EUROPEAN POWERS FIGHTING IT OUT IN DRC

In this 1964 clip, we see Pan-Africanist Malcolm X (1925-65) pushing back on CBS News reporters who, like mainstream media past and present, love to strip all incidents occurring in Africa and the Global South of their context, obscuring Western culpability.

A CBS News reporter asked the chairman of the Pan-Africanist Organization of Afro-American Unity to condemn what the Western media labelled as the 'massacre' of European nuns held hostage in October 1964 in the resource-rich Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Malcolm rightfully reminded the journalist that the massacre occurred in a country that the Western states had deliberately destabilised. Lest we forget that it was Belgium, the UK and the US that orchestrated the brutal assassination of Congo's first democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Emery Lumumba (1925-61), shot by Western-backed Congolese forces, hacked to pieces and dissolved in acid, leaving behind a tooth only recently returned to his family.

Malcolm's reply serves as a stark reminder that the ongoing conflict that had k*lled more than 6 million between 1998 and 2010 began with Western powers vying for the Congo's mineral wealth since the late 1800s. Once again, Belgium, the UK and the US today back Uganda and Rwanda to violently loot Congo to ensure the resources enrich Western states and corporations.