Okay, let's get restarted for our third, well it's not really a panel, it's a kind of a working session in the collaborative endeavor between the domain and and Kodjo Eschen and yeah it will be a different mode of presentation and discussing and discussion after hearing a couple of incisive and rigorous
papers we'll hear something that will no doubt be no less incisive and rigorous but it will be more of a joint presentation, albeit with two distinct individual parts, but those parts are also interrelated. Doreen Mende, who is teaching and actually head of a program of the research-based curatorial master program in Geneva. Doreen Mende, also co-founder of the Haarland-Ferrock Institute in Berlin, among many other achievements, will speak about socialist future signs without ends. And in particular she will deal with the Geva Futurum project or program founded in 1971 in East Germany
with the objective to define the principles of the socialist future film as different from the idea of a utopia or from Western science fiction, Western science fiction film. Kojo Eschen will present a talk entitled The Black Stars Jet-Propelled Takeoff. The link with Doreen's presentation is actually the figure of Joachim Helwig. Joachim Helwig, who was one of the key people of Defa Futurum in East Germany in the 1970s, directed this film, The Black Star, in 1964, about Kwame Nkrumah's newly independent nation of Ghana.
And we will discuss how visions of a techno-capitalist take-off and the plan for a pan-Africanist union We are sort of joined in that project by a third scientific future approved by East German state socialism. As we've mentioned before, we're really interested here in dealing with futurity, futurity as something other than this accelerating train wreck waiting to happen, or this train wreck in slow motion that is actually already in progress in rethinking forms of futurity. We're also really interested in re-examining historical cases, historical genealogies.
And with Kojo and Doreen we're, let's say, intensifying that strand during our final session dealing with socialist futures and with the black stars jet propelled takeoff. Okay, Doreen and Kojo, the floor is yours. Thank you very much for coming. I actually forgot to introduce Kojo, but I guess the man needs no introduction really. Among many, many other things, he's the co-founder of the Ottolit Group. He teaches at Goldsmiths College. He's an amazing writer and speaker. And well, check out his work as well as that of all of our other speakers for today, if you haven't done so right. Good afternoon, everybody.
Thank you very much indeed and also Eric for putting up this day discussing concepts and possibilities and impossibilities towards the future as a political kind of question. and it's the first time that both Guzhu and I are going to talk about this East German documentary filmmaker Joachim Helwig who is going to appear in various formations and it's a really great opportunity to do this in the framework. The outline that was circulating that is on the website and that is on Sven's website contains this one question,
what can be learned from historical futurities and potentialities? And that quite fascinates, I mean I think this is what really spoke and also what Sven said in the very beginning, Exactly, I mean to look into these kind of formations and historic moments that we could link back and reactivate and question towards understanding of vocabularies and concepts, what concept of maturity could be. It resonates in Jameson's, what also has been quoted this morning by Eric, it has become easier, Frederick Jameson, it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. So these two things put into constellation which I think can only be perspective from the West.
My thoughts towards a response to that quest for the learning of the stories of maturities and potentialities operate with an understanding that we find in Terry Smith's elaboration on the contemporary when he says that geopolitical changes in the years around 1989 opened up a degree of access of access between societies closed for one and sometimes two generations. The desire soon arose to create and disseminate a contemporary art that, toughened by the experiences of post-coloniality, would, in the words of Cuban critic Gerardo Moschera, remade Western culture and thus be well-earned throughout the entire world. It's a paradigm shift in slow motion that matches the changing world geopolitical and
economic order. From this perspective, contemporary art today is the art of the global south, and I also would continue the framework as an art of the east. In that sense, the claim I would like to propose here, if we look into these kind of historical future realities and potentialities that depart from a moment where a moment of a really existing socialism also means to decolonize the global cold war, which also includes the labor of decolonizing socialism. And this, I guess, is really something that I have been working with and has been resonating. So what does it mean to look into those moments of the 60s, of the 70s, 61, a very pivotal moment, and we are going here to look into 71, 64.
What does it mean to translate and transpose them in the present conditions that is informed by what Mark Fisher has been called the tabularist realism. So in the framework, I'm focusing pretty much on the thesis by Mark Humheldig and Klaus Ritter. It's the first time that's going to be presented in public, I guess after 1989. It's a collectively written PhD with the title Knowledge and Problems, Methods and Results from the Artistic Process of Socialist Visions for a Future in Film under particular considerations of the experiences of the working group Deva Futurum. I just have to check a bit of time. On April 23rd, 1975, the East German filmmakers, orders and scriptwriters Joachim Havig and Klauselitter defended their collective practice-based PhD,
as it would be called today, on the artistic creation for visions of a socialist future film. Their writing resided from the experiences of conceptualizing Deva Futurum that has been initiated as a working group in July 1971 by the Ministry of Culture in East Germany, which includes a macro-political implication in the Protocol, and DEFA, which was the state-owned film studio of the German Democratic Republic. Itself found it initiated with the objective to define principles of the socialist future film indifferent to the idea of utopia and science fiction. I'm going to play now a sequence from a film that plays a very important role here in this PhD, Im Staub der Sterne, in the Dust of the Stars, which indicates a moment that is very kind of important
to understand the socialist future film, which is not science fiction, it's not utopia, is defined and articulated as a so-called Gegenwartsfilm. So to analyze, project, to conceptualize the futures, depart from the present condition. I guess it resonates to some extent what we have discussed in the earlier morning. And maybe just before I screen this I would like to tell you like two elements, two moments in this PhD where you are in Heldig in Klose Ritter, right? I can turn this all into English, it's the main work at the moment, it's still in the early beginning of a research process, the artistic object is the present. The present's experience and its understanding is a prerequisite for shaping the future.
The future development of a socialist art is not about the prediction of future events, but of processes of possible or desirable future images, which stimulate the people of our day to work in the present for the future. This includes to engage aggressively with imperialist perspectives and proving their future-less futurity. This task necessitates a definition of the future film as a broken hypothesis. As a delimitation of concept utopia and science fiction, the socialist future film was defined as a special form of the so-called Gegenwarts film, films addressing contemporary life, an own genre that DEFA and Futurum invented and delimitation from the Stalin's of its realism and socialist realism towards a strong
focus on social, urban, cultural aspects of the East German life. The experience gathered in the non-future film, and this is something Loharim Helwig comes from, and also Klaus Witter, and I guess this will play a really important role also in The Black Star, which is a documentary film practice. The experience gathered in the non-future film has proved that the extensive studies and preparatory work for only one film and only one studio must remain ineffective, and that the work for shaping of socialists' future developments requires a focus of the forces and resources for all film genres that this work, shall it be communicated, requires a planned development of all genres. And this is like specific for the socialist non-future film. It's not like a feature film as such, it's not a movie, a kind of a narrate plot.
It's not a documentary, it's not animation, it's a constellation combination of all of these kind of genres. So there are films that DEFA Futurum have been working with, for example, Liebe 2002, Love 2002, realized in 1972, that has been realized in collaboration with the DEFA Studio für Documentarfilm, the DEFA Studio für Documentary Film. This is very important. They also introduced this idea of the intergenre film exactly in order to articulate the conceptualization of that film and rest in contemporary conditions that cannot be only articulated through one particular genre. I'm going to show you this clip here from In the Dust of the Stars, just to give you an idea how that has been articulated and placed into a cinematic narrative.
Thank you. I mean, just to tell you, I mean, we have these kind of typical scientific attributes in the film. Now, I mean, this guy is from the Sinaios people, like, trying to receive the call of help from the tourist people on the TAM4 planet,
and they have arrived in the spaceship, of course. But this is also how the kind of socialist future film looks like. I mean, yeah, so just... I'm going to go ahead and get started.
he has been very skeptical to arrive on planet 10-4. Before that he had received kind of greater frequencies where he could decipher that the theme source takes this planet on 10-3 or system 10-3. And before that sequence they all had to be divided for parts but he didn't work. And this is the 2-3 people. The
I'm going to go! Get out of here! We are Turi, this is our plan! You're going to go! Go! Okay, what we are following here is a kind of narrative, a narrative that we have been
exposed many times in the East as a kind of class enemy who is oppressing people and exploiting kind of people for here in that case it's kind of articulated through the people of the Turi who are oppressed as a colonized people by Temphur which is another system that's kind of previously has invited them for welcoming and so on and he is the guy who is suspicious and it goes on and on it's a kind of a narrative that tries to articulate the victim hero constellation that kind of articulates also the depiction of labor and it kind of indicates and articulates also
a form of the socialist future film. So the thesis, I mean we can analyze this and this is a film scholar, that's Sonia Fritschen, amazing film scholar, Igen Turner, Simon Spiegel, there are people working on this but nevertheless, I mean, I would like to also introduce a different kind of horizon towards this. The thesis is a product of a socialist ideology in the context of the Cold War. Reading it sometimes causes sincere in my stomach of thought. The thesis is impregnated by a Soviet Marxist-Leninist ideology, fabricated into empty signifiers that would have arrested and eliminated any forms of dissident thinking towards it. It's important to say that because growing up in an elementary school, a socialist education simply makes you feel suspicious to any forms of state socialist ideology
or also any other forms of state thought ideology. One third of the thesis could be thrown into the bin of history. The thesis argues with some Brecht here and there, Bertolt Brecht, Messinghaus, Stanislaw Lemme, of course, Cigar Wertow, even Noel Birch appears. A lot of Marxism, writings of Lenin and Marx, particularly also on scientific socialism. Some Erich Honecker and Wolfgang Lambert, which really makes me vomit. I mean, this is really, you can't go, I mean, so, and there's a lot of Soviet and Polish philosophers, futurologists, and theorists of science that hardly are known today and that you also hardly find when you Google them. So, for example, M. G. Jaroszewski, M. Kargan, Franz Löser,
maybe that's someone that resonated because he seems to be quite compelling. Gita Nickel, a documentary filmmaker, who also addressed particularly the conditions of perception. V. Samohin who investigated the neo-positivist understanding of how to activate a background in order to draw the viewer into the scene. So this has to be articulated. Whatsoever, these are also forms of knowledge that are absent in faculties of historical knowledge, in institutional curriculums or in macro-political agendas, but they exist, inhibited, as lived experience, lingering around until 1989, lingering around as a poetic political virus, as Sue Neroni would propose,
waiting for the right conditions to break out. And why is this moment now that we want to look into this kind of socialist kind of history? What is it that draws us in there now? So I would argue they are undead, rumbling, in transgenerational time, at least producing a sense of certainty that systems can break down and that imagination is the only thing we have, a Lacanian drive in us. Maybe these forms of knowledge are ruins of a lost socialist project on global scale after 1989, which are ruins of a complex multilayered modernity than a single monolith only capitalist one. I mean, this, yeah, I know it's controversial, but I think, yeah, socialism is a result of modernity.
Capitalism is not the only principle rule in here. A modernity in which the concept of socialism is one political strand that turns towards a communist horizon that seems to be lost around 1989. Those ruins are remnants of lived experience which turned into documents and generational distance to those who have not lived but learned about the experience. Those ruins shelter impatient zombies of a failed socialist plan, zombies that rumble impatiently with the politics of memory because the lived experience is undocumented, unrecorded, unwanted, disqualified and depressed, but archived, stored in bodies, in films, in transgenerational time and unspeakable narrations. ruins that mutate into monsters sometimes, turning or giving birth to boys called Ferdinand.
So, Frauke Petri just gave birth to a boy called Ferdinand. And she is part of a generation third, generation East, the third generation East, which is a generation that has been born in the 70s, enjoying socialist education, but then higher education in a different system. Or as Jodie Dean understood in 2012, communism is a loss and a force and a force of loss. That communist horizon had never been reached, it never has been fulfilled, or as the film-maker who I am held with Arben is in his thesis, the fulfillment of the social mission through the shaping of socialist futures in all film categories, again we have with the inter-genre film, towards the development of a communist consciousness. and I mean this is like we have the socialist futures and the communist consciousness,
two different things, is a long-term task which can be fulfilled only through the ensemble effect of all media. And I guess this is what makes it also quite compelling because what we are looking here into is a transdisciplinary approach to filmmaking. This includes in particular literature, theatre and the film in its various genres, in the cinema and on the screen, including a press information policy that is more strongly oriented towards this topic than before. And I show you this hilarious, amazing diagram, which is a quintessence basically of this practice-based PhD. I just will go through this, I mean this kind of summarizing what is needed, what kind of infrastructure is needed,
kind of constellation also of disciplines, practices, methodologies are needed in order to produce socialist future film which like at the end is what comes out here. It's kind of a diagram. So we have it just like very roughly here is a society being in constellation with society consciousness. So this is I mean you also can see it's like I mean it's not kind of impregnated entirely by socialism or communism per se, it tries to provide a diagram of how to raise consciousness towards this communist horizon, towards a kind of improvement of human thought. I will come to this in a second. So, and the most important element, methodologically speaking, is to define a problem.
This appears here, the problem process, the process of problem. The creative dialogue, the problem-lösung phase 1, the solution of the problem phase 1 and the solution of the problem phase 2. And I will come to the problem-prämisse in particular because it seems to be like a major thing that they borrow from Franz Löser, who is this philosopher who emigrated from the United States McCarthy era to the GDR and he was teaching at the Humboldt University. but he got into trouble in the eighth with the GDR regime and then he exiled again away from the socialist state to West Germany. Quite compelling figure that it's worth to investigate further. So he proposed the idea of the interrogationslogic, the logic of interrogation, in order to define
a problem that could, like it's not only a problem of defined problem as such, but that stands in conversation and dialogue with creative processes and these creative processes are informed and this is I mean we have the ideology by the cultural functionary here is the character the cultural function of course is the state I mean the state, the cultural ministry but also part of that is and she has a lot of qualities or she I mean ideology and individual being a cultural niveau a scientific knowledge and kind of a scientific, creative thinking, an artist, what is this? Creative thinking, I translated it differently, and a cultural political experience. But he also, she is the dramaturg,
the scriptwriter, the dramaturg, as much as with the author, very important role in the whole thesis, with of course the cameraman and the director of the film. So this is a kind of conditions of production that is proposed that kind of suggests the production of the artistic process of creation, of construction, I would call it, of the socialist future film. And where am I now here? So the problem premiss, and this I quote you also from the thesis, the premise, assumption of the problem, however, should not be confused with the problem setting, which emerges only in the creative dialogue with the author. If the premise, assumption of the problem is understood as a challenge to the creative dialogue, The first step is to create common conditions for this dialogue through targeted information.
For this reason, in our practice, the premise or the assumption of the problem is followed by an offer of information material, which contains material information and on the other hand, stimulating material, for example, fiction, to a similar material. And in the thesis, they are delineating a few concrete examples. So what I'm saying now is a shortcut like crazy, because the thesis was published in what's defended in 75, but they have been starting to work together already in the early, early 70s. Again, Deva Futum was founded in 71, but also Helwig was traveling in Ghana, Accra in the early 60s. So what the kind of the assumption or the premise of problem what they introduce is for example, the communist time travel,
communists of the 16th century meet communists in the 22nd century. The eradication of colonialism, it's a very important element that plays a crucial role here in the film of In the Dust of the Stars. Anti-imperialism, human and the collective, very important. Human and the machine, which they call a problem film. And the communist world is a comedy. And all comes with concrete examples. So I just would jump to one thing. I mean, the thing is, I mean, this makes it really difficult. It's the first time I'm also quite nervous to talk about this because we have all these references that are just not at the shelf to relate to immediately. So it's only what I propose are kind of sequences to deliver a horizon to think with now.
What they say also in relation to this question of cybernetics, I mean this kind of socialist future film that is built in technology, where they claim, and they go here also to the work of Jaroszewski, a Polish theorist of science, who insisted in kind of the abolition or the sublation, the aufhebung of the separation between thought and imagination, of thinking and fantasizing, in order to kind of create a possibility to understand thought always as logical. There's only correct logical thought or non-correct logical thought, but never extra logical thought. This is a principle. And they would also reason or introduce the question of mathematisation. Mathematics plays an important role of the basic process of
creative thinking is necessary in order to liberate the human from inferior forms of thinking through the use of automats. I thought this was quite important to bring in here because we are on this kind of moment of also ideological battles, how to relate to the question of technology. So, So, Mathematisation, it does not mean that the automaton for creation in the artistic process, for example they quote contemporary creating computer art, would be the future. Rather, it means an improvement of thinking, a higher quality and a better planning of increasing mental cultural needs. The needs is also a very important element here. And in order to kind of indicate this, I play another kind of clip from In the Dust of the Stars,
which is, I mean, I have not to explain very much, but it's where the technology is like really helps the human to get a better person. And this is, I have to look up where I find this. I mean this is the Staub der Sterne, it's a great film to watch, it's a classic what they call now that science fiction film, if you would have more time you could go off to another film, but this is like really a very good film. So he got also a treatment, there are sequences where people are brainwashed, hilarious, like also so visually, almost in a Wodafian way.
And he also got brainwashed because he was captured when he was investigating the Thuring people's working condition. And now we see what's going to happen. He tries to remind you something to remind him. But it doesn't work. He is mentally blocked. I don't know what to explain his behavior. Mental blocked? Listen... When I was at this ship, I suddenly felt like I couldn't think of what I wanted. I wanted to... Moment, all the way. As far as I know,
I can say Ultraschall in a mental dose. I'm afraid of the pain. But you're not even with Ultraschall. I have even a strong dose of Corinne. If it's about a pain, it should be on-screen. But an acoustic influence is possible? Let's try something optical. I found a special photo in the video. Maybe help his memory. There you go.
There you go. There you go. There you go. See? There's a mountain. The men? The turi? The planet? The planet? I will be sure to sleep 24 hours. Then we'll see. It's hard to be, that not only Sukko, but also we others, that we all mentally blocked. If that's so, we have to think something, not to speak, not to speak, since we blocked. Our computer should have to find out if our conversations are compared.
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Elig, is there a possibility? Yes, it's something. But the effect is... ... is to go to 24 hours. Thank you.
Okay, I'd like to thank the Van Abbe for inviting me. Of course I'd like to thank Sven and Eric and Yantine for endless emails and putting up with me. I'd like to thank Charles, Annie, the rest of the team here at Van Abbe, and all the speakers for their brilliant presentations today. What I'm going to talk about is a kind of work in progress around the question of a kind of a genealogy of African futures, or a genealogy of continental futures, as I call it. I'm sure you've noticed that as you come in towards the conference, if you move through the museum, you'll see the exhibition that's here.
And you'll see at a certain point, you'll see a kind of a display of books. And these books are effectively a library. And there's lots of exhibition work around libraries. The Chinranga Library, the Bidoune Library. there are lots of projects in which certain kinds of libraries circulate outside of libraries, outside of universities. So this is a certain kind of anti-colonial and de-colonial library. And so you see certain names, you know, you see James Baldwin, you see Paul Gilroy, you see Angela Davis, but there are some missing names, and those names are symptomatic and they're compelling. for their absence, and it's those names I want to focus on today.
I think when we work on the constellation between decolonization and independence, between modernity and modernism and modernization, between development and industrialization, between futurity, futurology and futurism, when we work in these constellations, there are certain privileged figures. Key, of course, is Franz Fallon. And then maybe after that would be, say, Amilcar Cabran. And these are something like the good objects of decolonial theory. But what I'm interested in is the bad objects. The bad objects who tend not to be quoted, who tend not to be displayed in libraries, in exhibitions.
Because when you return to the years of independence and the years of decolonization, in order to understand what was at stake in this question of a liberated future, what was at stake in the question of a continent freed from colonial forces, you'll see that the names that emerge are not only Fanon, and they're not only Cabral. you see the names of Leopold Senghor, you see the names of Julius Nerey, and above all you see the name of Kwame Nkrumah, the first Prime Minister of Ghana, which became a republic and became a one-party state in 1964.
And the reason Nkrumah doesn't get mentioned is because he stands as something like an archetypal bad object, an archetypal fable of decolonization gone wrong, of independence turned toxic, of democracy turned dictatorship. But for me, those are exactly the reasons to return to him. Those reasons are exactly why one would return to the constellation, not in order to narrate a virtuous object which makes the act of recovery transfer its virtue to you, but on the contrary, to understand precisely the forces that both turned the decolonization project inwards and on itself,
and also to understand the forces that acted on it. So instead of a kind of analysis which seeks to redeem the past, or an analysis which seeks to reward the present, or an analysis that seeks to indict the present, or indict the past in the tribunal of the present. On the contrary, what is at stake is to understand the forces that occur. And I think in Doreen's presentation on Helwig and on her nausea confronting scientific socialism, when you talk about the unspeakable narrations, when you talk about the ruins that are disqualified, what is at stake is a future that is destroyed
and a future that is narrated to us as one that is impermissible, a future that is foreclosed. So one gets used to hearing the same set of names circulating over and over, and other names are foreclosed. They never emerge. So I very much appreciate Mackenzie Walk's reading, in which J.D. Bernal is re-read so that he in some way comes from the present, although he's very much a figure of the early 20th century. So I very much appreciate the anachronistic imperative at work in rereading J.D. Bernard. And it's in something like that anachronistic spirit that I want to return to the moment of Nkrumah, Kwame Nkrumah, the moment of the Convention People's Party and the filmmaker Joachim Helwig, whose film Doreen showed two clips of.
So maybe a good way into this set of ideas is to show a clip, it's about four minutes, from Helwig's first film, The Black Star, from 1964. So I think the lights are down. So let's play the clip. Thank you. First of all, I would like to introduce myself. My name is... I come from the German...
It is called Capital. Besides that, there is a smaller conflict which was actually a lecture of Karl Marx. It is cool. Besides that, you will also read Karl Marx with labor, price, and profit. For those who will have trouble in the beginning, I expect you to improve with time.
you can also take fundamentals of political economy by a Soviet writer, Ekeke. This institute is therefore organized on the basis of scientific socialism, based on Marxism-Denonism and Harvin as its guide, in Khrumizing, as expressed in philosophical conscience. The role of the Khrumar Geologica Institute in the socialist revolution of our society and the ultimate identification of our continent is an estimate. Students who pass through the institute, the marker of our geological orientation... Bauern und Arbeiter, Mitglieder des Zentralkomitees unserer Partei, Minister und Propagandisten kommen in das Barney-Emkuma-Institut nach Geneva, um ihre Kenntnisse und ihr politisches Wissen zu erweitern.
Denn der Sozialismus braucht zu seinem Aufbau Sozialisten. The Türen of this institute is all of them, all of them from Africa and from the other world, who will fight against imperialism. Oh, hallelujah, hallelujah In the struggle of our sin, our victory victory
Oh, hallelujah, hallelujah In the struggle of our sin, our victory victory So, I think what is at stake in this piece is that we often see a certain fable that blocks representation. So the fable is that the Convention People's Party of Ghana, the CPP, won power in colonial
times through the ballot box. And then once they won independence, the democracy that they had promised was immediately abolished and replaced with a dictatorship. And this dictatorship built up a cult around its leader, Dr Kwame Nkrum, who was elevated to almost godlike proportions, who became a despot, who flung his political opponents into jail. And then the CPP, the party, at the time in 1957, the largest political party in West Africa, indulged in an orgy of ostentatious spending, corruption and general mismanagement,
which was bound to end up in a national disaster. Against such conduct, by Nkrumah and by the CPP, surely it was the duty of those in the developed countries to protest against this dictatorship. surely they would be failing in their commitment to the developing world if they did not rigorously investigate and publicise these matters as a warning to other states coming to independence who might otherwise fall into similar evil ways. So the arc of Ghana from 1957 to 1966 becomes a cautionary tale, becomes a fable of democracy turned dictatorship.
And so as a result, the footage that we just saw is footage that is impossible to imagine being filmed in either the UK or the US or anywhere else in the Cold War. Because what we saw were something like the cadre, the vanguard of students who were gathered around a place called the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute, the KNII. And the KNII was founded in 1961 and ran up until the overflow of the CPT in 1966 and was designed as something like the hub of what Nkrumah and what many people at the time
called the African Revolution. So this is Nkrumah in the book Africa Must Unite from 1963 in the chapter called Building Socialism in Africa. And this is him giving his description, his vision of the role that the KNII plays. He says, teachers and instructors are recruited directly from schools and teacher training colleges for part-time work. Others are prepared at the party's training centre, the Kwame Nkrumah Institute at Winneba, which is responsible for the party's general political education. All, from members of the Central Committee, ministers and high party officials, to the
lowest propagandists in the field, pass through the course at the Institute. Farmers, factory workers and others from all walks of life meet at Winneba, where they have the opportunity to broaden their political knowledge and ideological understanding. They strengthen their qualities of loyalty and discipline, thereby increasing the total discipline of the party and the loyalty of the general membership. The Institute does not crater for Gala alone. Its doors are open to all from Africa and the world who seek knowledge to fit themselves for the great freedom fight against imperialism, old or new. For we have a tremendous Herculean task before us.
It calls for all our attention, all our brains. Our party, through all its members, must show its merits in this our greatest mission yet, the building of a socialist Ghana and the laying of the foundations for the political and economic magnification of Africa. So what you saw was the kind of the vanguard, the young figures of the KNII, who effectively represent something like the hub around which Nkrumah envisions an entire party spreading its wings and embracing the nation. and in the same year of 63
an American modernisation theorist called David Apter who was part of an entire body of writing which is usually characterised as area studies or development studies but is more specifically and should be better understood as modernisation theory figures such as Edward Schills the early Clifford Geerts all of whom drew on the functionalist theories of Talcott Parsons, and all of whom drew on the translations of Weber's sociology, effectively trying to work out a functionalist understanding of what they called political institutional transfer. That's to say, decolonisation. That's how they understood it, political institutional transfer.
So in 1963, David Aktor writes an essay called Political Religion in the New Nations. And he's referring to Ghana, to Guinea, to Mali, to China and to Indonesia. And he says, what bridges the gap between ruler and rule, individual and society? Not the actualities of industrialization and a restructuring of social life on an industrial basis. Rather, an ideological position is put forward by government that identifies the individual with the state. Modern political leaders come to recognize quickly, however, that no ordinary ideology can prevail for long in the face of obvious discrepancies between theory and practice.
A more powerful symbolic force, less rational, although it may include rational ends, seems necessary to them, This force is what I call political religion. It feeds its own categorical imperatives into authoritarian political structure, on the one hand. On the other, as we shall indicate, it affects the most fundamental needs of individuals by specifying through the state religion the permissible definitions of individual continuity, meaning, and identity. And so he says that political religions function through what he calls mobilization systems. Mobilization systems are profoundly concerned with transforming the social and spiritual life of a people by rapid and organized methods.
And this is what characterizes countries such as Ghana, Guinea, Mali, China and Indonesia. Indonesia, the desire to transform social and spiritual life by all means in rapid and organised methods. Under those conditions, he says, the discontinuities between a modernisation that moves ahead of industrialisation tends to need what he calls a mobilisation system. And the Kwame Krumah Institute is the hub of the mobilisation system. Now only East Germans could film this because the UK and the US were at odds, if not absolutely hostile to
the very existence of the Kwame Krume ideological institute. So what is fascinating to see in this is a couple of things, which is that the obviously staged and corny choreography, clearly the dubbed sound design of the clapping, the sheer awkwardness of it does not, cannot quite contain something like the glimpse of a youth culture, that the KNII is a youth culture which embraces people who seem in their early 20s, people who seem older, and that there's a certain style, a certain uniform, a certain attitude. So what Helwig shows, and at a certain point you can see Helwig running behind, at a certain point you see
Helwig and he stops behind the two speakers, one of whom is the director, called Kojo Addison, and at a certain point you see Helwig stop as if he's back to film from behind and then he runs off and then you see another person run behind him. And so what Helwig captured was something like an affinity between an East German one-party state socialism and what was seen as a new one-party state socialism. And what it showed was something that a figure like David Apter could not imagine, which was effectively the pleasure that youth could take inside a one-party system.
as if the notion of a political religion did not allow for certain kinds of political blasphemy, certain kinds of political heresy, certain kinds of political pleasures to play out. But you begin to see that in certain moments, even in this short clip. The mobilization systems that you see in this short clip can be specified. When Kedra Anderson talks about Nkrumahism and philosophical consciencism, he kind of swallows his words, but they refer to very specific ideological mobilization systems.
Nkrumerism was the attempt by the right wing of the Conventional People's Party to take all of Nkrumer's writings and to build something like a system, a static system, a doxa, an orthodoxy, which would in fact result in axioms, the axioms of Kwame Nkrumer, a little book that you could buy just like the words of Chairman Mao, which you could quote. So Nkrumism was a right-wing term which was adopted by left-wing, in which the cadres within the party competed to appoint Nkrumism to the level of a doctrine. And philosophical consciences are in Nkrum's book from 64, in which he attempted very elaborately to work out something like a philosophy of decolonisation.
And so those are the code words within that film that the people who are watching it would understand. So in the brief time I have left, I would say that if we understand the KNI as something like the nucleus of several mobilization systems, of Nkrumerism, of Consciencism, then there's one other mobilisation system that cannot be pictured directly, but which nonetheless determines the whole thing, which is Pan-Africanism. Pan-Africanism cannot be pictured directly precisely because of its scale
and its intercontinental, transcontinental, transnational scale. But it's what Nkrumah gestures at in that quotation that I read, in which he evokes something like the giant scale of a Pan-African project. And Nkrumah was talking about this all his life. He continually referred to it. But maybe an even more compelling figure, less understood, is the Senegalese theorist Sheikh Antidiop, who's usually understood as a civilizationalist, whose role was to establish something like the African civilizational formation and diffusion of Egypt.
But what's less known is that Sheikh Antidiop was also a well-known radiologist who studied with Frédéric Joliot-Curie in Paris and who set up his own radiocarbon dating laboratory in Senegal. And in 1960, he formulated what he called an energy doctrine for Africa. So he tried to work out something like the energetic infrastructure for Pan-Africanism. and so what he was saying was he wanted to envision a schema of continent-wide energy development that takes into account at one and the same time renewable and non-renewable energy resources, ecology and technical advances of the coming decades. So that was in 1960 and then in
1978 he returned to it and drew out a very elaborate system for what he called African-Arab cooperation. And what Sheikh Antidiop, I think, recognised was that the oil crisis, the so-called oil crisis of 1703, was a crisis for America and the West, but for the Arab countries, it was one of the first opportunities to weaponise the relation between energy and finance and price, to weaponise the pricing system against America for its support of Israel. So it was actually an anti-colonial or anti-imperialist or anti-Zionist financial weaponization of pricing. And Diop kept a close eye on this notion and worked all his life to bring Arab and African
cooperation together. And so in this book, Black Africa, the Economic and Cultural Basis for a federated state. He tried to work out something like an understanding of economies in the light of the coming depletions of hydrocarbon fossil fuels. That's in March 78. So he was far ahead of his time in his understanding of the energetic basis of Pan-Africanism. And so the final and last point would be that Pan-Africanism is usually understood as something like a wishful dream, but actually it was, when you read Antidiop, you realise that it was actually a kind of an economic, military and transgovernmental project, which was eminently
practical. And the reason it didn't succeed, hasn't succeeded, but the reason it still persists as a negative presence is not only because of the impossibility of it, quite the opposite, it's because Pan-Africanism was effectively blocked by the European Economic Community, which we now know as the European Union. So in 1957, in the same month as Ghana signed off on its independence, the six countries of Britain, Holland, Italy, France, Germany and...
That's in Rome. No. Holland? Did I mention Holland? Yeah. West Germany. yeah not East Germany but West Germany gathered in Rome to sign the Treaty of Rome. So in one month apart the Treaty of Rome worked out what they called something like a Treaty of Association in which the colonies of Belgium and France would be linked to a vision of what they called a Greater Euro-Africa. A Euro-Africa, a European Africa, a Euro-Afrique. So in 1957, there was a notion that the resources of Africa would be at the service of a greater Europe.
And so very briefly, I'll just quote this briefly. Here we are. By adding the African territories, the common market would include more than 200 million inhabitants, and Europe would have access to the raw materials necessary for its sustainability. These empires would constitute a great historical landmass, which would allow the dream of Euro-Africa to become real. and so this particular diplomat says I consider what has been done in Paris concerning the African territories to be of an absolutely exceptional importance.
One, a new market of more than 50 million inhabitants is thus open for the European countries. Two, the treaty surpasses its purely commercial and economic character because it is the introduction of a common policy of the countries of Europe in Africa. So from 1924 onwards, the notion of a pan-Europeanism was formulated, and the popular name for this pan-Europeanism was Euro-Africa. And from 1924 until 1957, and the Treaty of Rome, this was pursued rigorously. And after 1957, despite independence, in 1963 in Yaoundé in Cameroon, 14 French-speaking African countries signed up.
And then Yaoundé II in 1970 confirmed it, and then so did a convention in Lomé, and so did a convention in Cotonou in Benin. And to this day, these conventions exist. So the question then becomes, if Pan-Africanism was merely a dream, then the question would be, why were the architects of the European Union so insistent on integrating the so-called overseas territories into the so-called greater Euro-Africa? And why were they so insistent on maintaining that after so-called independence? In other words, the relation between Pan-Africanism and Euro-Africanism is not only a question of impossible dreams, but it's a question of an actual contest and competition over resources and over the future of the continent.
and an inner world in which the European Union is both unstable but is as financially dictatorial as ever, a world in which we belatedly understand the notion of that financial dictatorship, clearly the extent to which we understand the European Union as a financial dictatorship summons up as if in negative the dimension of what a pan-Africanism would be. Thank you. I'll take it.
I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. It was a bit of a taxi related crisis. It turns out it's impossible to get a taxi in Eindhoven on a Saturday afternoon. One of our speakers really had to leave. Thank you so much, Doreen and Kojo, for paying such close attention to the anachronistic imperative,
as Kojo called it, and sort of going beyond all too understandable phobic responses that one may have to certain pasts and their blocked futures. I found it intriguing also that Kojo you return to Pan-Africanism as a dream but then going precisely beyond this notion of Pan-Africanism as a dream to really focus on the actual fight over resources. sort of hold the whole language also of you know a certain project as as utopia or as a dream can also be incredibly problematic and yeah i think so i think um i was um i reread uh utopia thomas
more's utopia and uh and i'd forgotten if in fact if i ever realized that um in utopia king utopas travels to this country called Abraxa and effectively occupies it and enslaves all the indigenous inhabitants and forces them to build a trench. And the trench is what turns Abraxa into an island and then he renames it and he calls it Utopia. So Utopia is clearly something like a colonial protocol. it's hard to envision it as a utopic project unless you precisely understand the colonial dynamics in this utopian protocol.
So the text clearly reflects the discovery of the Americas, right? It reflects that moment. Utopia is situated somewhere out there in Moore's narrative. The idea that the right-wing exposed left-wing desire for utopia, that seems to be a later accretion that emerged much, much later. When you go back to it, there's nothing left-wing, there's nothing inherently progressive about utopia. that the way we read it and inherit it is quite different. But then the question also is what qualifies as utopia, right?
And utopia, as you say, has become a kind of comf-boclif, right? It's a weaponized term because any form of society that is not supposedly liberal Western capitalism is utopian utopian and therefore possibly potentially unavoidably totalitarian, etc. So there are no alternatives, right? There is no different way of thinking and shaping society. Which I guess is also a dominant narrative about all forms of real existierender socialismus actually existing in socialism, which indeed none of us are interested in glorifying or even redeeming in many ways.
But as Doreen, as you also stressed, it is about not reclaiming, not a failed, let's say, social model or economic model, but it is about reclaiming certain, let's say, modes of operating, of organizing thoughts, of structuring processes. You had this great diagram here. But that actually awards revisiting at the very least and reproblematizing. Just now I saw this about a horrible exhibition at the Deutsche Kinemateek in Berlin about science fiction film. And of course they show a few examples from East German science fiction films, GDR science fiction films, but they all have to fit into this topology of tropes that all science fiction
films seem to consist of. So there is no actual room for considering the fact that this was not supposed to be science fiction, it was supposed to be something else, and it was supposed to be an inter-genre phenomenon, as you say. So at the Kinematheik it's all about science fiction as a genre, which I thought was really an interesting point, that it's supposed to be messing up the genres and existing between the genres. And of course with Kojo you in a sense use Helwig in a different way, you use the Black Star film as our point of entry into discussing Ghana and necromanism and pan-Africanism and EU Africa and so on.
But could you perhaps also say a few more things about film but also perhaps in a broader sense culture in this mobilization system? So what role did Helwig, but other local as well as visiting filmmakers and artists play in that organisation? Yeah, I tend to think that communist cinema inherits the debate between utopian and scientific socialism. The 19th century debate, the Martin Engels stage over the direction of socialism, their rejection of vegetarianism and vivisection and their dismissal of the cultic and spiritualist
dimensions of socialism. I tend to think communist cinema tries to have it both ways. It tries to say that cinema is itself a scientific, technological project in itself and it extends So, Vertov would be the clear example, but actually pretty much every communist filmmaker who you can understand is a cine-Marxist, all of them, from Vertov to Semben to Ferrocchi, all of them are cine-Marxists who try to put the scientific tendencies of cinema at its utopian imperative. So they try to actually fuse the two and say they are not at odds and they are not in tension.
Actually, communist cinema can do both. It can reveal the audience to itself differently. And I think what's fascinating about Black Star and what's fascinating about Doreen bringing this film back into circulation and thinking with it is because it's here you see this communist cinema making the connection to the moment of an experiment in African socialism, which is what the Convention People's Party is. It's like the first and most sustained experiment, the nine-year experiment in African socialism,
which is, again, a keenly debated subject at the time. All these figures, Nerey, Senghor, Diop, they all weigh in with their arguments about what socialism is for continental purposes. They inherit an older argument from George Padmore, which is under his title, Pan-Africanism or Communism, the coming struggle for Africa. This is the key state. It's which way will the continent go, and which way will countries within the continent go, and which way will the masses go within that. So this tends to be narrated in terms of the charisma of the politician, but actually charisma as a Viberian term is double-sided,
because that charisma is not so much flowing from the leader to the party. It's that the followers, as it were, charismatize, this is said in Robinson's argument, the people charismatize the leader. In other words, the charisma comes from the people and the leader follows that. But what's fascinating is to see this connection between two different state socialisms, to East Germany and Ghana, both of which are in a way prescribed to this day, both of which fail to enter knowledge. And Doreen's work was to open that out, maybe through the figure of Grace Arnold, as this female economist who is there inside the Institute.
Do you have any thoughts about that? No, I'm listening, it's amazing. But also then, in contrast distinction to East German socialism or actually existing socialism in Europe, you clearly drew the distinction and you emphasized that this socialism of mobilization dependent on charismatic leaders or leaders who are made to be charismatic is really a sort of, let's say, a formation that occurs in certain decolonizing nations in certain post-colonial states, right? Rather than in, let's say, rather than in the GDR or the Soviet Union. Well, I mean, it's two things. That's how the American modernization theorists understood it.
They understood all of these states as having these charismatic figures who are dangerously charismatic. Charismatic authority is dangerous because it's not rational, it's not bureaucratic. So we have to understand it because it's tending towards autocracy, it's tending towards theocracy, you know. But I wonder, was that the case in East Germany? I think a very important element, and this maybe is the reason why we're trying to get into that, that we are all kind of interested in the kind of revolutionary moment, and what we are looking here, I mean, Accra, Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, Krummer but as much also the foundation of the state socialist one-party state socialist construct of East Germany has been the proclaimed result of the
revolution so I think this is all what I mean plays into this whole narrative also of the new era that question of technology there is another film the Leibert 2002, Lach 2002, it's a whole kind of narrative around this of a new era where technology is an instrument to enhance and to put on a different level, on a kind of a communist consciousness level, the question of cultural mental needs and the question of needs that is very precisely articulated. And I guess, I mean, I think this is like, this is where I attach all the necessity to look into that and kind of as a paradox form,
but also just really to be very clear and insistent that the capitalist modernity is like, of course, it's a dominant modernity, but the socialist horizon or the socialist project is not just a part of it or just, I mean, it's also kind of has played out to be a reference and a really existing system for millions of people for quite a long time. I mean a post-war condition, sure. This is like after 45. And I think this is something that needs to be addressed but in its ambivalent paradoxical forms. So, but also to be prepared, I mean, for the moment we really have entered and we are going through the revolutionary process all of us, one way or the other, trying to do something that makes a difference.
But what is the next? This is exactly where the East German condition, the Ghanaian condition, the Algerian condition, this is where the real trouble started after something has changed or broken up the system. And this is the reason why I think the 1989 is absolutely important. 1968, yes, sure thing. But 1989 on a global scale, on a global political scale, totally... Yes. You're getting to the converted here. End of the marathon. No, yeah, yeah. Right? For example. Standard. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So... 1989. No, yeah, I mean, yeah, reshuffling the whole thing on the geopolitical scale.
and I lost my thought. No, thank you. Yeah, no. Yeah, I mean, why are we sitting now in this constellation and there's outside the library and I think what you pointed out, because it's really important. It's a decolonial, anticolonial library. Why does it now arrive in the institution? Let's not put that totally away. I mean, it's not dissident thinking what we try to do here. It feeds into the, to remake Western culture. I mean, this is where Terry Smith is really like important. I mean, yeah, it's like vampirism, so to speak. This is capitalist realism, narco-capitalism, vampiric capitalism, like extracting, and that's the reason why we have to, yeah, look into this kind of socialist moment and modernity.
As a modernity, that's much more complex, perhaps, that complicates the modernity we always criticize as a capitalist dominant supermodernity. Yeah. Are there any more questions, comments from the audience? Yeah, that period about 89, 91, yeah, fall of the Berlin Wall, but end of apartheid, collapse of the Zahato regime, like that's the fulcrum of world history. And it's also, you know, open door Mark II in China. That's when it really starts to accelerate, even if 78 is the first of two turning points. Obviously I really love this panel because it's doing this really difficult, important work to rearrange the archive, to de-provincialise the archive, because we don't know what happened
in the 20th century. All the resources are there, but they're never in a form where you can access them and think them. And I think these are two key pieces of that. I just wanted to add two tiny Australian footnotes. One, the Australian Film Radio and Television School was actually modelled on Eastern European film schools and it's where shooting with natural light came from in Australian cinematography which then went to Hollywood. So Australia is the mediator of a natural light cinematography style from the East to Hollywood. I'm obviously cartoon version right but it's just a nice anecdote. Second anecdote that's like very important to my people. The Australian Labour government elected in 1972 wanted to use Arab oil money to borrow it for a national development project that's not unlike what someone like Nkrumah would have attempted had it been able to.
It's not an accident that a constitutional crisis overthrows that government in 1975 that we now know the CIA was involved in. So you're just not allowed to do these things, even in a first world settler colonial democracy, whatever. you're still not allowed to do that stuff. So, like, good luck doing it in Ghana against not only Europe and the United States. And the United States was the piece that's missing in that version. I just wondered if you had a note to add to the... The Euro-Africa bit was fascinating to me because I have no understanding about what's the word. Because I tend to see it from the other side of the globe as being called what's more about the United States. Sure, yeah, no, absolutely. Clearly, the CIA and the IMF had a hand in the wave of coups across the 60s, specifically in Ghana.
The key book there is a brilliant book by Ruth First, the brilliant South African communist, a book called The Barrel of a Gun, Military Power and the Coup in Africa from 1970, which has case studies of the military coups in Ghana, the military coup that brought Gaddafi to power, the military coups in Saddam. A brilliant book. He's an amazing theorist. So, yeah, the USA is crucial at all points. But what's fascinating is the number of players because clearly there is a kind of play for power between USA and New Africa. And the figure that I didn't mention is a figure who's very compelling to me, besides
it because he never shows up, is a figure called Félix Fouet-Boigny, the old man, the founding president of Côte d'Ivoire. Côte d'Ivoire is next to Ghana. Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana are in a war, both a soft and a hard war, which is similar to the USA and the USSR. In 1957, Nkrumah challenges Hufwag-Buani to what they call a Western wager. And he says, here we are, 1957, in 10 years, whose economy will be better? So it's very much like the Khrushchev-Kennedy kitchen debate. It's exactly the same, played out in West Africa. And Hufwag-Buani is the key architect of Euro-Afrique on the West Coast.
He's the best friend of Moulet. Moulet is the French foreign minister who was in charge of African affairs. It was Hufouet-Boigny who made all the arguments for France-Afrique and Europe-Afrique. It was Hufouet-Boigny who, Frantz Fanon says, objectively speaking, African liberation would be better if Hufouet-Boigny was done away with. Fanon says this in towards the African revolution. This is the fanon that's really compelling, as well as the fanon of black skin, white masks. The fanon who actually says Huford-Bwani should be done away with because he's the objective obstacle to African liberation. That's to say it's Huford-Bwani who corralled and persuaded many French-Afghan countries that they would be better off under the economic block of the EEC.
which means today when you go to Senegal the Senegal have this CHF this particular currency which ties and pegs the Senegalese currency to the French to the French currency and you know 14 odd countries across West Africa still have that so the consequences of that are extremely extremely you know in a way the question of neocolonialism sounds so sloganizing, but when you read Nkrumah's Neo-colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism, what it actually is is an early version of cognitive mapping, in which Nkrumah and his team, because there's this argument that Nkrumah had
these ghostwriters, and his critics always say, well, these ghostwriters wrote his text, therefore we can't take them seriously, but in this case, the American writer Kevin Gaines says that his ghostwriters were three women. They were Shirley Graham Du Bois, the widow of Du Bois, and the head of Ghanaian television. They were Dorothy Padmore, the widow of George Padmore, and they were an American communist woman called Hody Edwards. And the argument is that they wrote, they researched and wrote neocolonialism. Although what I think they did was they probably headed other teams. I have a speculation that they built research teams who then went and found it. Because when you actually read neocolonism as opposed to just hearing it as a slogan. The depth of analysis is just
astonishing. It's closer to a bureautitude map. It really is. It's much closer to a bureautitude map than it is to a kind of sloganising, table-thumping diatribe. It's full of corporate networks. It's following the money to a relentless degree. There is no way one person could have written that book. It's undoubtedly written by a ghost team, and that's actually what makes the book even more compelling. So part of the project is to link, and so of course neocolonism is the book that supposedly the US Secretary of State called the Ghanaian Ambassador to account for the book, and it supposedly lost the Ghanaian government this large grant, supposedly. There's all these mythologies about this book, but this book
is not really read. So there is, I think the role of America is critical, but it's critical in the sense of returning and rereading a book like Neocolonialism, not as a finished system, but as a prototypical work of quality mapping. Fascinating. I could cure more ignorance by going and reading that now. How are we doing time-wise now? I guess we're over time already. Do you want to make a remark about the installation? I heard twice the installation interpreted as a library of African decolonization. It's an installation about the coming of a black Dutch artist with roots in the Caribbean.
So she has no relation to Africa. So that's why it's absent. I was referring specifically to the books themselves. Not so much to the installation, but thank you for clarifying the installation. Of course I understand the actual, I understand the context of the display itself, but I was making a point about the specific books that are on display and the role the books play. And in a way, once books show up outside of the library, they play a different role, because books are not there to be read. So what are they doing? There are copies of the books in the library. Yes, but that's not exactly my point. My point is that books play a role which is not purely a question of signification or meaning.
They're circulating in a different mode, in a different key, as it were. They're playing a different role and it's more the question of how come some books play a certain role and other books do not and what happens to those books. But of course I take your point and I like the presentation and I like the display very much. It's more this question of... In a way we've also returned to some of the genealogies and hidden histories that were being unearthed and presented yesterday because George Padmore, whom you've mentioned, was a close associate of Otto Huyshout and yesterday there was a presentation I think by Mitchell
Esaias about the Otto Huyshout archive which is part of the Black Archives. But yeah, I think we have to wrap things up. In a way, this was a perfect presentation or a perfect combination of presentations to end the day with because it provides us with openings rather than with a false sense of closure. There would be much more to say perhaps also about the role of film and of cultural production in revolutionary or post-revolutionary societies. the notion that actually the people, the subjects, the subjectivities still have to be formed, have to be created also through a process of cultural revolution, as Lenin put it in
the early 1920s. You know, your remarks about film as potentially bridging this gap that Marx famously articulated between scientific socialism and utopian socialism would be something to flesh out much further the specifics of the situation in East Germany and this wonderful flowchart that Helwig and Ritter presented, which attempts to, in a way, bureaucratize the imagination, but also perhaps to somehow save the role of the imagination in state-run bureaucracy and to somehow create a dialectical compromise between these two forces. But I think we have to leave it at that as an opening or a whole flurry and salvo of openings for further reflection, thought, speculation and action.