By Anny OSABUTEY
Theme: The Orbs Beneath the Nile Lead to Kongo
On the 8th of August, 1960, the President of the Republic of Ghana Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and the Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo Patrice Lumumba signed a secret agreement for the Union of African States between Ghana and Congo.
The union would have a republican constitution within a federal framework. Any state in Africa was free to join. The agreement also presupposes Ghana’s abandonment of the Commonwealth at the time.
A year later Patrice Lumumba would be brutally assassinated by the Belgian political establishment with MI6 and CIA complicity. Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown a few years later by the same external actors. For over half a century we have lived in the fabricated world, which we agreed not to question.
Congo and Ghana’s drive for absolute political and economic sovereignty would be subsequently dismembered by a violent restructuring of reality through the rewriting of time and burying of the most powerful self-determination project in Africa beneath layers of deception.
From Leopold’s brutal genocide to Baudouin’s assassination policy, Congo’s destruction wasn’t just for the land and resources; it was for the control of history itself. A history of a prosperous ancient state with fascinating folklore and mythology; like the secret cities hidden deep inside its forests and rivers that lead to even more fascinating worlds beneath the Nile.
When Leopold’s army landed in the Congo, their mandate was also to locate these sites with magical beings and bring them to heel, but they would settle for Congo’s rare minerals after they were unable to access these places that were said to be guarded by a towering radius of silver-back gorillas.
The brutality that ensued still lingers today. Congo’s resources would fund Europe and America’s industrial revolutions throughout modern history at the expense of its people and the rest of Africa.
As the world’s political systems tumble toward global war and an uncertain future, Congo’s mineral wealth is once again resourcing the next imperial wealth grab; the cloud economy. The kind that gives one access to the new digital land: the privatised cloud.
The enclosures that created the commodification of land have now privatised the Internet, creating a fusion of militarised big tech and private equity. These capital interests have become the foundational blocks for techno-fuedalism – in which our lives are surrogated into privatised algorithms that dictate consumption habits and terraform societies.
Everything is pointing to a one world economic system of control based on decentralised AI infrastructure, “free trade” and economic subjugation. States that are unable to compete will collapse under old economic models and become digital vassals with territories overrun by digital feudal Lords.
This kind of power is meant to control time, through “the law” and speed. The world is perennially bombarded with crisis and incessant updates to the point that one is unable to organise meaningful resistance.
How much of what we believe is actually real and how much is manufactured consent just to keep individuals in conformity? Every crisis is a path to control how people perceive their world, what they fear and find acceptable. The more we watch, the less we question.
Techno-fuedalism’s silent weapons are meant to create a fixation with consumption and demoralisation. Meaning we don’t see the world as it is but rather see the version programmed for us. Dr. Kwame Nkrumah was clear about the role the Shinkolobwe mine in Congo played in the Manhattan Project and the transformation of the United States into a global superpower.
Today, Africa’s rare minerals undergird the west’s power-hungry transition into the Internet of bodies, one that sees a worldwide apocalypse as a means to dominate. Congo has endured endless cycles of destruction and rituals of erasure from colonial interests.
The Africa that Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba dreamt of is yet to be realised and it must be, because now more than ever it is a matter of life and death. Congo must be liberated from oligarchs’ intent on keeping Africans in a permanent state of exception. Chale Wote is curating critical multi-disciplinary perspectives of liberation and imagination of Congo.
We are accepting works that document and highlight African and Afro-diasporic history and cultural lineages with roots in Congo. The Orbs Beneath the Nile Lead to Kongo will feature interdisciplinary artists whose work critically examines the universal effects of imperialism in Congo through perspectives of its protracted conflict, social hierarchies and consumer culture, and the vicious power dynamics embedded within its borders.
For the application protocol, click the link:
#chalewote2025 #callforartists #TheOrbsBeneathTheNile #LeadToKongo
#KwameNkrumah #PatriceLumumba
#interdisciplinaryart #contemporaryart #contemporaryartist #chalewote #streetartfestival
