I can trace it back to the research for the previous film, Shadow World, where we dissected the global arms industry, together with Andrew Feinstein, who published a book, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade. We interviewed several characters for the film, including Chris Hedges, former war correspondent for The New York Times, who lost his job because he was speaking out against the invasion of Iraq under Bush. He talked about a template within politics, “the corporatocracy,” that basically we are undergoing a corporate coup d’etat in slow motion. War has been privatized, and it’s the lobby industry’s revolving door that dictates foreign policy.

After finishing this film, I wanted to dig into the backyard of my own country, Belgium, and a black page out of the history of my country is in relation to the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was a Belgian colony and in the beginning was the private property of the king. I began digging into that story and stumbled onto the fact that the assassination of Patrice Lumumba was very much traceable to that corporatocracy, where the Belgian mining industry in cahoots with the CIA in 1960 was responsible for the overthrow of his democratically elected government and his subsequent assassination.

Then there was also the figure of Nikita Khrushchev, who figured in a previous film Double Take, where he functions as a Hitchcock doppelgänger. As a kid of the ’60s, a TV-generation kid, you know, I was born in Belgium, jammed between East and West. At the time, the ideological divide between communism and capitalism divided the world. The figure of Nikita Khrushchev figured prominently in that previous film, and I had always known about the slamming of the shoe at the United Nations, but what I did not realize is that it had to do with the history of my country, with the Belgian Congo, and that Nikita Khrushchev was, in essence, calling for the resignation of the then secretary-general of the UN, Dag Hammarskjöld, for his dealing with the Congo crisis. And Hammarskjöld was banding together with the king, with the monarchy, and the Union Minière mining industry to overthrow Patrice Lumumba.

Well, with documentary most of the historical actors or the things that we feature in the film or the archive, the writing happens in the editing. As you go along, you construct a film with the archives and try to combine and layer several elements. This took four or five years of research, and the editing was four years. But then there are things that you stumble upon that you didn’t even know existed.  For example, there was William Burden, the president of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), the CEO of Lockheed, advisor to the Pentagon, and he had stakes in the mining industry in eastern Congo. Then he was appointed the US ambassador to Brussels just prior to Congo becoming independent, and on top of that, he was a secret CIA agent and befriended Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA. In his audio memoirs, which we sourced from the Department of Diplomatic Studies at Columbia University, he literally says, “Belgium is toying with the idea of assassinating Lumumba, and I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea either.” This is coming from a US ambassador, even president of the MOMA for that matter. And he says “Patrice Lumumba was such a damn nuisance, it was pretty obvious to go for a political assassination.” I fell from my chair when I heard his words. This is firsthand audio, documentation that was never meant to be released, but it was part of study material for the Diplomatic Studies Department, where being a secret agent is apparently a part of that.

We had to redirect the film and place this material fairly prominently in the middle of the film when the whole shift changes. The film leads up from the nonaligned countries, to the pre-1960s, then to the 15th UN General Assembly, where 16 African countries become independent. A whole wind of independence is blowing over the continent, and the African and Afro-Asian bloc gains the majority vote in the UN and against the backdrop of that, you have the West and Belgium deciding to deal with this wind of freedom by a neocolonial grab—in essence, trying to keep a hold of the reaches of the continent of Africa.

But the archive consists of much more. I often allude to Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, who wrote a history of the Congo and says, “If we want to rewrite a history of our country, maybe we should call for decolonization of the archives as well.” To source the history of the Congo, you have to go to Brussels, for the images you have to go to the African Museum or even Belgian television. Then another big component is the home movies that we were able to source from Sergei Krushchev, who filmed his father, Nikita Khrushchev, and the home movies of In Koli Jean Bofane, who was reading from his book Congo Inc. When we were trying to get the story of Andrée Blouin, her memoirs were hard to find. We got in touch with her daughter Eve Blouin, who generously agreed that we could use the memoirs. She sent us an undeveloped roll of film, and when we developed it, we saw Andrée with Eve Blouin herself as a two-year-old kid in Leopoldville while Andrée was working for Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the independent Congo. It’s the very moment where, about a couple of weeks later, Andrée was exiled and Eve Blouin was held at ransom in Leopoldville. Here you feel the heartbeat of history with those home movies; you have firsthand images of characters involved with that history. Those intimate images are in contradiction and juxtaposition with the bigger global political events that were happening at that time.

It’s very schizophrenic, because they were used as tools to propagate and defend democracy while at home they were not allowed to vote, they were second-rate citizens. As Dizzy says, “I didn’t go over there to sugarcoat segregation back home.” Louis Armstrong in 1956 was sent out, and it is Edward Murrow who films him, and later on becomes the director of the United States Information Agency, which was sponsored by the US State Department and using soft power as a way to defend democracy. On another level you could talk about Hollywood in a similar way, how it seduced the rest of the world. Heiner Müller at one point in East Berlin said, “The most powerful message we got from the West was actually the commercials.” It was not strong power; it was soft power. It was the seduction element.

In 1956, when Edward Murrow accompanies Louis Armstrong to Ghana, it is amazing, because while he’s a second-rate citizen back home, he’s celebrated by an audience of 100,000 Ghanaians in Accra. And wherever he went, even if he was being used as a tool, he was also outspoken. At one point during the Africa tour, he refused to play for an apartheid audience in South Africa. To contextualize it a bit, there was this huge shift in the United Nations with the influx of all the independent countries, the Afro-Asian bloc. Nikita Krushchev was proposing a decolonization vote, while the United States was sending arm twisters into the UNGA to buy up African votes and also sending jazz ambassadors to win the hearts and minds of people in Africa. Louis Armstrong was one of them.

But these jazz ambassadors were not always in the know. Louis Armstrong was sent to Katanga, which was seceding from the Congo with the financial aid of Union Minière that paid billions to prop up Moïse Tshombe’s government. It was not ratified internationally, so it was illegal to even send US ambassadors, but it was the Katanga lobby and the CEO of Union Minière who pushed for Louis Armstrong to be sent to Katanga. And when he arrived, he was lodged at Moïse Tshombe’s presidential villa and was having dinner with Larry Devlin, the head of the CIA, and also Ambassador Timberlake, who was the US ambassador to the Congo, and Belgian advisors, amongst them Harold Charles Lyndon, who was the minister of African affairs. And here is Louis Armstrong facing Larry Devlin, but not knowing that he’s the head of the CIA in the Congo, because he was undercover as an agricultural advisor. Seated around that dinner table, in November 1960, Armstrong grilled Moïse Tshombe and said, “Hey, you’re in bed with big money.” We found an audio interview with Trummy Young, who was a trombonist for the All Stars that accompanied Louis Armstrong to Katanga, and he said, “We felt all of this was not quite right.” So they were in the know, but they were not in the know about just how insidious it was that Armstrong was actually having dinner with the very person plotting the murder of Patrice Lumumba, together with the Belgians.

The film dissects the jazz ambassadors and how they were used as a propaganda tool, but there is also the role of Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach and their album We Insist!  that was broadcast on Belgian television. It is Abbey Lincoln, together with the Women’s Writers Coalition in Harlem, writer Maya Angelou, and the playwright Rosa Guy who called for a protest at the United Nations Security Council when Adlai Stevenson, the US ambassador [to the UN] under Kennedy, announces that Patrice Lumumba was murdered with two of his colleagues. They literally crash the Security Council, stand up, and scream. So there is also another element to the music and jazz, how jazz was inspired by that freedom movement to become part of the Civil Rights Movement. All of that is not separate. For example, one track from the We Insist!, “Tears for Johannesburg,” was inspired by African women tearing up their apartheid passport in South Africa, which became a protest that was smashed down in Sharpeville, where women were killed.

So there’s a back and forth between how the liberation and independence movements on the continent were inspiring the Civil Rights Movement, but also inspiring jazz. So it’s not just that music is being used as an instrument, but also music becomes a tool of rebellion to speak out. Even if it’s a scream at the very end of the film, it’s a scream of resilience, of not agreeing with the state of the world.

With rumba it was similar. There is also a back and forth between what was going on with fourth, fifth, sixth generations of Congolese, who during the transatlantic passage made it to Cuba, and the music in Cuba, inspired by Congolese heritage—conga, rumba, chacha—made it back to Leopoldville. There was a trade where musicians were working on the ships and were going back and forth between Havana and Leopoldville, and that inspired rumba in the Congo.

And the rumba was also very much inspiring how they lived and what was going on, sometimes in subdued terms. You know, the first rumba track featured in the film, “Sooner or Later, the World Will Change” by Adou Elenga, was very much a protest song banned by the Belgian colonialists, and Adou Elenga was put in prison. So there’s a connection between the politics and how one stands in the world. If you’re a suppressed, colonized country, you cannot not but give expression to your emotions. During the independence movement, when Patrice Lumumba was not yet prime minister, he hired Rock-a-Mambo as a way to raise consciousness and talk about independence, going from bar to bar in the Cité. which was the native neighborhood of Leopoldville. In 1960, when the round table was organized in Brussels to talk about independence, the Belgians were thinking, We’re going to give independence in a couple of decades. But unanimously, all the political Congolese parties were arguing that independence should be given much more rapidly. There was a call to release Patrice Lumumba, and when he arrived around the 25th of January 1960, he was accompanied by Joseph Kabasele, Docteur Nico, and African Jazz, and when towards the end of the month of January they claimed independence, it was celebrated by those musicians, and it’s in the Plaza Hotel, where they were lodged, that they composed “Independence Cha Cha,” and that anthem mentions all the political parties, in a way reflecting a unanimous solidarity. “Independence Cha Cha” became very popular all across the continent of Africa as an independence call for all the other countries. It became the name for the Liberation Party in Rhodesia that subsequently became Zimbabwe. It became a political anthem for the call for independence.

It’s a crucial question. At the very end of the film, we have a statement about his murder. We have a series of names: Kwame Nkrumah overthrown in 1966, Malcolm X shot in Harlem 1965, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, overthrown in 1964 and written out of Soviet history, and then we had Dag Hammarskjöld killed in mid-September 1961. We didn’t dig into why precisely, but I thought it was important that all these people were subsequently victims of that neocolonial grab towards the Global South. Of course, the only one who survived was Andrée Blouin, who, after two more death threats, was exiled from the Congo by way of Switzerland.

But to come back to the story of Dag Hammarskjöld. I had hoped in the film to sketch more of an ambivalent character arc. He’s a person who is suffering, and you can read it in his face. I really think he had his back against the wall and was navigating all these forces. In the General Assembly, the Global South community was pushing for a United Nations force against the colonial powers. That’s also interesting. Dag Hammarskjöld was siding with the Global South. You know, the UN Congo Mission was the biggest mission ever, and if that would fail—because in the film they all ask this question, “What if the Congo Mission fails?”—and it did actually, because Lumumba was killed. But he had his back against the wall. And the United Kingdom and the United States were both threatening to withdraw their funding.

An important source for the film was Ludo De Witte’s book The Assassination of Patrice Lumumba, published in 1999. He was able to gather a lot of evidence in United Nations cables and cables within Belgium that pointed to the fact that, indeed, Dag Hammarskjold was complicit and involved in the downfall of Lumumba, as was the Belgian monarchy. In Belgium it was really shocking, because the book was published 1999 and there was a parliamentary commission in 2004, which had a half-baked conclusion saying, yes, the monarchy knew about the murder. That is why the film ends with that statement on its own, the singular statement that actually the Belgian government was complicit in murder, because that’s still not been concluded in Belgium. They are still arguing, “Should we say, ‘We have regret’? Or should we say, ‘I am sorry’?” That is about reparation as well, because if you say sorry, you actually admit that there was a crime and that there should be consequences.

While researching that period I saw a whole sense of solidarity. At the beginning, all the political parties in the Congo were unanimously agreeing. But three months later, there was an economic roundtable where Mobutu was being called in by Larry Devlin, and he was already being groomed to become a CIA asset. This was pre-independence, so the machinations were already there. If you look into that period in history, there is unanimity and solidarity. Sukarno invites all the leaders to the 1955 Bandung Conference. The Arab countries are there, the Latin American countries are there, the African countries are there. It was the biggest gathering of countries where they were trying to come up with an alternative to the ideological divide between East and West, and they called for decolonization.

It’s very much similar leaders that make it to the 15th General Assembly, when Nikita Khrushchev in September 1960—and this is a precedent as well—was calling for all the world leaders to join him to talk about demilitarization and decolonization. When Khrushchev arrives in 1959, he is the very first Soviet leader after the Communist Revolution of 1917 who visits the United States and talks about demilitarization, and then 10 days after visiting the United States, he goes to celebrate the anniversary of the revolution in Maoist China. He refuses Mao to have the nuclear bomb and recalls all the nuclear scientists from China. In essence, you know, the United States had an unlikely ally in Nikita Khrushchev. There’s a lot to the history of Nikita Khrushchev, which is not to say he’s a saint. There is a reference to Hungary when he arrives at the United Nations, when they’re calling him a fat red rat. But he did set a precedent in inviting all these nonaligned leaders to the 15th General Assembly, including Fidel Castro, who gave his first marathon speech, which is still the longest speech in human history. There was Jawaharlal Nehru, Kwame Nkrumah, Sékou Touré, Abdel Nasser. The big absentee is Patrice Lumumba, but there is a unanimity amongst these leaders in the General Assembly, where they are siding with Patrice Lumumba, including Castro. The Congo crisis is the big discussion in that 15th General Assembly. There was a sense of hope with the influx of African countries, the Global South becoming the majority at the United Nations. But all of that was threatening for the West. So there was that sense of hope and there was also a shift happening, and Belgium was crucial in using Patrice Lumumba’s murder and assassination as ground zero for how the West would deal with this sense of hope and solidarity.

But I don’t want to be pessimistic. Today there are still things moving. I just came back from Havana and the Patria colloquium with 500 journalists from Latin America. There are also huge shifts happening in Africa with Niger and Mali, when they threw out the French and the Americans, and there is a sense of trying to establish sovereign countries from a Global South perspective, where they want to take decision making into their own hands.

Well, “this is not a pipe, this is not a coup” is so Belgian. Belgium is full of schizophrenia. We have two languages, but we don’t have a national language, and this whole thing of being a subtitled country, for instance, you go to the supermarket, you buy a bottle of milk, it’s always subtitled in two languages, and you feel that sense of displacement. It’s so much part of how irony or jokes can contain contradictions, and “this is not a pipe” is a typical belgicism, where you suddenly get a subtitled version of something, but it causes alienation. “This is not a coup” you can read between the lines. You have Allen Dulles constantly saying something, but for the most part, he’s denying something, but by denying—“This is not what it is”—he is saying what it is. It’s this irony of denial that exposes what’s really going on. The very last time he’s in the film, he says, “We might have made a mistake. We were actually exaggerating the communist threat.” He finally says something that is more accurate. But this way of holding contradictions is, for me, interesting, and maybe politics is also a part of that. When they say “weapons of mass destruction” in more contemporary times—it’s in denial that things are revealed, in these contradictions. Truth is maybe closer to contradictions.

This is the poetic third space, the cinematic space, that is opened up. And if you research a body of archive, sometimes things offer themselves. This elephant came back again and again. In Sékou Touré’s Guinea, the elephant was a national symbol. The elephant in the water is this underwaterness of certain things that are about to emerge or the displacement of an elephant in the zoo or hanging in the air. It’s all these things that can embody what the symbol stands for. There is an acoustic biologist, Katy Payne, who studies elephant behavior, and she was listening to the deep sounds that the feet of elephants make, that you cannot actually hear with human ears, but you can record them with infrasound or ultrasound. She says that every hour or so, they all stand and stretch their ears and listen to where they’re going to head next. It was such a peculiar image, but for me it’s what sometimes history gives. Sometimes you listen, and it takes you to places that you would never have thought it could take you. It’s like what novelists say about their characters—you set them up in a context, but the characters are pushed into making certain choices, and then suddenly it is the characters that are writing the book. It’s the characters who take you on a journey, and for me, very often the film itself is a challenge, where it takes me to places that I would never have thought I would venture. If you listen to history, that’s what it gives and, for me, that is what the elephant is.

To me the whole corporatocracy is the engine. Of course, it includes the whole rift between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and that genocide that crossed over to the Congo. A lot of the refugees made it to the Congo and that has created a more complex situation. That is part of it. But then the rift between the Hutus and the Tutsis dates back to the Belgians, who also caused a rift as a divide-and-conquer strategy to get at the riches and the conflict minerals. Ludo De Witte again wrote an interesting book and gave an analysis of how the whole rift between Tutsis and Hutus was artificial. It’s the same as what happened in Katanga between the Balubas and then what was happening to the south with President Tshombe and the subsequent genocide in Katanga. The colonial military force also caused rifts between identities—they would send  people from other parts of the country when revolts were happening. They would not send the people from that area; they would send rival groups. So in the army, identities and cultures were set against one another, and that’s part of what’s going on in eastern Congo. Indeed the Tesla and the iPhone images are followed by the statistics of raped women. And if you look at the map from the film City of Joy, which is about the rape of women in eastern Congo, there is a direct correlation between the rape women and the mining sites. I think the occupation of eastern Congo would not happen—and I say “occupation,” which is literally the same as the occupation of Gaza or what’s going on now with the bombing of Yemen, it’s also an occupation of rival groups against one another, or Ethiopia or Sudan.

If eastern Congo did not have what they call a “geological scandal of resources,” it would be left alone. The European Union recently approved weapons again to Kagame, and there were troops embedded with the M23, and it’s a private militia involved with other private militia involved in the rape of women. I was with Zap Mama, who reads the voice of Andrée Blouin in the film, and she was texting Denis Mukwege, and she got a message back to say that it’s unclear what will happen with Panzi Hospital, because M23 also occupied Bukavu, where Panzi Hospital is located. So that is why the iPhone commercial is in the film. It is literally a wake-up call: The lithium and the coltan that is sourced for green energy or green technology goes back to child labor and women being raped.

On April 9, it will be shown at the Andrée Blouin Center in Kinshasa, and it’s been shown in some festivals in Kinshasa, where it was pirated. There’s Maliyamungu Muhande, a Congolese filmmaker whose uncle was killed in eastern Congo just a month ago—she wrote an article in The Nation called “Soundtrack to a Complicit Silence.” She took it to South Africa, and it has been showing on the continent as well. It was released recently in Nairobi, and it has a distributor in Kenya. There is a Moroccan distributor who distributes on the continent. It was shown in El Gouna Festival in Egypt, where we won the prize with the film. Vijay Prashad announced the Andrée Blouin Prize for journalism. The whole story of Andrée Blouin is being rewritten back into history. It had a way to find redemption where the memoirs of Andrée Blouin have been published by Eve Blouin and released a month and a half ago by Verso.

The film was just now shown at the Patria Colloquium in Havana, and it was very well received. We had a meeting at the Film Institute in Havana, and they don’t even have electricity, the generator is broken. We went to the Casa de las Américas, but I couldn’t even go to the toilet, because they don’t have water.  You see that what’s going on in Cuba is, in a sense, still a result of this whole Global South politics, but it had a huge echo there. What was a little bit of a homecoming for me was the film was shown at the Maysles Center in Harlem on 125th Street, one block from Hotel Theresa, and that was organized by the Friends of the Congo.

But at the same time, you know the film was part of the Oscar nominations. so it also reached a big audience. I invited Zap Mama and Marie Daulne, and we wrote a statement for the extraction economy to be held accountable for what’s going on in eastern Congo. On the bottom of her shoes, she had written “Free Congo,” and once she opened her dress, it also said “Free Congo,” so if we had won the Oscar, we would have gone on stage as well, just as No Other Land made a very important political statement about what’s going on in Gaza and the West Bank, Zap Mama would have made a call.