When the Second World War made copper, gold, diamonds, and tin central to the “slaughter of the war,” in Raymond Dumett’s words, “devoured by the assembly lines that made brass cartridges and cannon shells,” Belgian officials extracted these metals and minerals using Leopoldian methods: forced labor, minimal safety measures, and harsh repression of strikes. The mines sent virtually all their copper to the United Kingdom and most of their tin, cassiterite, cobalt, manganese, zinc, cadmium, silver, gold, and uranium to the United States. The uranium sent to New York had been gathered by hand, exposing the miners, Gabrielle Hecht writes, to “a year’s worth of radiation in about two weeks.” To fulfill additional U.S. orders, miners worked night and day. When their shifts were over, they returned to homes built with radioactive materials and to a tainted water supply.
This was not the picture the Belgian government wanted to paint of the Congo. The Belgian colony had been synonymous with colonial greed since Leopold’s days, and the government remained defensive, paranoid about criticism. During World War II, its propaganda agencies stubbornly repeated the Leopoldian myth: The idea that the king (who never personally visited the colony) was responsible for “pulling the Congo from the shadows of the jungle.” The agencies asserted that the Belgian Congo gave more raw materials to the Allies than anywhere else in Africa, no minor propaganda point in these years when hunger for materials raged. The Belgians hoped it was a point that would guarantee Allied support of their country during the occupation, and that when peace came, they would maintain their colony.
The point was to be made on film, the lingua franca of wartime propaganda. This was easy enough to arrange, because the Belgian Congo was teeming with filmmakers. Some of them worked for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, which was in the Congo to make sure that the United States controlled the colony’s uranium.
At the time, Belgium’s own best-known colonial filmmakers were Gérard de Boe, Ernest Genval, and André Cauvin. De Boe, a government employee, had lived and worked mostly in the Congo since the late 1920s. Genval was a poet and songwriter who traveled back and forth between colony and metropole and made films in the 1920s and 30s.
Cauvin was the man the Belgian government chose to lead the propaganda effort. A lawyer and filmmaker with a taste for drama, Cauvin had the right credentials and the right contacts. Just before the war, he had made two short films about artists that won him acclaim at the 1939 New York World’s Fair — Hans Memling, peintre de la Vierge (Hans Memling, Painter of the Virgin) and L’agneau mystique (The Sacred Lamb). He had experience filming in the Congo, where he made the 1939 Congo, terre d’eaux vives (Congo, Land of Living Waters) and Nos soldats d’Afrique (Our African Soldiers). He was also a member of the Belgian resistance, and after several members of his network were arrested at a Brussels café in 1942, he fled to London, where he asked his friend Paul-Henri Spaak, Belgium’s exiled foreign minister (and former prime minister), for a job. Spaak had just the one. In the shared jargon of war and diplomacy, it became known as the “Cauvin mission.”