Well, it’s something that you grew up with and it’s part of the Belgian landscape. The colonial heritage is seeped into the ground. It’s built with the rubber money. So, you grew up with this, but also you grew up with ignorance, so this discrepancy already was growing and I always wanted to do something about it. But then there’s the backstory of Nikita Khrushchev slamming his shoe [at the UN], which I knew about since the research for Double Take.

Double Take is about a Hitchcock doppelganger, but Nikita Krushchev also functions as a Hitchcock doppelganger. What I did not know is that the shoe banging was related to the Congo crisis, which was related to the handling of the move from the Belgian Congo to independence, which was not really independence. As some of the characters say in the film, it was a neo-colonial grab. It installed some marionette leaders, which ended up in a kleptocracy, and it still is. Belgium is a very young country, and you grew up with that, it’s all around you. And then, the history that was not spoken about, and knowing that something didn’t add up. I went through a learning curve making the film.

Leopold II is often cited as a way to not talk about today. As horrible as it was, it’s an evasion to not talk about what’s going on in the Congo right now. The Empire was hidden in Belgium. It was called the empire of silence.

Even today, I would say what’s going on in the East Congo with the private militia still raping women to empty villages to get at the conflict minerals is actually a direct result. It’s the direct result of the ground zero of 1960, when the Belgians together with the CIA overthrew that first democratically elected regime. So, in a nutshell, that’s the backbone of the film. In Koli Jean Bofane, the Belgian-Congolese novelist who’s part of the film, alludes to that trajectory where all the conflict minerals were always sourced from Congo for every big conflict in the world, but it never benefited the Congolese. And he takes it all the way up to today. He mentions genocide after genocide after genocide, and that it’s still the same.

There are several components to it. The black jazz masters, that’s an obvious component, because I knew Louis Armstrong was visiting the Congo during that pivotal moment, but that the State Department and the CIA were both hand in glove about sending out the black jazz musician while actually plotting the coup. It’s exactly the moment where the overthrow of Lumumba happens, but where they’re already plotting to assassinate Patrice Lumumba as well.

And so when Louis Armstrong is having dinner with Moïse Tshombe in Katanga, the marionette president, he’s having dinner with Larry Devlin, the CIA agent, US Ambassador Timberlake, and the Belgian advisors to Tshombe. It’s the moment where also Mobutu is going to come over to negotiate an exchange of money to plot the killing of Patrice Lumumba. But of course, Louis Armstrong was not going to know. In essence, he was sent to a country that was legally not actually a country. It was not ratified by the United Nations, so the State Department was actually not allowed to send him. But it’s the Belgian advisor, the Katanga lobby in New York, that pushes for Louis Armstrong to be sent over to Katanga.

The problem with that documentary [is that] it’s still whitewashing American politics. It touches on it, but it doesn’t delve into what I feel was completely hypocritical on both angles: the plotting of the coup and the politics back home. I felt that was missing. But in this film, I think the bigger global context in the United Nations is quite crucial. With the independence movement, 16 African countries, plus Cyprus, are admitted to the United Nations, which does create a big shift within the General Assembly, where suddenly, the global south is able to gain the majority vote.

But that shift, and the independence movement, also inspires the Civil Rights Movement. What I researched in the film is that bigger connection. When we talk about the rumba, there’s a huge transatlantic connection to Cuba, where a lot of third, fourth generation Congolese were living. That inspired the music scene. And then little by little, there’s trade between Léopoldville and Havana. The rumba was brought back from Cuba, it goes back to the African continent. Researching this film, I stumbled onto the fact that whenever there’s a big political upheaval or movement, [there’s a musical connection,] like when Lumumba demands to be freed and arrives at the Round Table [the January 1960 conference which determined the future of the Congo]. Two days later, independence is claimed. Joseph Kabasele [AKA La Grande Kallé] and African Jazz accompanied Patrice Lumumba and composed ‘Independence Cha Cha’ in the Plaza Hotel in Brussels. Kabasele would be involved with the [election] campaign of Patrice Lumumba in Léopoldville. What they talked about was very political, and the music scene was always very much part of that in the city. The first rumba in the film, ‘Ata Ndele’ by Adou Elenga: ‘Sooner or later, the world will change.’ It was a very political song, and it was banned by the Belgians in the mid-50s and they put Elenga in prison. So, there is a connection. But also the jazz. We have the Abby Lincoln and Max Roach album, We Insist! Freedom Now, [the performance of] which we found, by the way, on Belgian television.

Abby Lincoln and Max Roach bookend the film. The opening is Max Roach drumming and the Abby Lincoln scream is at the end of the film. And we knew that she initiated that protest, together with the women writers’ coalition in Harlem, with Maya Angelou. There was also Amiri Baraka and Paul Robeson, but that we cut out of the film. We had a whole Paul Robeson line in the film, we had to cut it out but he was present at that protest as well. That scene of Abby Lincoln screaming: since we found that footage, we knew that was where we wanted to head — for a scream of anger, which is also a scream of resilience and a scream of not agreeing to the state of the world.

But We Insist! is inserted throughout the whole film. The song ‘Tears for Johannesburg’ was inspired by the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa. And we have [South African singer] Miriam Makeba in there as well. With Makeba there’s another story. Marie Daulne [AKA Congolese-Belgian singer-songwriter Zap Mama], who’s reading Andrée Blouin’s voice, made her first album together with Miriam Makeba here in Brussels. So there was a reason why we asked Marie Daulne to embody the voice of Andrée Blouin. [Born in Congo, Daulne’s Belgian father was killed by Lumumbaist rebels during the Crisis. She and her mother fled to Belgium, where she grew up.] She had just got back from the City of Joy in Kyivu province, working with the raped women using song and voice as a way to overcome the trauma and share the trauma. So she was a very appropriate choice for taking on Andrée Blouin.

I like the kaleidoscopic approach where you have different entries to try to open up what that story would be. I think there’s a very big difference between speaking for and speaking with. And so for me, it was important to open up that dialogue with other history tellers who actually connected to the story. Jean Bofane is one, and he was six when independence happened. Andrée Blouin, too, who was the Chief of Protocol and speech writer for Patrice Lumumba, but whose story was written out of history because it she spoke up as a woman, and she was put on the debt list by Belgian intelligence. We were trying to get access to those documents, and they ‘disappeared’.

We thought in the editing, why not treat the politicians as musicians? Very often we would have speeches or UN votes that would lend themselves as lyrics to the jazz composition. That’s how we sort of imagined the film. And that worked remarkably well, because each time things fell into place that made it more meaningful of what was going on with the music, but also with the political scene. Or sometimes it would be the opposite. We would have a juxtaposition, like with Eric Dolphy in the independence ceremony, where he comments on what King King Baudouin says. It’s what I would call jazz interrupters.

Of course, Eric Dolphy was not present at the independence ceremony, but there’s that Pan African link, the independence movement inspiring the Civil Rights movement. By colliding those spaces, [you get] something revelatory. The musicians are not merely musicians. They also speak up. It’s like where Max Roach says we use music as a weapon. Or John Coltrane, saying that music can be the inception of political change, even though he’s not at all a political sort of musician. He would think about his music as more spiritual, but he was contextualized by that society in the early 60s, so the fact that he went up to Harlem to meet Malcolm X says something of his background and how he imagined those things.