Katasumbika, Coltan

Yes. Katasumbika was born not simply in response to a political emergency, but from the deep pulse of a persistent crisis—a condition that has come to feel like a permanent atmosphere in today’s world. Especially in Goma, where the exception has long since become the norm, the question that haunted me was: What does it mean to live where emergency is not an event, but a condition of being?

This reflection first arose not in theory, but in soil. I was working with the mamas of Yole Ekolojia at the Bulengo IDP camp—just another day within our Agroliberation program. We were tending to indigenous crops, sharing knowledge, exploring farming rhythms. Some of the mamas and children were also documenting the day through our community journalism training. It was a living moment—rooted, generous, connected.

Then came the rupture. The skies cracked. Goma was under bombardment. Government troops, retreating before the advance of rebel forces, had set up artillery close to the camp—the very camp where the mamas lived. As they fired on M23 rebels movement positions, the rebels returned fire. And from our place at Yole!Ekologia, we could see and hear the bombs falling, like the breath of war exhaling just beside us.

My first impulse was to ask everyone to flee. Nearly a hundred of us were gathered. I moved to disperse, to send people “home.” But one of the mamas stopped me with a question that cleaved the moment open: “Go? Go where?” Her words were not just a question—they were a mirror. In that instant, I recognized the privilege embedded in my instinct to escape. These women had already crossed four wars just to arrive here. For them, Goma was not a waypoint—it was the imagined arrival, the end of a long exile. There was no elsewhere left. And then, they began to sing. That singing was not a performance. It was resistance. It was re-membering. It was the ancestral rhythm rising to interrupt the chaos. In that moment, fear lost its grip. The war was still there, but we were no longer held hostage by it. We stayed—not because it was safe, but because it was human. And in that staying, a different knowledge awakened.

Later, one of the mamas asked if I remembered Mukumbira. Of course, I did. It is an ancient practice—a philosophy of recalibration. When someone fell out of harmony with the community, they were not punished by imprisonment. They were sent to the forest, to live in a world not designed for only human comfort. There, among the untamed intelligences of the earth, the mind could remember its place in the larger rhythm of life. To live in asynchronicity with human time, and to return to synchronicity with all life—that was healing. After 21 days, people would often return transformed, not as outcasts but as re-aligned souls. Mukumbira became a guiding remembrance. Not just for the individual, but for societies that have lost their rhythm with the sacred balance. And I began to see: our world is suffering from a chronic loss of synchronicity. The normalized violence in the world, as in Goma, is not simply political—it is systemic. It is a dismemberment of Being, and a severance from the source. Some months before that day, I had been walking with a colleague after a filming session. We encountered members of Bazalendo, a spiritual movement grounded in indigenous belief. They were protesting outside the UN mission. Recognizing me, they called out: “Petna, you have your camera—come film us!” I didn’t yet know why, but I felt called to witness. I recorded the moment. Months later, I heard they had been massacred—in their own church. Unarmed citizens. Elders. Spiritual leaders. Killed not by rebels, but by the president’s own guard. Their only “crime” was demanding the withdrawal of the UN peacekeeping force that had failed again and again to protect the very people it claimed to defend. Their death passed with barely a murmur in international media. Over one hundred human beings—disappeared from the world’s attention as if they never existed.

But I had seen them. I had heard their songs. One of their leaders had spoken with a clarity that shook me—a Pan-African vision, not rooted in separation but in dignity and sovereignty. The last time I had heard such language on Congolese soil was in the voice of Lumumba. I was left with a terrible weight: what do I do with this witness? With this camera? With this voice? That’s when the film began to take shape. Not as a reaction, but as a weaving. I began tracing the threads between ancestral cosmology and contemporary violence. Between Mukumbira and the need of the re-membering rhythm in the face of rupture. I saw that the structures we are resisting are not malfunctioning. They are functioning precisely as they were designed to: extractive, dehumanizing, loyal only to capital and empire.

This realization crystallized when I watched a colonial film called Cuivre (“Copper”) by Ernest Genval in 1938. After romanticizing the colonial venture, the narrator stated calmly: “The goal is to produce indigenous white people of the Congo without the intention of returning back .” That line—so brazen, so casual—revealed the architecture of a project that persists in new costumes. The present-day violence is not incidental. It is the echo of a design, humming through history. I remembered a photograph one of the mamas took during our Agroliberation project. A cooking pot with stones cooking in it. Her comment about it was: “We don’t eat coltan. Why do we have to run from our homes because of it?” That sentence broke me open. The metal that feeds global tech empires is unrecognizable in the kitchens of the people displaced by its harvest. This is the trap of permanent emergency. It constrains the mind to survival. And in that state, dreaming becomes dangerous. Imagination becomes subversion. That’s why spaces like Yole!Ekolojia are sacred. They are more than refuge—are sites o ancestral recalibration. They are where Mukumbira is enacted, where storytelling becomes ritual, where song interrupts fear, where seeds are planted not only in soil but in memory. In the end, the Bazalendo did not die in vain. Their defiance, rooted in indigenous faith, demanded a redefinition of citizenship—not the one offered by a post-colonial state that brutalizes its people, but one inscribed in the soil, in the spirit, in the song. So Katasumbika is not merely a film. It is a song of remembering the dismembered. A witnessing. A call for rhythm in a world that has lost its tempo.

That meeting, intense and unfiltered, did indeed open a portal—one through which multiple temporalities began to speak with and through each other. It is part of the narrative’s architecture, not as a foundation, but as a gateway. It stands at the intersection of my soulful-soil cinema and the cinema of representation—between a gaze that emerges from within and one that hovers over the other.

I see from the margins, and I speak from them too—not as a limitation, but as a position of possibility. The margins are where multiple centres can be reimagined. I speak from Goma, from Congo, but my becoming has been layered. Within Congo I am a Nande. I became Congolese in Uganda. African in the Netherlands. Black in the United States. It is through relationships—with people, with land, with history—that I’ve become whole, not as an identity fixed in place but as an ongoing act of remembering. This position is not neutral, and I do not desire it to be. To look from Apa-Hapa—from below, from the ground—is itself a political act. The scene of protest is not just documentation; it is an embodied act of solidarity. The camera doesn’t merely observe; it participates. It breathes. It listens. The true base of Katasumbika is what pulses beneath—the unseen threads of memory, the ancestral undercurrents of groundation, the inaudible rhythms of continuity. That’s where the real film lives.

The testimonial is not there to explain the film—it is the film’s spine. In oral cultures, the voice is not merely sound—it is technology. When spoken with intention, it conjures images. It is a meeting point of the future-past and past-future, Ejo-Lobi. It is a bridge. It transmits memory. In Katasumbika, the voice is a vibration—an ancestral drumbeat carrying memory across thresholds of violence, healing, and time. We approached it like rituals. Each cadence, each pause, was shaped with care—like composing a rhythm that must resonate not only in the ear, but in the bones, in the soil. Her voice doesn’t narrate in the conventional sense. It embodies. It invokes. It holds space. It refuses to flatten the political into spectacle or the personal into sentiment.

This practice is part of my recoding aesthetic curriculum. The archives are not just inserted as historical evidence—they are summoned into living space where they must answer to the present. I project them onto labouring bodies, soil, walls, gestures—not to illustrate, but to interrogate. What happens when the ghosts of the colonial gaze are forced to inhabit the very gestures they once attempted to erase? This is not an effect—it is a ritual of producing new knowledge. Superimposing colonial archives in post-production would feel too distant, too clinical. I needed the encounter to happen in real time, through friction, tension, surface, and resistance. These colonial archives are crime scenes—marked by violence, distortion, and erasure—but not only these, they are also pedagogical spaces. They reveal, among many things, how visibility was used to enforce invisibility: how whole cosmologies were negated through the colonial frame. So, the projections are also a sieving act—like the traditional act of separating rice from chaff. When these violent images meet surfaces animated by ancestral knowledge and everyday life, a sorting occurs. The power dynamic is reversed. The projection doesn’t dominate; it is sifted, filtered, held to account.

Editing followed the logic of Ejo-Lobi—where the future of the past is braided into the past of the future. We were weaving rhythms across dimensions. We were not cutting images—we were braiding them into the logic weaving nate in Murago way, just like in a soulful-soil cinema principles.

Sound is breath. It is memory. It carries spirit in ways the image sometimes cannot. We treated sound not as an accompaniment, but as a protagonist –an elder in the storytelling circle.

We built the sonic landscape in layers: the rustling of maize, the wind from Lake Kivu, echoes of distant radios, ancestral murmurs, the rumbling of heavy tractors on cobalt gravel, heartbeat. Each sound was asked, what do you remember? What do you mourn? What do you heal? Sound didn’t serve the image; it conversed with it—sometimes affirming, sometimes disrupting, sometimes whispering what the image could not say. In our philosophy, sound is part of the narrative circle. It is not decoration. It is a being. It is a community member with voice, history, and responsibility.

The tradition is a circle of trust, we gather in circles to speak, to listen, to remember together. But a circle without shared values is only a shape. Real aural community-making requires deep listening—where what is said is rooted in responsibility, and what is heard is held with care. In this scene, the women are listening to fragments—stories, histories, songs—some real, some imagined. The headphones become portals into other dimensions of consciousness. They represent an inward turn, a sanctuary. They also question: in this age of green energy transition, who is listening to the people being killed, displaced, raped, as the minerals powering this “future” are extracted from their ancestral soils?

The earth is crying—choked, poisoned, dismembered. The headphones don’t isolate the mamas in this particular scene; they protect their inner worlds. They affirm that knowledge is not separate from labour. Listening is not passive—it is revolutionary. As Ubuntu teaches: “Mutu ni mutu juu ya watu, na watu ni watu juu ya mutu“—a person is a person through others. But in this context, the listening is sacred. It is also resistance. Liberation often begins in what one listens to—not just in what one says.

Katasumbika is a word in the Yira language for the tantalum mineral. Literally, it means “that which cannot be destroyed”, or “the unpickable”. But it is more than a description—it is a vibration. It speaks to a resilience that cannot be mined out, a spirit that cannot be erased. It names a force encoded in land, body, memory, movement, and silence. Katasumbika is not not just a title—it’s an invocation. It holds space for the unbreakable: the earth’s memory, the people’s resistance, the ancestral flame. Katasumbika is the refusal to be annihilated. It is the energy continuity. It is what makes continuity continue.