self-determination, a cause for which he ultimately sacrificed his life, as Hammarskjöld died in a plane crash under mysterious circumstances in September 1961. But the truth behind Hammarskjöld’s involvement in the Congo Crisis, as well as the lessons we can learn from it, is more complicated.
The film, a Nordic production directed by the Danish filmmaker Per Fly, depicts Hammarskjöld’s last year as secretary-general of the United Nations. In the film, which premiered in December 2023 in Sweden and is now being shown all over the world, we follow Hammarskjöld mediating in the Congo Crisis, both in New York and on the ground in Africa.
The film is visually beautiful, well-acted, and has a relevant and likable agenda. At the center is not just the stoic figure of the Swede Hammarskjöld but perhaps the most decisive transformative process in recent history: decolonization, the moment in time when the world stopped being ruled by a few European empires. From the formation of the United Nations in 1945 until today, the number of states in the world has quadrupled, and an increasingly strong Global South demands its rightful place at the table.
On the positive side, Fly’s film challenges the narrow perspective of Danish political feature films, which tend to focus on the German occupation of 1940–1945. Also, it is welcome to have the point of view of a Scandinavian film, instead of leaving the dissemination of all great contemporary stories to Hollywood.
Nevertheless, there is something jarring about the film’s basic narrative of Hammarskjöld knowingly going to his death to save the world (as research indicates, Hammarskjöld’s plane was probably shot down during his attempt to mediate the Congo crisis). Not only because it is a reproduction of a well-worn and problematic trope of the white savior but because Hammarskjöld’s efforts were probably as much a part of the problem as they were a part of the solution. If the film had real revelatory ambition, it would have illuminated the problematic diplomatic role he and his office played when Congo’s future was decided.
Our historical consciousness is the result of many factors, but feature films and television series tend to have a strong influence on our collective memory. The stories we project onto the white screen and onto our many small screens matter. This includes how we remember this important era in which African states gained their independence and who fought and died to achieve this.
Hammarskjöld served as United Nations secretary-general from 1953 to 1961, a period when decolonization gained momentum. He supported the process and tried to make the UN the focal point of it, including strengthening the UN’s capacity to use force in the name of peace.
However, the great powers were not prepared to give up their internationally privileged position or their access to resources in the Global South. Therefore, for a long time, the old European colonial powers bloodily fought the efforts at secession. And although the new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, rhetorically supported decolonization, their international actions were often linked to the building of their own, more informal empires. At the same time, they were caught in a mutual Cold War for world domination.
The Congo Crisis unfolded in this context. Congo was not only Africa’s second-largest country but also the continent’s richest in natural resources, including uranium for the production of the weapon that guaranteed the special status of the superpowers—their extensive nuclear arsenal.
Since 1885, Congo had been first King Leopold’s personal colony, then Belgium’s. But in 1960 the country became independent, one of the first among the Sub-Saharan countries. Patrice Lumumba became Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister. But the young and charismatic leader had hardly taken office before internal tensions escalated, largely conditioned by international conflicts.
Lumumba was assassinated, and although all is not clear, research confirms that Hammarskjöld certainly played no glorious role in this sad chapter of Congo’s history. The event and its consequences gave the newly independent state a destabilizing foundation from which the country has never recovered. Lumumba was a nationalist with Pan-African leanings, not a communist; despite this, the United States one-sidedly considered him, in the light of the binary logic of the Cold War, as a threat to Western influence in the region. The fear was that Lumumba would become a Soviet tool, and Congo an outpost of Soviet influence in Africa.
From historical records in Washington and London, we know that Hammarskjöld and his staff in New York discreetly informed the Americans that they fully agreed with that assessment. In front of the British UN representative, Hammarskjöld even called Lumumba “a communist puppet.” Instead of securing the democratically elected Lumumba, who was formally under the protection of UN forces, Lumumba was effectively left to his fate.
In a meeting, US President Eisenhower infamously commented to British Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home that he hoped Lumumba would fall “into a river full of crocodiles.” The responsibility for Lumumba’s assassination fell to the Central Intelligence Agency. The measures included, among other things, hiring a European assassin and the dispatch of poison ampoules to Congo.
However, Congolese army chief Joseph Mobutu soon led a military coup and then arranged for Lumumba to be captured and handed over to forces in the resource-rich province of Katanga, whose rebellion against the central government was supported by the former colonial power Belgium. Ghanaian UN troops in the Congo requested authorization from UN headquarters in New York for the right to intervene and evacuate Lumumba, but the UN maintained its formal neutrality. Assisted by Belgian police forces, Lumumba was tortured and shot to death, and his body was dissolved in acid.
Over the next five years, the CIA rewarded Mobutu with what today is equivalent to $100 million, in addition to the even larger sums he received as dictator until 1997. At the same time, Congo became the country in the region that received the largest amount of American economic support.
Hammarskjöld belonged to a branch of Christianity that, in a Swedish context, was modern, supporting national democratization and the building of the welfare state. Internationally, these ecumenically minded Christians were critical of colonialism in the interwar period, but this was mainly due to the extensive secularization of Europe, which they did not want to be exported globally.
Furthermore, Hammarskjöld was a diplomat. In international grand politics, the choice is rarely between good and evil, but different variations of the latter. In other words, Hammarskjöld’s choices were not unlimited, but they established a precedent.
Had Fly’s film captured such nuances, it could rightly applaud Hammarskjöld for his courageous defense of Congo’s territorial sovereignty and support for decolonization, while at the same time maintaining his problematic role in the assassination of Congo’s first democratically elected leader and its legacy.
Perhaps it is time to focus on completely different figures and nuances in the collective storytelling if we are to promote greater global diversity, equality, and freedom. Maybe it could even be a black personality, a Lumumba, that we might let ourselves be inspired by on the screen next time.
This article has been adapted and translated from the Danish weekly Weekendavisen.
