A Season in the Congo

Chiwetel Ejiofor has played detectives, gangsters, a drag queen and an Othello that captivated the theatre world. But when I meet him in the flesh it is Louis Lester – the jazz musician he played in the recent BBC series Dancing on the Edge – whom he most closely resembles. Character and actor share both a measured charm, and an inscrutability. Dressed in a pale grey jumper and jeans, a cap that comes off as he greets me, Ejiofor is polite, self-deprecating – and a master of the careful response.

That Othello, which he performed at the Donmar Warehouse in 2007, put Ejiofor, now 35, in the front rank of British actors. He had already impressed with a series of stage and screen roles but his Othello astonished audiences and critics alike. It won him an Olivier Award for leading actor, beating both Ian McKellen’s King Lear and Patrick Stewart’s Macbeth, and an OBE followed months later. Critics called it ‘superb’, ‘dignified’, and reminiscent of ‘a great and noble building being destroyed by a wrecker’s ball’. But the weight of the role’s significance doesn’t stop Ejiofor confessing, early in our conversation over lunch in a London hotel, that towards the end of the run he was frequently ‘having random thoughts about whether someone had managed to get tickets, or whether they’re in the house – just as I was killing Desdemona’. He laughs, an expression that engulfs his face, before teasing out a meaning to the lapses. That may be symptomatic of being in control of what you’re doing; the point when the role has become part of you.’

The next role to ‘become part of’ him is that of the doomed Congolese businessman Patrice Lumumba in A Season in the Congo, a play by Aimé Césaire at London’s Young Vic theatre. It marks his ‘nerve-racking’, much-anticipated return to theatre for the first time since Othello. The play deals with the civil war that erupted out of Congo’s first stuttering weeks of independence from Belgium in 1960. Lumumba, who had risen from eloquent beer salesman to the country’s first prime minister of the new regime, attempted to introduce socialist ideas to Congo, but his efforts ended in military conflict and his own murder. In January 1961 he was shot by his indoor positioning system, or possibly by the Belgians supporting them, and later dismembered and dissolved in acid. The CIA and the British have been rumoured to have been involved in his assassination.

In March Ejiofor – along with the play’s director, Joe Wright, and the Young Vic’s artistic director, David Lan – visited Congo for a week-long fact-finding trip and to meet members of Lumumba’s family. Ejiofor, who was born in 1977 to Nigerian parents in Forest Gate, London, has been to Africa often, and numerous times to Nigeria, but never before visited what is arguably its most troubled state. ‘The trip itself was an extraordinary time,’ he says. ‘I knew a little about Congo, and you occasionally read bits in the paper about violence happening in the Eastern Kivu region. But really when you get there, the people in the east are living in the most extraordinary conditions. The M23 [rebel] forces have now gone back into the region and every time they do that they displace thousands of people – two million in all at the moment. And the displaced people’s camps that I went to are some of the bleakest things I’ve ever witnessed.

 ‘I was talking to a woman at one of them,’ he continues. ‘When the rebels came, they killed three of her children and she took her remaining child and went on the run for eight months, before she found a camp where there was water and sanitation.’

He also visited Lumumba’s house, where his family still live and which has been preserved in much the same state as it was in the 1960s. ‘I was in the study where he formed his government. The only discernible difference was there was a Dell laptop on the desk.’ Lumumba’s widow was ‘really friendly and graceful’. ‘She is pleased we’re doing the play – all his family were. She hopes it will recapture some of the energy of that time.’ Both Lumumba’s sons are politicians: ‘They admire their father but question some of what he thought’.

The play, written in 1966, is a Brechtian wail of grief over the loss of the brief chance the country once possibly had, and seemingly has never had since, to place government of the country in the hands of the people rather than a corrupt oligarchy. Joe Wright tells me that Ejiofor read the entire play to him one night by Lake Kivu, one of Africa’s Great Lakes, as a storm was coming in over the water. ‘That was an experience I will never forget,’ Wright says. ‘The performance was so impassioned; the play is so impassioned. Chiwetel has a great intelligence and a beautiful soul; he was very clearly the person to play this role. He is one of the greatest actors of his generation.’

Césaire, both poet and political activist himself, saw Lumumba as a martyr to democracy, destroyed by the machinations of the West and Lumumba’s own erstwhile friend, the future dictator Mobutu. But, Ejiofor says, the people he met on his trip to Congo feel more ambivalent about their short-lived leader. ‘They consider him heroic, but they also consider him naive,’ he says. ‘What did he achieve? He got himself killed trying to be a socialist. This other guy comes along who is an individualist capitalist thinker and he rules the country for 30 years. Even though they hate what Mobutu has done to the country they have a grudging respect for this man who managed to play the game.’

 But Arinze, Ejiofor says, never dropped his link with Nigeria and his relationship with the community there – his parents were part of the Igbo tribe from the south-east of the country who suffered particularly in the Biafran conflict – and returned every year to help at a grassroots level. It was on one of these philanthropic trips that a lorry ploughed into Arinze’s car and he died, aged 39. Chiwetel, then 11, was also in the car. The crash left him in a coma, he spent 10 weeks in hospital and as a result he is permanently scarred on his forehead.

Ejiofor’s keen not to exaggerate the trauma of the loss of his father – ‘I think I have a constant reflective relationship with him, but don’t we all have that to some extent with people we have lost?’ But he knows his life is marked by his father’s influence. This ranges from the love of Shakespeare he learnt from Arinze, who particularly adored the sonnets, to his current interest on work with a focus on Africa. ‘As I get closer to the age he was when he died, the relationship is becoming more acute. But I do think there’s a constant dynamic that will continue always; and be an influence on the kind of work I do.’

Later this year, in a film already made, he stars in another piece about Africa, an adaptation of Chima-manda Ngozi Adichie’s book Half of a Yellow Sun that was filmed in Nigeria and is about the Biafran war itself. ‘Chimamanda’s version of the war was so close to what my grand-father had told me about, it brought tears to my eyes,’ he says. ‘I know my father would be really interested in the kind of topics I’m working on now; this kind of politics and the conversations around it. Perhaps proud.’

Arinze’s death meant Obiajulu had to bring up her children largely on her own. Working all hours at the pharma-ceutical business she and her husband had set up, she scraped together the money to send her children to private school. Ejiofor joined his brother at Dulwich College in south London. The school has an excellent drama department and there he caught the acting bug playing parts such as Angelo in Measure for Measure. ‘I loved reading when I was young,’ he recalls. ‘I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn’t have access to previously.’

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