Video

The Legacy of the Colonial Business I

Guy Woueté

2020, 22:20 minutes, colour, French with English Subtitles

TAPECODE 2045.11

To learn from the past, one must be aware of the past, of its past.
To learn from the history, history must have been recorded, kept and told by all of its actors.
To decolonize and be in the present of the collective march of humanity, one must know what colonization was. We need to understand and see (through archives and living memories) what colonialism did by dehumanising people (black and white), killing people and destroyed cultures and nature in Non-western lands.
The question here is: How do we do when history, our history has been silenced, stolen or erased by the colonial system?

This video is part of a five-channel video installation title
Le Fou Postcolonial Insane.
The installation examines what it means to be insane in today’s postcolonial era. Three of the videos (
Le Fou Postcolonial Insane I, II, III) were shot in the charcoal and furniture markets in Lubumbashi (DRC), an important social meeting places. Two characters (psychoanalysts) explore the aspects and impacts of mental health on the individual and in the societies they live in. Woueté relates what they are saying to the city’s colonial memories/vestiges of mining extraction and its present-day inhabitants by intercutting their performances with street scenes filmed from a moving motorcycle.

The two other videos (
The Legacy of the Colonial Business I, II) are filmed in a reportage-like style. It featured an encounters where Woueté talks to Joseph Léonard Rohoyasimba, a Belgian professor living in The Congo, and to Marcel Yabili, a Congolese lawyer. Each has a different perspective on the colonial regime. These two caracteres gives us an insane tour into their subjectif reading of the colonial history of Africa/DRC. Woueté places their two accounts side by side: the supposed objectivity of written history versus the ‘other’ voices. How can we listen to these accounts? What opinion can we form for ourselves?

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