KUKA MULANDINGA

In the stands of African football, where noise and motion usually rule, Kuka Muladinga chose stillness. Wrapped in the colors of the Democratic Republic of Congo, his body painted, his face solemn, Muladinga became known as the human statue: a supporter who does not chant or dance, but stands immobile for ninety minutes, transforming devotion into ritual. For him, football is not only sport. It is memory, politics, mourning—and tribute.

Among the names written on his body and banners, one returns again and again: Lumumba.

Muladinga’s silence is deliberate. It is the silence of a country whose history was interrupted, a pause imposed by violence and betrayal. When he stands in the stadium, he is not just supporting the Leopards, the Congolese national team; he is evoking a figure whose fate still defines the nation’s unresolved past. That figure is Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of an independent Congo—and one of the most powerful ghosts of postcolonial Africa.

Lumumba’s story is often told quickly, but it deserves slowness. Born in 1925 in what was then the Belgian Congo, he rose from modest origins to become a self-taught intellectual, a trade unionist, and a gifted orator. What distinguished him was not ideology alone, but tone: uncompromising, dignified, and intolerant of humiliation. At independence ceremonies on 30 June 1960, in front of the Belgian king, Lumumba delivered a speech that shattered protocol. He spoke of forced labor, beatings, stolen land—truths usually buried under polite colonial farewells. It was a declaration not only of sovereignty, but of memory.

That speech made him a hero to many Congolese—and an enemy to powerful interests almost immediately.

The new state was fragile from its first day. Colonial structures had left Congo vast, rich, and administratively hollow. Within weeks, the army mutinied, provinces attempted secession, and foreign powers began maneuvering. Lumumba, barely in office, faced an impossible equation: to hold the country together without surrendering its autonomy. In the context of the Cold War, neutrality was interpreted as threat. His appeal to the United Nations for help, followed by overtures to the Soviet Union when help failed to materialize, sealed his fate in Western eyes.

In September 1960, Lumumba was dismissed, arrested, and placed under house arrest. In January 1961, he was transferred to Katanga—then controlled by secessionists—and executed. He was 35 years old. His body was dismembered and dissolved, an attempt not only to kill the man but to erase the symbol. For decades, the full extent of foreign complicity remained obscured behind diplomatic language and classified files. What remained clear, however, was the result: a nation deprived of its chosen leader at the moment it needed him most.

The Congo that followed—later renamed Democratic Republic of the Congo—entered a long tunnel of coups, dictatorship, and plunder. Mobutu’s kleptocracy, foreign interventions, proxy wars: all unfolded in the vacuum left by Lumumba’s absence. To many Congolese, history feels like a book torn at its binding in 1961, its chapters rearranged by force.

This is why Kuka Muladinga stands still.

In the stadium, where modern Congolese identity often finds one of its few shared stages, Muladinga’s body becomes an archive. Painted slogans and portraits replace textbooks rarely taught. His tribute to Lumumba is not nostalgic; it is accusatory. It asks why independence came without sovereignty, why wealth produced poverty, why heroes were eliminated while opportunists survived. Football, the most visible national ritual, becomes the only place where such questions can be asked without microphones.

Muladinga’s immobility contrasts with the frenzy around him. It is an interruption, much like Lumumba himself was an interruption—too fast, too direct, too honest for the machinery that surrounded him. In that sense, the human statue is not commemorating the past. He is holding space for a future that never arrived.

Lumumba’s image still circulates across Africa and beyond as a symbol of betrayed emancipation. Yet in Congo, he remains unfinished business. Statues rise, apologies are issued decades late, archives open slowly. None of this restores what was lost. But remembrance persists in unexpected forms: a silent man in a football stadium, refusing to move until the match—and the memory—is over.

Sometimes history does not speak. It stands.

Photos: Shot with a Leica Q2 in Africa, at an undisclosed location. August 2019.