Dusty reels, living history: Volunteers fight to save Congo’s TV archives

From the rusty tape reels stacked from floor to ceiling in the long-forgotten archives of Congo-Brazzaville's national television company, a priceless, fragile testament to the history of central Africa unspools.

For decades, Tele Congo's rolling cameras have captured the country's course from its time under French colonial rule through the Second World War and the Soviet-aligned era after independence.

"It's a treasure trove," said director and documentary filmmaker Hassim Tall Boukambou, pointing to the thousands of reels piled up on the shelves.

Since 2019, Boukambou and a handful of fellow volunteers have worked to save these archives in the national broadcaster's former headquarters in the capital, Brazzaville, whose ceilings are crumbling to the ground.

The tapes document everything from sports matches, concerts and musical recordings to news broadcasts and the litany of Stalinist-style trials held under the government that ruled Congo-Brazzaville from 1968 to the 1990s.

The oldest available archives date back to the 1920s, to the era under French rule, according to Boukambou.

- 'Miracle' survival -

Founded in 1962, two years after independence, Tele Congo became the first African television channel to broadcast south of the Sahara.

"And why in Congo specifically? Because we had Radio-Brazzaville," Boukambou said.

Since France's colonies in central Africa managed to evade the Germans, the French WWII government in exile made Brazzaville its wartime capital in 1940.

Radio-Brazzaville began broadcasting the same year, with its high-powered transmitter capable of reaching the south of France, ruled by a Nazi-collaborationist government after the country fell to the Germans at the beginning of the war.

When Congo-Brazzaville gained independence some 20 years later, the transmitter was still in place.

Thanks to that inheritance, Tele Congo became a cultural touchstone across the region, with households in Cameroon, Gabon and the Central African Republic alike all tuning in to the channel's broadcasts.

But as the years went by, Tele Congo declined, a victim of underfunding and competition from commercial channels even before the country was ravaged by civil war in 1997-1999.

When the broadcaster moved to a new headquarters in 2009, the archive tapes were left to rot in the half-ruined building.

A handful of soldiers still guard the site, whose once-bright television sets lie intact in the darkness for want of electricity.

Without air conditioning, the fragile film reels deteriorate quickly in the humid equatorial African air.

"It's honestly a miracle that we've still got usable material at all," said Boukambou.

Next door, three volunteers scrub up and dust off the old reels, hoping to make out a few clues as to their content from the writing on the side.

"When I first came here, I thought I was coming to earn something.

"I had never even heard of an archivist in this country," said volunteer Blanbert Banakissa.

A painter and electrician in civilian life, Banakissa has devoted his Saturdays to restoring the archives for the past five years and would like to make it his full-time profession.

"There are many people who don't know where we come from. But through these tapes that we've neglected, we can pass on this heritage to young people who aren't aware of what we've lost.

"That's what motivated us to embark on this work," he said.

- 'How many hours lost!' -

Once cleaned and identified, each reel is stored and arranged by theme on the already bulging shelves.

In a nearby room lie dozens of tapes deemed too damaged by the passage of time to be saved.

"On each reel, you have roughly an hour of footage. Just imagine how many hours we have lost!" Boukambou lamented as he looked at the pile.

"That's why we have to get to work urgently."

Once the restoration work is complete, the archivists hope to digitise their trove with the help of France's National Broadcasting Institute.

"We have a largely young population under the age of 35 in Africa, who need to delve deep into their history to meet today's challenges," Boukambou said.