This was originally published in 2021 during a residency at the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora.

Power is asserted and (re)produced at the podium. Like the institutional archive, the podium is the mouth through which power speaks. Purposed to command credibility by projecting speech outward, the podium and the institutional archive allow those speaking to occupy an authoritative position by engaging in an indisputable monologue. Reality is produced through the discourse delivered at the podium, while historical truths are uttered without the threat of a falsifying response. Of course, access to speak is prohibited. Not all speech has the same currency. Those endowed with power – through military, political, ideological and economic means – use the podium and the archive to constitute reality in their favour by naturalising the terms of their dominance, monopolising meaning over historical events and silencing opposing interpretations.

But the discourse uttered through the podium can be interrupted, the archive can be seized.

[Plays footage from the Ceremony of the Proclamation of the Congo’s Independence]

It’s June 1960, the seeds sown by decades of anticolonial struggle were being reaped across the African continent as seventeen states won their struggles for independence against France, Britain, and Belgium. Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s newly elected Prime Minister, is sat in the Palais de la Nation in Leopoldville – today Kinshasa – amongst opposing Congolese politicians and community leaders, Belgian priests and military personnel, European journalists and statesmen as he watched King Baudouin of Belgium, the personification of colonial power, stand comfortably at the podium to announce the end of Belgian rule:

“The independence of the Congo is the crowning glory of the work conceived by the genius of King Leopold II, undertaken by him with firm courage, and continued by Belgium with perseverance. Independence marks a decisive hour in the destinies not only of the Congo herself but – dare I say – of the whole of Africa. For eighty years, Belgium has sent to your land the best of her sons, first to deliver the Congo basin from the odious slave trade which was decimating her population, later to bring together the different tribes which, though former enemies, are now preparing to form the greatest of independent states of Africa. These pioneers deserve admiration from us and acknowledgment from you. They build communications, founded a medical service, modernised agriculture, and built cities and industries and schools […]. It is now up to you, gentlemen, to show that you are worthy of our confidence.” [1]
{A respectful round of applause}[2]

Lumumba was not scheduled to speak, permitted to approach the podium or authorised to interrupt the official history being produced by the Belgian King. Nonetheless, Lumumba calmly took to the stage while he carefully sorted “through the papers of his speech that he had hastily prepared the night before”. [3] Lumumba seized the podium and delivered, what Malcolm X famously called, the “greatest speech” made by “the greatest black man who ever walked the African continent”: [4]

Where Baudouin centred the “courage”, “perseverance” and the “glory” of Belgium’s civilising mission, Lumumba’s interruption spoiled the official narrative of independence by centring the political agency of the Congolese people:

“I ask you to make this June 30, 1960, an illustrious date that you will keep indelibly engraved in your hearts, a date of significance of which you will teach to your children, so that they will make known to their sons and to their grandchildren the glorious history of our fight for liberty […].”

“[…] no Congolese worthy of the name will ever be able to forget that it was by fighting that it has been won, a day-to-day fight, an ardent and idealistic fight, a fight in which we were spared neither privation nor suffering, and for which we gave our strength and our blood.”

In seizing the podium Lumumba seized memory. While Baudouin oriented history towards erasing the ten-million Congolese murdered by King Leopold II during his reign, and the millions maimed, displaced and enslaved under Belgium occupation to claim “glory”, Lumumba’s speech insisted on a disruptive remembrance by speaking what was silenced: 

“We are proud of this struggle, of tears, of fire, and of blood, to the depths of our being, for it was a noble and just struggle, and indispensable to put an end to the humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force.”

Lumumba mobilised collective memory to centre resistance to the conditions of colonial rule by locating what was missing. He transformed those subjugated by Baudouin’s speech from silent observers of history into agents of radical historical change. Where Baudouin claimed independence was given, Lumumba showed how it was won; where Baudouin erased Congolese resistance from his account of independence, Lumumba placed their collective capacity to liberate themselves and shape their own destiny at the very centre of history. Baudouin attempted to enforce closure while Lumumba emphasised continuity as he bridged the struggle for independence with the struggle of imagining and forging an emancipatory future:

“We are going to begin a new struggle, a sublime struggle, which will lead our country to peace, prosperity and greatness.”

{“loud and long applause.”} [5]

Bedouin, taking Lumumba’s speech as a personal insult, threatened to leave, prompting a one-hour pause in the programme.[6] Meanwhile, celebrations erupted across central Africa, and Lumumba’s name, synonymised with anticolonial liberation, echoed throughout the globe. [7]

[Pauses footage of the Ceremony of the Proclamation of the Congo’s Independence]

History is a site of struggle over how present-day political formations are articulated. The archive is the arena through which we can observe how power attempts to silence opposition, how it heroises itself and produces narratives that legitimise its domination over the present. Wielding the power to freely access the podium while silencing opposition determines whose stories are (re)told as historical ‘truths’, whose reality is naturalised.

The podium upon which Baudouin spoke is the archive from which Europe and its settler colonies continue to reproduce ways of seeing and speaking the world that reassert the terms of their superiority. During 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests in Brussels, in response to the defacing of King Leopold II’s statue, the former president of the Free University of Brussels, Hervé Hasquin came to the defence of Belgian colonialism on a live TV debate. Hasquin argued that there were “positive aspects to colonisation”, citing the health system, infrastructure and primary education as outcomes worth commending – as if the spectre of King Baudouin was speaking directly through Hasquin, aiding his effortless erasure of the histories and political agency of the Congolese. The language of empire’s ‘civilising’ mission, its humanitarian responsibility, is a longstanding moral justification for dominance which continues to find a home in the rhetoric of politicians leading Europe and its offshoots today. We can hear it when Boris Johnson asserts that colonialism should never have ‘ended’, stating that “the problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge anymore”; when Emanual Macron claims that Africa has a “civilisational problem” in response to its struggle to ‘develop’ along universalised standards designed to prioritise European interests; when Joe Biden’s states that the United States’ mission in Afghanistan was to “create a democratic, cohesive and united Afghanistan, something that has never been in many centuries over Afghanistan’s history”. Empire speaks the world and its history loudly, frequently and emphatically to centre itself and monopolise interpretations over the present.

The archive and the podium are vehicles through which power is projected outward. They are occupied by the national curriculums of Europe and its offshoots, their foreign policy, military reports, and corporate media who coalace to maintain a reality that naturalises European exceptionalism. By ‘European exceptionalism’ I refer to the ways Europe and its offshoots assert a monopoly over language through its democracy endowing military interventions, its singular path towards development and its perceived role as the global purveyor of peace and justice. Seizing the archive necessitates reading against the grain of European exceptionalism to, wherever and whenever possible, interrupt its claims to historical truths. Seizing the archive is about locating gaps and openings to contaminate official readings of present-day events; spoiling the linearity of Europe’s heroic histories by centring the ongoing resistance of colonised people; demystifying Europe’s dominance over the channels through which histories are (re)told by asking how its exceptionalism came to be.

June 30th, 1960 provides lessons in interruption which are fundamental to undermining the discourse of power wielding institutions, nation states, and imperial hegemons. I have shared this archival encounter with you to show that the archive and the podium have no political allegiance in and of themselves. They can be (re)positioned, commandeered, dominated, censored, corrupted, diminished, expanded, resisted, dogmatised to meet any given political objective. However, the archive’s capacity to interrupt colonial realities is determined by the speaker’s commitment to locating dissent, especially when it is rendered totally invisible and silent. Lumumba’s speech didn’t form a separate or ‘new’ archive, it exposed ruptures in dominant readings of history to make resistance to power visible. It drove a wedge between the gaps in the official narrative to insert the revolutionary capacity of colonised people. This moment teaches us that seizing the archive necessitates listening to what is being silenced with as much intent as we do what is audible. For it is in empire’s silence, in its casual omissions, that resistance is being waged, and our collective humanity is being affirmed. The practice of anticolonial archiving isn’t necessarily about consolidating separate or peripheral histories. Rather, anticolonial archiving ought to be concerned with charting routes to meet those resisting dominant forces at the very centre of history, nurturing dialogues with the past that fracture colonial realities while excavating paths towards emancipatory futures.

Footnotes
[1] Zeling, L., Lumumba: Africa’s Lost Leader (Life & Times), Haus Publishing (2015) P.96
[2] Ibid P.96
[3] Ibid P.96
[4] Ibid P.100
[5] Ibid P.100
[6] Ibid P.100
[7] Ibid P.100
Image credit: ‘Le 30 juin 1960, Zaïre indépendant’ by Tshibumba Kanda Matulu (1970)