Viande de Brousse: Video Links

Here are some video links for further information:

White King, Red Rubber, Black Death: An excellent documentary on the history of Belgian colonial interference in Congo. The link between the needs of industry (in this case, rubber) and the brutal methods of extraction is an eerie mirror of the contemporary drive for rare minerals.

Congo Connection: Journeyman Pictures short feature about Coltan mining in Eastern Congo's national parks, home to the last redoubts of the Mountain Gorilla. The Journeyman Pictures YouTube channel has a wealth of documentary information on life, death and war in Congo.

The Assassination of Patrice Lumumba: A documentary about the life and assassination of Patrice Lumumba, Congo's first free president, demonstrating the responsibility of the Belgian and US secret service agencies.

The Human Cost of Conflict Minerals: A short video about a female survivor of Congo's apocalyptic tide of rape. Congo suffers perhaps the world's most severe rate of rape, and rape has become a widespread weapon of war and intimidation.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, episode 3: A stunning documentary by the BBC's Adam Curtis. An exploration of the roots and consequences of our love-affair with high-technology and networking. Includes an astonishing analysis of Congo's World War.

Belgium and the Congo: 50 years after Decolonization: A news short about the debate on Belgium's culpability for Congolese instability.

Welcome!

This is a project of Roger Peet and Ryan Burns; a bushmeat food-cart serving up information and interpretations of the history and present of the Democratic Republic of Congo, its peoples, forests and creatures, and of the glutton world that has chewed it ragged. Our aim with this object and the situations we place it in is to shed some brief light on a subject deeply shadowed by greed and complicity. The intersection of ecological devastation and explosive economic growth, the knife's edge where survival and catastrophe force impossible choices, and the bitter recapitulations of history and its cruelties are our subjects. Our medium: a food-cart, cut from historical and metaphorical cloth, serving the severed hands of Chimpanzees.

Why hands? They are one of the choicest and most expensive cuts of bushmeat on the market. We believe that their popularity is partly an echo of Colonial Belgium's brutal enforcement strategies, where the hands of thousands of Congolese were cut off in an effort to maintain slave labor regimes in the rubber forests. Severed hands have been given an arcane value by world capitalism's penetration of Congo.

We are trying to talk about who eats what. We want to know who gets to eat and who goes hungry, and we want to know what is destroyed to fill these bellies. Two and a half centuries after King Leopold's colonial edicts began arriving from Belgium, the vast heartland of the African continent is still pulsing to the beat of his dark drum. We want to bring that chilling music back to the West, to dip our fingers in the complicity that binds us together as consumers, and offer a taste to all.

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Video Links