I am from Pan African Television, a station in Accra, Ghana, that broadcasts to about 46 African countries, Southern Europe, and what they today call the Middle East and West Asia. We strive to bring the African story to the people, and bringing that story must also include history. As someone said earlier, that history is on our side, and as she was sharing that, I kept telling myself: Which history would I share? As a communist, the history I learned came from the Belgians, and it took me becoming a refugee in the United States to actually learn Congo’s history.
I was 17 years old on May 16, 1997, the day before Kabila took power in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). We were living in Kinshasa in a state of turmoil. I remember the night vividly because of my upbringing. My uncle was in the military, so he was on the front line fighting, and of course, they took over the capital. I remember seeing a lot of guns and things that I have never seen since. In most of the major mainstream media, there was no news that American soldiers landed at a school called the American School of Kinshasa (TASOK), where they had the soccer field, and then entered the city and fought alongside those who were taking the capital city. It never made it into the news, but that is what I know happened to us that night.
What really helped us survive that day was a radio channel. The only one broadcasting throughout the entire takeover of the capital was Voice of America. It stays with me to this day. The more we discuss it, the more it comes back to me. It makes me wonder how it's possible that in the midst of war, when the national TV station was no longer working and the local stations were also down, everyone in the capital had to listen to American journalists telling us, "Now they have taken over N’djili Airport; we can see them near the palace where Mobutu, who was the president at the time, lived." Our understanding of our history is based on what we hear. So we have to deconstruct the information that we get. It's not just about saying "history is on our side" or that we have to tell our history; we have to rethink what we have been taught, relearn many things, and then tell a new story—the story of the struggle of the people.
On September 8, 2019, ABC News published an article with the title: “Singer, tailor, soldier, spy: A CIA officer’s life as the front man of one of Uganda’s top bands.” I was already aware of this history and was alarmed when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was boasting about a new director they were going to appoint. In the listing of this director there was a Black man, Darryl Blocker, whose face looked familiar. From our perspective on the African continent, a lot of people come here, including missionaries, journalists, and artists. We are now finding out that when Louis Armstrong came to the Congo through the cultural diplomacy program of the U.S. State Department, there was a CIA agent with him. Now I am also finding out that in 2004, an African American musician was with a Ugandan band called the Kampala All Stars, and he was being nominated to be the new CIA director. Most people in Uganda, when they heard that news, probably said, "Wait a minute, I used to see him in the bar in my city. This is the guy from the Kampala All Stars." This raises the question of soft power and how it shows up on the African continent. What information is collected, and how do they actually influence how we think about it?
I now want to shift. Rather than speaking about soft power or hard power, I want to talk about what actually scares me to death every day of my life: the words “Hillary Clinton.” Most people did not watch her nomination hearing for Secretary of State, but I watched it religiously. When she was speaking, she said something I had never heard before: "smart power." She was speaking to the U.S. Congress about what she would do if she became Secretary of State, and which tools of diplomacy they would use. It was not just hard power, and it was not just soft power; it was "smart power." The way she defined smart power is what we are now, a decade later, discussing. She strategically spoke about the role of technology for both hard and soft power, explaining how the use of social media would be critical for U.S. diplomacy and for pushing its foreign policy abroad. Most people were not aware that this happened, and as years go by, I see more and more how technology is being used as a way to actually advance U.S. interests.
I was glad to see young Egyptians, when she went to Egypt, refuse to meet with her. Some of us know about what happened during the Arab Spring to subvert the youth movements on the ground. There were youth groups funded by the U.S. State Department, and they were very skilled with technology. We started wondering how these youth could be so skilled with technology; they are so much more advanced than anyone else. We all use the same tools and have social media accounts, but how is it possible that their accounts are reaching so many more people? That is how we know that they have colonized and are controlling the algorithms, making sure that certain information gets to people so that they can also confuse the youth about what truly changes the world. I insisted in 2012 that Facebook does not create the revolution; it's the work on the ground. Liking a post does not create a revolution. So it is to figure out how technology supports movements, but propaganda has been strategically used by the State Department. This is because most of the social media platforms that people around the world use are companies based in the United States, so they abide by U.S. law. They create backdoors for the U.S. government. The many revelations from sources like Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks have allowed us to see what is actually happening.
What is happening with technology on the African continent? I will bring it back to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). I was in the DRC at least four times last year and became very alarmed when I found out that Netflix, Google, Facebook, and Twitter are now in Kinshasa, and that Google and Facebook are building data servers across the Congo. They have built three exchange servers within the country. For the past two or three years, it has been very noticeable that if you want to know what is happening in the DRC, you can get it on social media. One of the major Congolese languages, Lingala, is even automatically translated on Facebook. We found it very strange that when things are happening, we are able to get information so easily. When I went on the ground, I saw that they had built caches—they copy the servers of Google, Facebook, and Netflix—and put them in three major cities: Kinshasa; Mbuji-Mayi, the region where the current president of the Congo is from; and Goma in the east, where the uprising is happening. When I spoke to young people to help them understand what is actually happening and how data is much easier for people to get, we realized that we are providing more information than ever before, but no one in the country even knew this was happening, even though these corporations were not sharing this information. What could happen to Congolese who are putting their information on these platforms, especially those who are critical of the United States government and are trying to expose the memorandum of understanding that Congo, Zambia, and the U.S. have built around cobalt? Will they end up like Press TV, which had its local press in the DRC shut down because it was sharing critical information on what is happening in the U.S.?
With the few minutes I have left, I want to focus on another important date: May 25, 2023. The president of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is coming to China for his first state visit. What has been fascinating since the announcement toward the end of December is the unbelievable amount of negative press on China. Every other day, I am receiving videos, articles, and information about the Chinese in the DRC. It is fascinating because the story is a single story, but the different articles present different angles of the same story. One article may focus on one part of the contract, while another may say something else about it, but it is literally the same single story. This is happening at an alarming rate that makes you wonder how. Three days ago, on my WhatsApp, I received a fifteen-minute compressed video of a whole segment by Hans Backer on the Chinese contract, sent to me by Congolese. How are they able to get to us? We are all using the same tools; we have video cameras and social media accounts. Why is this information circulating at a faster rate? This is not just a question of saying, "Let's do what they do," but rather of learning much more scientifically to recognize that we cannot simply use the same means that they have. I strongly believe that even if we are more advanced in technology, if we do not have that people-to-people connection between the Chinese and African people to actually meet and discuss these things, there is a concrete program being planned to make sure that people think China is the enemy.
I will conclude by sharing a long quote that relates to the first point: "history is on our side." As I said, the question is, which history? We did get the answer from Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), who was brutally assassinated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) before January 17, 1961. Before he died, he sent a letter to his wife. In his last letter, he told us what we need to do. He let us know that today, as we are building solidarity, this is what we have to do: "History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations will teach, but that which they will teach in the countries emancipated from colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history, and it will be to the north and to the south of the Sahara a history of glory and dignity." This is why we are here. We came to China to meet our comrades from around the world to build the solidarity necessary to tell our own story. We must rethink the history that has been taught to us, tell our history of dignity and glory, as we unite in communications to tell the world that we are all together in this.
(Transcribed from recording and edited.)