From 1917, during the Russian revolution, all the way through to the late 1980s, the Soviet ideology that advocated Marxist ideals of color-blind internationalism and solidarity among the “oppressed of the world” resonated throughout the globe—including in the colonies, where social and racial inequality were an inseparable part of society. Intellectuals from different parts of the world—on the African continent, the Caribbean, as well as the Americas—saw the Soviet Union as a meeting point and thus a cradle for many communist-inspired revolutionary ideas. For the Soviets the 1950s was characterized by a growing interest in the development of long-term relationships with several countries on the African continent. This happened through Joseph Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev. These stimulating interactions between the Soviet Union and the expanding independence movements on the African continent culminated in the symbolic organization of the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students in 1957, where several delegations of African students were welcomed to Moscow. The festival attracted 34,000 people from 130 countries. Subsequently, on 5 February 1960, the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia (RUDN University), was established in Moscow. Soon the university was renamed after the murdered Congolese politician Patrice Lumumba and the official name became Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University. Students from Asia, Africa, and South America were given the opportunity to become specialists in various fields, in order to contribute to the construction of their newly independent countries.

In 1961, the urgency for education was confirmed during the Conference of African States in Addis Ababa which was dedicated to this issue. Due to a shortage of cadres in the aftermath of the independences, the number of African students in the Soviet Union increased drastically to over 5,000 by the end of the 1960s. Up until the mid-1970s, the Soviets had developed relationships with radical strands of the independence movements in Angola, Benin, Ethiopia, and Mozambique, some of whom fought for their independence with the support of Soviet militias. By 1990, on the eve of Soviet collapse, the number of African students had risen to 30,000, or 24 percent of the total body of foreign students. The reason why students chose to study in the Soviet Union varied from them simply looking for an educational opportunity, to them being attracted by the socialist experiment and looking for an anti-imperialist experience.

My interest in the geopolitical and artistic relations between the Soviet Union and the African continent—as well as the experience of African students in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War—was triggered by coming across a letter from Moscow in my family archives, sent by a family friend, who was a Rwandan studying near Moscow during that time. Both the period and this geographic encounter had also previously caught my attention, as several renowned filmmakers from the African continent had studied in the Soviet Union and carried home the renowned form of Soviet montage in their films—filmmakers Ousmane Sembene, Sarah Maldoror, and Abderrahmane Sissako, for example.

I started my research by exploring both the political and artistic interrelations in all the “layeredness” of the 1960s and 1970s, trying to gain an insight into the geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War, and their entanglements with the politics on the African continent after its many independences—taking particular interest in what the experience of individuals studying in the Soviet Union through a scholarship would be like. This research not only challenged my perceptions about that period in time—myself being of the generation that was raised after the fall of the Berlin Wall—but started to give me a deeper comprehension of this turbulent but also insightful period of society.

Little is known about the personal experiences of the African students, their personal lives, personal positioning, and negotiation with the communist ideology, nor their trajectories after their return to their homelands. Using a screenplay as a research method allows entry to this unknown space. Through the figures of Gilbert and Idrissa, the story’s protagonists, I want to explore the historical potentiality of two intersecting narratives: postcolonial and East European, as a refuge from a geopolitically constructed western reading of history. Being born in Rwanda, mostly raised in the west—in Belgium—has framed my perception of history, and by extension, my imagination and understanding around the Cold War and Eastern Europe. The experience of being perceived as a migrant enabled me to question and acknowledge the geopolitical ingredients in the imposed notions of history and, particularly, which histories are told. Therefore, I used counternarratives coming from more informal archives in the development of my research, such as oral histories and family archives.

My research resulted in the performance of a written screenplay, surrounded by a mapping of historical images in my studio during my residency at Wiels, Centre for Contemporary Art, Brussels. The performance—and its projections and the misunderstandings that unfolded in the collage of historical images and personal dialogues—was an experimentation in rehearsing ways of engaging with oral knowledge beyond reproducing the violence inherent as much in the Cold War era as in the present world. I would like to thank Anna Smolak, independent curator, for giving me the opportunity to perform this screenplay as part of the program Lectures on the Weather in Snagov, Romania, and through conversations helping me to find the words to explain what the experiment was about.