The beginning of 1971 was a rough time for prominent Black Panther Party militant Eldridge Cleaver. In exile since 1968 following a shootout with the Oakland police, he was living in Algiers and attempting, with his wife Kathleen, to hold together the “international section” of the Panthers. But conflicts over strategy within the party, fueled by FBI infiltration and violence, reached a breaking point that February, when party co-founder Huey Newton expelled Eldridge Cleaver and the rest of the Algiers group. To make matters worse, the “Marxist-Leninist” states that Cleaver had been most enamored with—China and North Korea—began to soften their relations with the Panthers’ primary adversary: the US government.

Feeling abandoned and isolated, the Cleavers jumped at an invitation to visit Brazzaville, capital of the recently-proclaimed People’s Republic of Congo, in April. Having tried to build a movement in the US that fused Black liberation and socialist revolution, the Cleavers were enticed by Africa’s first self-declared Marxist-Leninist government. At the end of the trip, returning full of excitement about what he saw in Congo, Eldridge wrote:

What the Soviet Union meant to Europe, what China meant to Asia, and what Cuba meant to Latin America, the People’s Republic of the Congo means to Africa and to black people everywhere… Now for the first time in history, Africa and the Black World have such a center of people’s power. And this center of people’s power is destined to exercise the same kind of influence upon Africa and black people as the other centers did in their parts of the world and upon their peoples.

But the trip to Brazzaville was also an opportunity to experiment with a new medium of communication at the time: video. The Cleavers, joined by two other Panther activists, brought a new handheld video camera to Brazzaville, entrusted to photographer Bill Stephens. Stephens quickly edited the footage (with guidance from French filmmaker Chris Marker over the phone), and it was then narrated by Eldridge. As historian Sean Malloy explains, the resulting film, Congo Oyé (We Have Come Back) became the start of the Revolutionary People’s Communications Network. The network, driven by Kathleen Cleaver, attempted to quickly create, replicate, and distribute videos that would connect disparate groups of former Panthers and their supporters around the world. But Congo Oyé seemed to quickly disappear until a copy was found preserved at the New York Public Library about a decade ago.

Roughly cut and coming in at just over 46 minutes, it is a deceptively complex film. Eldridge Cleaver’s narration molds the footage into a lesson for Black Americans about the power of Black sovereignty and armed struggle. But in the spaces between Cleaver’s narratives, the film also offers a rare glimpse into a little-known African revolution and the thinking of its most committed leaders, some of whom would be executed just two years later. What the film so compellingly shows is how these militants—some American and some Congolese—arrived at different interpretations of the revolution.