The extraction of minerals from the Congo has been an ongoing colonial expedition since the Belgian king, Leopold II, personally annexed the country’s land via private enterprise, officiated by European and American representatives in 1885. What followed was the creation of an enforced slave labor, itself populated by the majority of local indigenous peoples. The horrors that unfurled were great, its legacy persisting under neocolonial rule, where many Canadian mining companies now exploit a country persistently fraught with economic turmoil and serving as an outpost for cobalt extraction. The West’s desperation to maintain control of resource production has led to the implosion of African economies; many of them sought to rebuild after independence, but were then stunted by continued neocolonial exploitation. This is not to mention the assassination of many of Africa’s democratically elected, often socialist, leaders, the case in Congo being that of Patrice Lumumba. Such transparent manipulation of national governance via economic coercion and political interventionism leads inevitably to an urge for resistance by the exploited masses, and this is where Petna Ndaliko Katondolo’s Cobalt initiates itself, ethereally observing the landscapes that have been forever altered by the Belgian mining enterprise. A continued unease rests over the length of the work, as Katondolo pointedly peppers in archival, ethnographic footage, utilizing both its narration and images to distinct effect. In essence, the project organizes itself as a collage, handcrafted of juxtaposition, identifying with acute clarity the parasitic nature of coloniality but also providing a platform for the self-enunciation of an oppressed class.
There are two moments in Cobalt that most markedly articulate the ideological faculties of the project and the strength of visual imaginings that such politics are represented through. Early on, a basket of rice is being sifted through, again and again, waves of grain at a close-up, as in a serene tide rolling in. Projected against this image, however, superseding its details — for we cannot see the weaving of this strainer, nor is the rice very discernible — is a projection of ethnographic footage, an act of collage that augments the colonial expedition’s negating praxis over the agricultural history being offered as gesture. Second, a sequence of three shots perforates the neocolonial positionality through an austere semiotic consideration. The first shot of this sequence simply observes the placement and posture of a placard installed for the remembrance of European collaboration against the peoples of Africa: a single column infographic of little-to-no notice to passersby, nestled between shrubbery and a narrow sidewalk. Following this, we glean a static survey of one of the many memorials to the Berlin Wall: a large exhibit placed amidst an open market route, where many have the space and intrigue to gather and scrutinize. From here, we leave Europe, the sequence’s final shot taking us to a wooden rack of coffins on open display. This simple image should be descriptive enough to denote the violence that persists through ongoing material consequences across the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Katondolo’s syntax is one of reverberating anger toward the passivity of white comforts, necessarily rebuking this stagnancy with the collective struggle of Congolese activists, whose words take over from the continuity of ethnographic narration.
Cobalt’s polemic is one that mediates on textures forever altered: land, tradition, infrastructure, humanity. The abstracted consequences of a globalized marketplace is seen, here, in the darkness of mines, where headlamps sift through shadows, where the act of witnessing becomes, as expressed by so many across the film, a requisite one for confronting the conditions of total disenfranchisement. This film, like many others finding themselves circulating around the Western circuit (whether from Sudan or Palestine), facilitates an explicit methodology of seeing, which emphatically advocates for the voices of allies to augment the voices of those on the ground, embroiled in the accelerated desperation of extant white colonial histories. The final scene of the film divulges circumstances as plainly as possible: the quotidian turbulence of these enterprises places everyone in danger. Our response should echo those of the workers and activists we hear throughout, pushing us to understand how our mundanity and theirs present radically distinct realities in need of reconciliation.
Published as part of FIDMarseille 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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