“When will humans finally unlearn their quest for sovereignty?” So asks the 300-year-old Lileko tree at the end of Congolese artist and director, Sammy Baloji’s award-winning film essay, L’Arbre de l’authenticité [The Tree of Authenticity]. Starting with the discovery of a decaying collection of notebooks in the previously derelict Yangambi ecological testing station in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Baloji’s powerful and beautiful film reflects on the extractivism of the colonial presence in the former Belgian Congo through the story of two men, one Congolese, one Belgian, both involved in the work of the Yangambi station, once a leading center for agricultural research on the African continent. The Congo Basin is the largest tropical rainforest in Africa and the second largest in the world. It plays a key role in mitigating climate change in the world, removing more carbon dioxide from the earth’s atmosphere than it releases. However, its vital role as a carbon sink has been progressively compromised by continued deforestation caused by human activities, notably colonial extractivism. What has become the Yangambi Biosphere Reserve is now home to the distinctive Congoflux tower, installed by Ghent University in 2020 to measure greenhouse gas exchanges between the rain forest and the atmosphere. Images of the tower feature in Baloji’s film, reminding us of the central role of the Congo Basin in mitigating climate change.

The Yangambi notebooks, discovered by Belgian ecologist Koen Hufkens in 2013, date back to the 1930s and include weekly observations of 2,000 trees in the Congo rainforest over a period of 20 years. As such, they provide important historical data on the impact of climate change. The first chapter of the film is punctuated by readings of observations from the notebooks over stunning images of Yangambi and its surroundings today. The film is composed of three chapters, each narrated by a different character in the history of the testing station, starting with two scientists who worked there in the first half of the twentieth century. Chapter One tells the story of agronomist Paul Panda Farnana, the first Belgian colonial official of color and the first graduate from the Congo, who later becomes a political activist after fighting for Belgium in World War One; Chapter Two gives voice to Abiron Beinaert, a bored Belgian scientist and former director of the National Agricultural Institute, a specialist in oil palms. Both men die in unknown circumstances, adding a layer of mystery to the film. Finally, in Chapter Three, we read the words of the Lileko tree, witness to the exploitation of Congolese natural resources and its people by the Belgian colonial system since the end of the nineteenth century. In giving the tree a voice, through both the words on the screen and the extraordinary rainforest soundscape, Baloji’s film recalls Ivorian novelist Véronique Tadjo’s brilliant novel, In the Company of Men, where the majestic baobab tree comments on the precarity and destructive nature of the Anthropocene. Named the tree of authenticity by former Congolese dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, the giant Lileko later became a symbol of timber workers’ resistance when they used its trunks to block logging sites in a demand for higher wages. At this point, the tree was renamed the “tree of ancestral resistance” but, in each case, as Lileko reminds us, the tree was exploited by humans to glorify themselves.

Much of the film is shot with a fixed camera, placing the viewer in the position of self-conscious observer, mirroring that of colonial scientists in the former Belgian empire. The people of the modern-day DRC remain silent in the film: we observe them working in the former testing station to preserve the Yangambi documents, running towards a drone as it photographs the village, climbing book ladders in the archive, and wading through torrential rain, but they remain anonymous objects of the viewers’ gaze, forcing us to reflect on the objectification and exploitation of the Congo’s natural and human resources, which continue to the present day. L’Arbre de l’authenticité is a hauntingly beautiful and powerful film that highlights the impact of extractivist human activities on Africa and on the world. It recounts the entangled legacies of colonial and environmental injustice and calls for us to listen to the natural world rather than constantly strive to conquer it.