The Mormon Assimilation Schools in the Democratic Republic of Congo

The Mormon settler-colonial project has extended itself into the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Situated in Kinshasa, capital city of the Democratic Republic of Congo, is a chain of trade schools, two orphanages and least seven private schools under the name American Academy of Excellence (abbreviated here as AAE). These school facilities were purchased and remodeled from existing Congolese schools by Utah real-estate businessman Rick Maingot, overhauled to take on a new mission led by his quarter-billionaire philanthropic partner Robert Workman. The primary organization claiming sponsorship for these programs is Robert Workman's TIFIE foundation, which stands for "Teaching Individuals and Families Independence through Enterprise." TIFIE is a U.S.-based NGO that has the purported goal of combating poverty in the global south by teaching practical trade skills and promoting entrepreneurship, primarily focused on the Kinshasa communities in Congo.

TIFIE's Hope Changes Nation program and Trade Schools are the latest programs serving this purported mission. They are aimed at teaching skills to either find jobs or start small businesses that can lead to personal economic advancement for those who have completed the program. The AAE schools are the largest part of the operation, which advertise themselves as teaching a bilingual English and French program, and allow parents to choose an optional trade education path for enrolled children in sewing, business management, machining, electricity, biochemical science, and pedagogy. The image put out by TIFIE's charity is one of positivist vision, generosity, through economic guidance: it aims to teach self-reliance and capitalist entrepreneurial values to the impoverished and underdeveloped so that these communities can create opportunities for themselves and lift themselves out of poverty.

When taken at face value, the narratives of the charitable-industrial complex teach us that Robert Workman's TIFIE foundation is a great model of the kind of generosity that wealthy people should exemplify—to give away their wealth selflessly as a means of helping others in need and to help them gain self-reliance. Who, according to these narratives, could be more in economic need than the children of Congo? Congo is a country where relative economic underdevelopment, poverty, and an artisanal mining economy fueled by global tech giants pushes Eastern Congolese children out of schools and into hard labor. Congo es experiencing genocide and displacement as these key mineral deposits are being fought over. Within the framing of "Congo as in need of saving" or even "Congo in need of developing its economic independence", running a charity focused on economy-building and education seems like a great show of solidarity to counteract this crisis. The claim that AAE schools are helping children and families become economically independent is something that must be examined, because it is a misleading one. In fact, when taken in totality of all of TIFIE's connections and income source, local independence is the exact opposite of what TIFIE is actually building in Congo.

I will argue in this article that these schools are in no way a neutral institution as they are presented to be. While AAE receives most of its funding from from TIFIE, another major financial contributor to the AAE schools, having financed equipment and entire facility renovations, is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, also known as the Mormon Church. Both Robert Workman and Rick Maingot are from Mormon families and have access to Mormon-affiliated universities and institutions. Though TIFIE presents the Mormon church's role as that of making one-off, uninterested financial donations, social media from their operations show that the Mormon church is deeply involved in these programs, and interested in how they can serve the church's own interests both expanding its church membership, and expanding the economic capital within church membership.

AAE schools are assimilation schools because they assimilate European languages and European anti-black narratives onto their students. These narratives cause lasting harm due to the way that children are taught through direct and indirect ways that aspects of their culture are fundamentally backwards, that they must be abandoned. It instills in vulnerable children who go through their program that embracing a white or white-approximate culture represents a path to economic freedom. The languages of instruction within AAE's schools are solely English and French, often second and third languages to the program's students. They are not any of the local languages, Lingala, Tshiluba, Kikongo and Swahili. The primary utility of English and French are not to the Congolese people, but rather to trade with European and European-settler nations such as the U.S. While some parents are paying to purposefully enroll their children in these schools, some students are orphans attending on TIFIE-funded scholarships. These orphanages receive visits by Mormon missionaries dressed as school faculty. Some students in this orphanage may even come from refugee program that would place genocide victims from the Kivu region into these schools. The primary language spoken in Goma is Swahili, a language not as prominent in the Tshangu neighborhood of Kinshasa on the other side of the country where AAE hosts its orphanages.

In this way, children enrolled in AAE schools are being assimilated not only into normalizing the exploitation that is happening to them, they are assimilated into praising their exploiters for the opportunities they are being allowed. On completion of this program, the majority of its students are funneled into trades where they will be set up to be exploited further for their wage labor which itself is often dominated by foreign monopoly. A select "excellent" few are given scholarships and an opportunity to become entrepreneurs themselves. Above all else, the AAE schools assimilate the children of Kinshasa into seeing the capitalist mode of production as the only path towards development. This mode of production and its domination by foreign assets, foreign land enclosure, foreign contracts, is the exact thing that keeps Congo in some level of underdevelopment because U.S. industry extracts immeasurably from it. Congo is not poor as NGOs like TIFIE frame it to be; Congo is the richest company on Earth in terms of its mineral wealth after all. Only its people are kept poor.

Most concerning of all is how these schools have been utilized in a power play to advance the political career of the Mormon superintendent that runs them. Hermès Itina Mayamba takes credit for the success of these schools via his large social media presence and makes very little mention of TIFIE altogether. In 2023 he was appointed as Stake President [1] overseeing multiple Mormon churches in the Kinshasa area. In March 2024, Hermès was elected as a Member of Parliament (Dèputè) for the entire nation. He belongs to a party that is aligned with DRC's pro-US president Félix Tshisekedi, and is now advancing both education and trade reforms that affect the entire nation of Congo.

Hermés Itina Mayamba, superintendent of 7 private schools and 2 orphanages in Kinshasa, which have received funding and donations from TIFIE and the Mormon Church.

Hermés Itina Mayamba, the Mormon Stake President, granting English-language certificates to two Mormon converts in Congo, one of which bears a Mormon missionary plaque.

Hermès Itina Mayamba, the Congolese Legislator, vice president of the Autre Vision du Congo (AVC) party's youth league, a party committed to the Congolese president and best friend to the U.S. tech sector, Félix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo

As this article will demonstrate, the schools were a political chess piece not primarily designed to uplift the Congolese people or help the Congolese people achieve economic independence, but rather to tighten the control that the U.S. economy and the Mormon church has over Congo's mining sector an advance their own growth, something that both TIFIE's founder and the Mormon Church ultimately profit off of. The exploitation of Congo by U.S. industry has led to an ongoing genocide in the northeast Kivu region of Congo, fueled by a Rwanda-backed proxy war for supply chain dominance over mineral deposits. Now more than ever, it is important to understand how the imperialism system functions in Congo. The LDS church and TIFIE are themselves one small, highly complicit fraction of it, but they are an excellent case study on the symbiotic relationship that charity, technology industry, and U.S. imperialism create as a system.

I was able to piece together this story because of my personal connection to it—Robert Workman, the spitting image of a white savior in charge of the TIFIE foundation happens to be my grandfather. I grew up observing the rise of his wealth, the monumental profits coming from his businesses, ProvoCraft-Cricut, GoalZero, and Barebones. I spent many holidays and family gatherings on his lavish property, Tifie Preserve, a many-hundred acre complex of private facilities and multiple mansion-class houses where he resides. For most of my life I was taught to normalize his wealth and my own family's relationship to it, to view him as a fundamentally good person because he is a generous philanthropist, using his wealth for good and coming to the aid of those in need.

Robert brags about his activities. I am certain that he might even believe in that savior image that he portrays himself to be. Because of his unabashedness about what he and other actors involved do, the information presented in this article was not very hard to find. But the fact of the matter is that no amount of "giving" will change the fact that the most successful of his businesses, GoalZero, is a highly profitable company which depends on mineral extraction in Eastern Congo (far out from Kinshasa). The economies that emerged in these communities due to the rise of U.S. big tech's demand for resource extraction keeps children out of schools and into slave-like debt bondage labor in the manufacture of every single one of its products. If Congo were to ever achieve true economic independence like TIFIE advertises, if GoalZero were to be run out of business by eliminating the supply chains of cobalt, iron, lithium, and copper extraction in Congo that it is dependent on, this would likely dry up all of the funds going to the AAE's programs.

On the recent traumas of LDS Assimilation Schools

LDS (Latter-Day Saints, referring to the Mormon church) assimilation schools are a recent traumatic memory for many of Utah first nations people—Shoshone, Goshute, Paiute, Diné (Navajo), Timpanogos, and others. In an excerpt from her recent work Mormon Settler Colonialism: Inventing the Lamanite, Dakota scholar Elise Boxer contextualizes this reality:

"Lamanite" is a racializing term that comes from the Book of Mormon, It is an ahistorical mythology about "Lamanites" who, later becoming the first inhabitants of the Americas, disobeyed god and were cursed with the mark of Cain or a "skin of blackness." The ISPP used mormon doctrine as pretext which stated that indigenous people whose land and resources were stolen from them by Mormons were unrighteous, savage Lamanites who needed to be saved and assimilated into the U.S. empire. It was told to those who went through the program that if they converted to Mormonism and assimilated into Mormon settler society they would become "white and delightsome" again. The program was seen among indigenous families as a way for their children to suvive in a rapidly-transforming U.S. empire which left their people displaced and alienated from their land's natural resources. After being sent to live with Mormon families across the U.S. many were told their skin would literally turn white if they were faithful enough. This narrative persists to this day in some of Utah's Mormon communities, particularly among adopted and racialized children. Though the modern Mormon church now officially downplays its previous racialized heirarchical views, anecdotally I can say that in many of Utah's Mormon communities these ideas persist. In reference to African and black Americans' relationship to the church, official anti-black doctrines from the 1950's to 1980's by previous Mormon Leadership survive today in Utah's communities:

(Quotes were compiled by Nic Johnson of Unsettling Mormonism)

Mormonism itself is a new religion born the 1800's, less than a generation away from the founding of the USA as a country. It was invented by Joseph Smith, a pedophile colonizer who established a cult among his hometown community on land that was very recently dispossessed from its indigenous inhabitants. Utah itself was established during a genocidal western expansion campaign which Mormon settlers participated in. The Lamanite ideology had to be invented as a justification for dispossession of this land by framing the "righteous Nephites", white European settlers, as having a spiritual right to the land they took. First Navoo, then Utah became the Mormon "Zion." Settlement in Utah led by Joseph's successor Brigham Young involved outright killing, ecocide, killing of buffalo to disrupt Indigenous peoples' food supply, and the redirection of water and irrigation towards white Mormon communities. The ISPP therefore was a program developed when direct genocidal violence stopped being the primary mode of advancing their colonial interests and the U.S. turned to an assimilationist strategy. This change in strategy preyed upon Indigenous communities who were already put into a vulnerable position by previous Mormon genocidal violence, blaming the victims by claiming that their economic condition was a result of their unrighteousness. In addition to the ISPP, there were also more formal institutional assimilation schools run by the church, such as the Intermountain Boarding School in northern Utah, not too far from the mansion where TIFIE's founder Robert lives.

Living in Utah, I have heard stories from friends whose families have gone through this program, and was made aware through my father that indeed own my paternal grandparents had hosted a child under the ISPP in the 1970's or 80's (this is not including Robert Workman; Robert is from my mother's side of the family). She was from the Navajo nation, was displaced to live in the home of my great-grandparents in central Utah, given a European name and, according to my father, was very shut off and traumatized by the whole ordeal. What's worse is that my dad's side of the family ran an irrigation and house moving business, meaning they were directly involved in homesteading and resource diversion that created dire economic conditions for displaced indigenous people. I would estimate that the majority of settler European-Americans who grew up in a predominantly Mormon Utah community have at least one living family member complicit in the perpetration of these assimilationist programs. White descendant of settlers in LDS communities indeed have a lot to answer for when it comes to uncovering these truths, combating the normalization and genocide denial, and taking real accountability for these crimes against humanity.

These programs themselves have predecessors in evangelical christian institutions, and most notoriously the Catholic church. The Lamanite narrative is an echo of traumas generated in the Catholic Church's settler-colonial projects—one in which blanqueamiento, branqueamento, whitening and blood quantum are lasting traumas of internalized racism that have created a moral and political "aspiration" towards breeding into whiteness and culturally assimilating into white-dominated settler-colonial projects. The Mormon church's approaches racialized aspiration with its own added economic element. Membership in the church requires some level of economic dependency, a donation of 10% of the income of all members. It is also not uncommon for white missionaries to marry converts they meet in the global south, creating very close personal ties of economic dependency. Through conversion one may receive benefits of the global economy that white settlers dominate—scholarships, job opportunities, foreign visas, and church welfare programs. It is a promise that through conversion, you yourself may become settlerized individual who can benefit from the colonizing economy even if you come from the colonized population from which everything was taken. Mormon men and women are highly encouraged to serve a mission often proselytizing in a foreign country at the ages of 18 and 19. Though the church is moving away from the doctrine of the "miracle" of skin-lightening for converts, it is certain that they are selling a kind of economic prestige that is narrativized as proximity to whiteness, which plays a major part in their conversion attempts.

It is no wonder that the photo on display in Hermés Itina Mayamba's branch office, the photo in front of which converts to Mormonism in Kinshasa now serving as missionaries to rapidly convert others pose, is the Arnold Friberg painting of Mormon Jesus descending upon the Americas (mythologized as Zarahemla, the Mormon ahistorical version of the Aztec empire).

It cannot be a coincidence that this painting was chosen as a symbol of what the Mormons are building in a nation where the majority of its inhabitants are dark-skinned. Three core features in my view tie together the function of the ISPP and the modern-day AAE schools. They are a colonial power imbalance, a civilizing mission, and a racialized aspiration narrative. The first feature, the colonial power imbalance, is the material condition of Congolese society formed out of a deep historic wound of slavery, colonization, genocide, material extraction, and CIA-backed coups which have created the modern-day situation in Congo. The latter two features are ideological features present in multiple publications created by TIFIE-affiliated actors, which can be seen as a direct philosophical evolution of the ISPP and Intermountain boarding school programs.

As of writing, I lack access to any independent testimonies from those who have gone through AAE schools talking about their experiences. I believe that resulting from this article there will be a careful attempt by the actors involved to sanitize the image of these schools and control the narrative via testimonies of those who have gone through the program singing its praises. It is not my intention here to criticize the merits of orphanages, free food and water, education, economic development, religious practice, or even language learning—these are not evil things in and of themselves and are signs of prosperity in a truly decolonized, economically independent state which serves its own people and has bonds of mutual solidarity with its neighbors. What I am criticizing is a structure and distribution of power which these charitable exceptions depend on. On whose terms are schools able to be purchased by foreign actors, privatized, and re-branded to teach (aspirationally white) American Excellence to African children? On whose terms is the language of instruction decided, and beginning at what age? On whose terms is the content of instruction decided? And on whose terms are children placed into these private school programs with what, if any, religious affiliation?

TIFIE and the Origin of the Civilizing Mission

AAE schools their shell organizations acting in Congo find their origin in 2006, when Robert Workman established the TIFIE foundation. The name TIFIE stands for Teaching Individuals and Families Independence through Enterprise. The very name invokes a Ronald Reagan-like ideology, and clearly implies a civilizing mission: There are families out their in the world, living in economic dependence and impoverished conditions. It is therefore TIFIE's role to teach them the skills of business management and self-reliance that will lift them out of poverty, to civilize them into modernity and into capitalist enterprise. Such an insulting statement, then, does TIFIE make by its name alone, because it implies that the people of Congo were incapable of achieving economic prosperity and self-reliance without being taught how to do so by a white man, a supposedly self-made entrepreneur who has led many successful businesses. Of course I know from my own family history that Robert had a great head start when he inherited his first business, ProvoCraft, from his family, before he could ever call himself a leader of enterprise. I would argue that it was no matter of "self-reliance" or "independence" that placed Robert in a position of authority to teach these things to others.

In a 2013 UVU Business School seminar, Robert lays out the story of GoalZero and TIFIE. After the success of ProvoCraft and the Cricut machine, Robert sold the company but was kept on for consulting for 5 years.

The framing of Congo as an intrinsically poor country is an ahistorical narrative pushed by the charitable-industrial complex. And Robert's tale certainly begs the question—to the extent that Congo can be said to be impoverished and corrupt, what historical forces caused this poverty and corruption?

Congo historically had a thriving, independent economy before European imperialism and colonization destroyed it. The Luba Empire was a prominant historical example, born out of a large confederation comprising territories in modern day Congo, Angola, and Zambia which traded its natural wealth on an independent basis. The Luba kingdom lasted all the way until the late 1800's, when an excursion by Cecil Rhodes informed Europe of the wealth to be made there. Later Belgium's King Leopald II had invaded the area, committing genocide on an estimated 15 million Congolese people, and instituting a forced labor extraction economy. Though rubber was the main export of the day, this quickly expanded into more resources, leading to the modern day economic situation of the Congo. In the late 1800's those who did not meet Leopold's rubber quotas would have their hands cut off. A primary economic driver creating demand for this rubber extraction in Congo was an innovation in chemical processes that allowed for the manufacture of the rubber tire, "invented" by Charles Goodyear. Ford's Model T car would not have sold in massive quantity to American markets if it were not for brutal Belgian colonization and African labor at the basis of the supply chain. This echoes into the modern day, where electric car manufactures such as Tesla, owned by the world's first trillionaire Elon Musk, have placed a immense demand for cobalt that requires the labor of Congolese families, compensated at barely over a U.S. dollar per day, to labor in hazardous conditions to meet basic everyday needs.

After the Belgians had ceded explicit power over the brutal "Congo Free State," socialist-aligned president Patrice Lumumba was democratically elected and attempted to push policy towards Congo's economic independence during the cold war. This sparked a U.S. and NATO-backed military operation in which Mobutu Sese-Seko, who himself was brought up in a catholic assimilation school, deposed Lumumba and began to open up the mining sector further for foreign exploitation. Mobutu siphoned much of the nation's public wealth to himself and his cabinet[2]. Since then, there has never been a peaceful transfer of power in Congo until the election of their current president, Félix Tshisekedi, under whose rule mineral extraction to foreign economies has only amplified. After the ousting of Lumumba, the C.I.A. has admitted to utilizing evangelical proselytization in various African countries as a method of countering socialist and anti-imperialist ideas[2.5].

Given this history, it seems that independence was never something that needed be "taught" to the Congolese, but rather something the Congolese have always known before globalized European industry colonized their people. To TIFIE, independence is a matter of ideology that can be taught, by accepting the idea of entrepreneurship and free competition. To the Congolese people, independence is a material reality, one that has been taken from them because of European business and the state violence that upholds it. It is something that can only be taken back by ousting these economic mechanisms, something that is not going to happen under the existing state. The Belgians first promoted a narrative of "independence needing to be taught" in the 1900's when they began to create the first colonial assimilation schools in Congo. The Catholic church was the first to send its missionaries, praising a civilizing ideology their church would bring upon the Congolese people while continuing to brutalize them, to deprive them of their material, economic independence. This pattern of interested foreign enterprise creating assimilation schools seems to have never changed over a century later—schools whose secondary purpose is education, and whose primary purpose is to instill the narrative that the European way of life is inherently wealthy, modern, and progressive, and the African way of life is inherently poor and backwards.

TIFIE's origin is tied directly to its source of funding, GoalZero. Coinciding with the 2007 iPhone boom, a supply chain shift which demanded a large volume of Cobalt extraction in order to manufacture smartphones for sale in the European and European-settler countries, Robert made his first visit to Congo and saw a new lucrative business opportunity. He simultaneously found a way to launder his guilt about it by framing himself as a savior who is actually helping the Congolese people and their economy instead the material reality that he is tapping into the profits of exploited Congolese labor that extract the raw materials required for manufacturing each product they sell to the "wealthy" countries.

But at least GoalZero, unlike other companies complicit in the mineral extraction of Congo's eastern cities, is giving back to the community? I would urge skepticism on this claim. GoalZero primarily retails in majority-white countries and white enclaves of some African countries [4]

Of course, as GoalZero has now merged with similar greenwashed company Biolife[5], one must not forget the multi-level marketing scheme run in African countries called Solar Sister that distributes a fraction of their lower-end products to African people. The majority of their high-end products are still being sold as camping toys for wealthy U.S. citizens who can afford them. It is the perfect recreational gadget for white settlers to deploy as they drive their pickup trucks out into the land that they had dispossessed.

Is GoalZero giving away their products at least? In a later section I will show how that too has been misrepresented in at least some of their previous campaigns. GoalZero is a highly profitable company, and ran these campaigns during their highest growth periods. In at least a number of cases, the framing of "giving back" has meant simply selling these products to rural communities in the global south on an installment plan, which the community is expected to pay back the value of over time.

From Corporate Civilizing Mission to Mormon Missionary Retreat

While TIFIE shows one side of the AAE schools and takes all of the credit for them in U.S.-facing media, not a single word or logo referencing TIFIE or GoalZero will appear in media facing the Congolese communities where these schools are actually located. Instead, they are operated under the shell corporation "Breaking the Chain of Poverty" or BCP [6]. On this side of the media divide it will seem as though these schools were the not business venture of Robert or TIFIE, but rather of the Honorable Hermés Itina Mayamba. Though the schools also have some local management from the Maingot family, Hermés is the most prominent face of the AAE school model, and he has utilized the shell corporation BCP on his electoral campaign trail, claiming the entrepreneurial expertise of BCP as his own achievement. He makes it seem like he alone was the one who founded the renovated AAE schools and surrounding programs [7].

Hermés carries the credit for the "improvement" of the schools that the Maingots purchased and that TIFIE and the Mormon church jointly financed. Hermés has carried this into his official church activities, in one instance taking a sewing machine from one of the schools into an LDS church building as some kind of object lesson. Likely his church congregation has not heard of TIFIE or GoalZero at all:

There can be no doubt that the charities have been leveraged as an influence on both Hermés' political campaign and his church activities. Certainly it is playing a psychological role in the local attempts at converting new members via the way the operations are utilized in local media. The Mormon church reports to have grown its membership from 0 to 160,000 members in the DRC[8] between 1979 and the present day. If real economic benefits are attributed to the generosity of the church, they can be used as a talking point by Mormon missionaries as an effective strategy to baptize locals into their church. By manufacturing a sense of economic prestige in the community, the LDS church themselves benefit by baptizing others and growing their numbers and long-term tithing income generation, while Hermés claim credit for the same institutions to promote his own political campaign through strategic media coverage.

What economic benefits are being attributed to Hermés and the church to create the psychological effect of prestige? Firstly there are the schools, trade programs, and orphanages. There are the EnglishConnect programs directly offered by the LDS churches. In addition, Hermés makes social media posts declaring that he has opened multiple medical centers. The latest in this line is the "Zion Medical Center" or "Centre Medical Sion", a name which comes from the Mormon conception of Zionism. Mormon Zionism, not too dissimilar from Israeli Zionism, is the idea of "building the true Kingdom of God" on earth. This involves both the settlement of Utah and the expansion to convert all of the world into its gospel[9][10].

In the image above, the Zion Medical Center is strategically being utilized for the purposes of political propaganda where Hermés is being interviewed on a local news channel. In this segment he is operating in the capacity of a politician. This was later posted on official his Facebook account.

In a frame from the same news segment, Rick and Denise Maingot are pictured on the right. This demonstrates that the Zion Medical Center has clear financial ties to TIFIE. Almost like a bribe, this medical center can serve multiple PR campaigns of Hermés' political career, TIFIE, and the LDS church. They are able to report on this separately and claim credit for the center in an isolated fashion.

On Google Maps, another one of the TIFIE medical centers, which Hermés has taken personal credit for as a political achievement on one of his Facebook pages, has simply been labeled as "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints".

On the back side of this medical center lies a mural that advertises the AAE schools. This mural carries a large amount of symbolic meaning within it, which we will examine later in its connection to the racialized aspiration narrative AAE is putting out.

I have no complaints with the opening of a medical center, of course. But who gets to name it, who gets to fund it, and who gets to leverage its construction to advance a particular political and religious agenda is at issue here.

I have characterized the AAE schools as assimilation schools due to their exclusive teaching of European languages which have utility mostly to European and American global markets. A final question on their opportunistic leveraging remains: to what extent is the Mormon church influencing the actual content that is taught in the AAE schools themselves? Are they engaging in outright religious assimilation at school? To answer to this, look no further than the official Instagram account for the shell NGO, Breaking the Chain of Poverty.

It is plausible that AAE, being a private school, is a semi-secularized school in the sense that children of all faith can join. If this were true, this would be a relative advancement where the majority of schools have at least some religious alignment to them, and are themselves privatized with foreign capital interests. Indeed, some AAE photos show children dressed in hijab, indicating that there is mixed-faith attendance. But this does not mean the school has not for at least part of its history engaged in tactics to promote Mormonism. The BCP Instagram highlights one fateful visit to the school by four white Utah Mormon missionaries dressed in AAE uniforms.

During their vacation, the missionaries were not presented in the typical Mormon missionary uniform, but were instead wearing AAE uniforms and engaging in both education work and medical care. Here they are pictured in plain clothes giving an eye exam to enrolled school children likely living as residents in the orphanages.

Though they are presented as qualified on-site staff, they are identified in a later post as missionaries. Likely they had learned French and Swahili through an LDS missionary program prior to engaging in this work. Here they are seen dining with the Maingot family and a number of other Congolese missionaries, bearing their "testimonies" (a Mormon confession of faith) over dinner.

BCP's highlighted Instagram stories feature the missionaries entering an AAE school in order to "teach" the students about the joy of learning, why they love going to school, and everything it's given them.

Some proof of explicit Mormon influence slips through in their posts. One particular Instagram highlight is damning:

The missionaries, dressed in Mormon Sunday attire but with no identifying missionary plaque accompany a child to the Mormon church services. I cannot give definite proof that this child was one of the students placed in the AAE schools or orphanages, but it would not at all be an unreasonable assumption to make given that this comes from the official BCP account. Another post shows clear Christian religious messaging in an official AAE school ad.

One highly suspicious post that Hermés has made on his personal Facebook account shows youth from the Mikonga 1 Parish being lined up in a barbed wire walled courtyard. This courtyard has a very similar appearance to the same courtyard of the AAE orphanages shown on BCP's Instagram page.

To me this is evidence that children from the AAE orphanges are likely being converted to Mormonism, and this would not be an uncommon practice by evangelical groups in the area. It is a reflection of colonial practices that have become normalized in the Democratic Republic of Congo that the LDS church is engaging in its own version of.

To add insult to injury, it is possible that some children placed in these orphanages are victims of genocide that have been transported from Goma all across the country to Kinshasa through a refugee program that TIFIE is connected to.

In their promotional video, TIFIE makes the amazing feat of talking about the Kivu genocide, framing themselves as saviors, all without once mentioning the mineral deposits and supply chains that this genocidal proxy war is being fought over! How convenient for GoalZero and the Mormon church to not mention this, given that they are both heavily invested in maintaining these extractive mineral supply chains.

LDS Stock Positions and the source of TIFIE's funding

In his groundbreaking work of investigative journalism Cobalt Red, Siddharth Kara describes how waves of demands by the global economy's tech sector has led to successive projects of extraction built on top of existing Congolese communities:

Now that GoalZero has merged with another handheld solar product company Biolife, it seems TIFIE is more complicit in this situation today than it ever has been. GoalZero's image is that of a sustainable technology that is helping create opportunities, and electrify Congo (this of course only makes sense if you define Congo as the Kinshasa-adjacent communities that GoalZero has sold or maybe given away their products to). But the fact of the matter is, GoalZero can never be a part of the solution while it is deeply invested in being part of the problem. Siddharth Kara writes:

A minor note—GoalZero claims it is now moving away from Cobalt-based batteries and towards improved Lithium-Iron-Phosphate batteries. Even with Cobalt removed from the supply chain, these products still require extraction of minerals that are exported from Congo onto world markets at scale, particularly Iron, Copper, and Lithium. The mining concession system and cheapness labor in Congo remain the same regardless of the exact minerals used in the final product. And bypassing the complicity in Cobalt extraction today does not erase the past exploitation, nor the complicity by the Mormon church's own stock positions.

An interesting aspect of the Mormon activities in Kinshasa is that Congolese missionaries are now being sent into mining towns such as Kolwezi and Lubumbashi. These are cities where in many cases entire neighborhoods have been dug up and residents displaced to open mining concessions that then dominate the city's entire economy.

Kolwezi is a cirt where open-pit mines are almost as large as the town itself. The mines can be viewed from space even while zoomed out to the entire continent of Africa. Here, much of the city's economy has been restructured towards dangerous mining operations which often employ child labor. I can count at least 8 Mormon churches here, and off to the side there is another Mormon church closer to reservoir which features colonial-era hydrodams that still power these mining operations. Multiple posts from Hermés Itina Mayamba show missionaries from Kinshasa being sent to proselytize in Kolwezi.

The Mormon church has a net worth of at least a quarter-trillion U.S. dollars, and this is just the wealth that is publicly known about. Some of its biggest stock positions are in tech companies that absolutely rely on the exploitation of the south and east of Congo under brutal conditions. The Mormon church would not have any of the funds to meddle in a foreign country's educational, economic, religious, and political policy if it were not for this money. If it were not for this vast wealth, they would not be able to see major growth in membership as they have since the 1980's in not only DR Congo, but in many other African countries as well.

Some examples of tech companies and the LDS stock positions in them, and their relative rank in the Ensign Peak portfolio[11]:

#1 NVIDIA $4.02 billion

#2 Apple $2.97 billion

#3 Microsoft $2.45 billion

#4 Amazon $1.84 billion

#5 Alphabet Class A (Google) $1.78 billion

#6 Meta (Facebook) $1.42 billion

#7 Broadcom $1.33 billion

#8 Alphabet Class C (Google) $1.27 billion

...

#12 Tesla $728 million

#13 ExxonMobil $681 million

#14 Oracle $577 million

The LDS church has tens of billions if not more invested in the exploitation of Congo. GoalZero-Biolife is completely invested by nature of their products, though not even close to in magnitude to the companies that the church holds stock in. The LDS church also holds positions in weapons manufacturing companies that are engaging in imperialism today which enforces this exploitation and fuels genocide, war, and proxy war all around the globe[12]:

Boeing - $198 million

Lockheed Martin - $90 million

Raytheon - $53 million

Northrop Grumman - $25 million

Military bases and weapons manufacturing facilities for companies such as Raytheon and Northrop Grumman are also present among Utah's Mormon communities[13]. And I can attest from my own upbringing that many Mormon families ritualistically enroll the U.S. military to personally partake in foreign imperialist interventions and genocides across the globe. From their original settler violence creating U.S. Utah as a state to present-day conflict, the Mormon church has had a hand-in-hand participation in all violent wars that have been waged by the U.S. Empire.

"Tribalism", "Underdevelopment", Lamanites, and the Racialized Aspiration Narrative

The last interaction I had with my grandfather Robert Workman was in January of this year. Having been shaken up by what I stumbled into regarding my entire family history, I had confronted him on his complicity in this genocide. I opened by being honest about my thoughts. I was living away from Utah and had more time to reflect on the situation. I figured there was something there in the way of cognitive dissonance given that Robert no longer claims to practice Mormonism. He instead now follows an eclectic new-age spirituality, which he sells retreats for at his private residence. Admittedly I was very naive and was not sure what I could accomplish by it, but I opened the conversation.

Following this line of conversation, I had confronted Robert on his complicity and the shocking things I had uncovered about the AAE schools.

Later on in the conversation, I stated more plainly the operations I was looking into and my skepticism about them. He responded to me with a series of justifications that eventually turned into very racist, anti-black statements.

I will admit that with hindsight, knowing more about the levels of corruption and harm he is engaging in, having internalized the seriousness of it all, I would not have entertained this conversation today at all with any sort of charitability or attempt at convincing I was hoping to achieve at the time. But I include it here because a key sentence from this dialogue sticks out to me:

"Tribalism is the main reason why Africa cannot prosper"

This is rhetoric I have seen before, not out of his mouth, but out of a Congolese child rapping in a reel that went viral on Instagram[14].

"...if we leave tribalism, then get [united] to make Africa the number 1"

This post was co-authored by a popular German NGO FocusCongo, a charity I had seen shared by many anti-genocide activists talking about Congo, and that runs many of the same kinds of institutionalized programs that TIFIE does—Schools, Orphanages, Medical Centers, Trade Schools, Churches, and Sports Programs.

Looking into their board of directors, one of the three founding members Matthew states openly that he returned to Congo with a desire to see God's kingdom grow.

It seems that FocusCongo, like TIFIE, has a civilizing mission that they are very interested in promoting. Their LinkedIn pages states "We see Congolese people transformed to be able to fulfill their God given destiny". Many anti-imperialist and anti-genocide activists I know personally seem to fall for it and even donate to this organization, probably out of a sense of guilt, because they saw a very convincing Instagram story weaponizing the genocide for donations. I doubt most people donating to FocusCongo are aware that they are helping to "grow God's kingdom" according to Matthew's own theological vision.

What is FocusCongo teaching the children placed into their schools? It seems based on that rap video, much like what Robert is saying, that they are being taught this line about how "tribalism is the main reason why Africa cannot prosper"

Is this statement fundamentally true? Based on books I began to read when I first looked into TIFIE, based on the true Africa-centered tellings of history found in Siddharth Kara, Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, they would argue a much different idea—Colonization and Neo-Colonialism are the main reasons why Africa cannot prosper.

It is interesting to me that the language used by NGOs like TIFIE and FocusCongo is not setting aside national differences or rejecting colonial borders, but specifically a narrative of rejecting tribalism. This to me sounds similar to but in fact greatly contrasts the ideas of pan-African leaders such as Patrice Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah. In his book Neo-Colonialism: the Last Stage of Imperialism Nkrumah puts forward the theory of African Unity, which posits that the borders arbitrarily dividing modern African countries are a key tool of control created by the European colonizers in a system of Neo-Colonialism. Neo-Colonialism is contrasted from Colonialism in that these newly-created nations after the "Scramble for Africa" supposedly ended still exhibit many material aspects of colonialism—material extraction, assimilation, political and cultural interference—while being ostensibly independent and decolonized entities. The purpose they serve, just as in the colonial period, is to maintain economies in which resources are exported in absurdly large quantities away from the African continent. Aid is another key aspect weaponized against African people, creating dependence on condition that exports keep flowing out of the continent. U.S.-hegemonic entities like the IMF, World Bank, USAID, and the United Nations weaponize "economic aid" to ensure that unfair policies stay in place among these supposedly independent and sovereign post-colonial nations. Under Neo-Colonialism, cultural and religious influence are also weaponized to normalize the state of affairs and maintain disunity between African nations.

These exports from Neo-Colonial countries continue to be of benefit to European and U.S. economies and not for other African countries to benefit each other. Nkrumah emphasizes the colonial borders between these Neo-Colonial countries as a primary barrier to development within the continent. To remove these arbitrary barriers between Neo-Colonial nations is the project of African Unity. While this may sound similar to the more co-opted idea of "abandoning tribalism," African Unity takes on a major difference in meaning. Pan-Africanism and African Unity are not some spiritual call to abandon a backwards national identity or way of life as the racist idealism of tribalism puts forward, but rather to unite the many nations of Africa as they already exist while promoting their indigenous cultures and growth. A second and crucial component of African Unity is ending the disproportionate extraction of Africa's resources outside of Africa. This extraction away from Africa must be cut off entirely for African Unity to be possible. Finally, industrialization and manufacturing, ore refining and green product development that presently happens away from continent needs to be brought into Africa itself. This analysis is a materialist one based on reality, asserting that Africa has plenty of wealth which can be used to uplift its people without any need for outside help, if only countries are able to unite in solidarity, to look beyond their colonial borders, and to prioritize each other economically rather than countries outside of Europe.

Globalized capitalism, supply chains that depend on rapid extraction of Africa's minerals to the global north, and moneyed interest in Africa's exploitation is the reason why Africa is being kept from its own prosperity. No amount of donation to charity can fix this, because the money that that is being donated to charity to begin with relies on African exploitation in order to stay solvent. This view of charity is the materialist analysis of what is actually going on. But if you take on the idealistic analysis put forward by foreign NGOs, they will assert the racist assumption that there exists some cultural defect of tribalism within African cultures that is preventing African from achieving prosperity. This ideological perversion has many implications in how assimilationist charities and charity-run schools operate. It is reflective of racist views that white settlers on the American continent have generated about indigenous people: that non-European cultures are inherently savage and tribalistic and are in need of civilizing.

In one of TIFIE's earlier campaigns which pre-dates AAE schools, the 2012 Light a Village Campaign[15] promotes a similar narrative about tribalism.

It is interesting to note that, though presented as charity, the Light a Village campaign did not actually give away any of GoalZero's products to people living in the Bwe village. Instead, they were sold to small business owners who were then required to make installment payments back to GoalZero. This was GoalZero's greatest early periods of growth as a company after all!

TIFIE deliberately chose the language used here in their script—They could have said "It is great for African people to finally have access to this technology like Europeans and European settlers do, now that they have decided to let us see some of the wealth that they exploited us to create!" Instead they chose instead to send a message along the lines of "Europeans have a superior way of life, and this is evidenced by their wealth and technology. The old traditions and ways of life in Africa are preventing us from prospering, leaving us in darkness. TIFIE is teaching us a superior way of life that will allow us to prosper."

The use of the word dark is no coincidence either, this is the essence of what TIFIE, what the AAE schools, what God's kingdom, and what Hermés Itina Mayamba's alternative vision for Congo culminate in: a white supremacist racialized aspiration narrative.

The narrative, though never explicitly stated nor admitted, goes like this: If you are not white, it is a sign that your ancestors were cursed with the mark of Cain. This mark has made your society, fundamentally tribalistic—violent, corrupt, delinquent and poor. The only way to be saved and prosper is by studying the languages of the white people, adopting their religious ideology, and adopting their economic model to exploit some of your own people just like they do. Your proximity to whiteness is the only true path to you and your family's prosperity. Tribalism is the main reason why Africa cannot prosper. Nevermind what Europe took from you when your societies were already prospering. Nevermind what Europe is still taking from you to this day.

I gave the example of the painting whose theological basis lies in the Book of Mormon's chapter of 3rd Nephi. This is the chapter when Jesus descends upon the Americas to bless the righteous Nephites after war had caused them to devolve into tribalism [17]. And I don't think I can explain this any better than the "Book of Mormon Study Notes" blog can:

According to Mormon theological doctrine, to overcome tribalism, those who seek to become prosperous Nephites (Righteous white settlers and their descendants who are free from the mark of Cain), they must cooperate with the settler economy. The same economy which, of course, is exploiting them. But maybe by assimilating aspects of whiteness, one may at least join ranks with the perpetrators rather than being a victim. Through class collaboration between colonizer and colonized, between rich and poor, maybe you too can play the role of the missionary, the colonizer, and the rich entrepreneur yourself. It would be a much more prosperous life for you, after all.

This view of "tribalism" is a form of victim blaming. It puts the burden of eliminating prejudice and working cooperatively on African people, not on the European people who are exploiting them and creating this prejudice in the first place. Europeans want Africans to cooperate according to their view because it makes them filthy rich. It says that the fault lies in African languages, beliefs, cosmologies, and that these are inherently tribalistic, therefore wrong. Under this white supremacist view, racialized depictions of white, prosperous people are deployed as the ideal to aspire to in the face of this tribalism inherent to African cultures.

Skin bleaching is one of the most commonly-adopted beauty products in many African countries especially in Brazzaville just north of Kinshasa[16], and there are clues that a racialized narrative has been instilled in populations wherever European missionaries are present. The narrative of racial aspiration is visualized all over in AAE's imagery. Let's return to the medical center mural, marked on Google Maps as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints

This is an advertisement for American Academy of Excellence. The child on the left appears to be European-American or Chinese. He has a straight hair type, light skin, and is very studious. On the right, he has braided hair, African features, and light skin. It's possible that I am reading too much into this, but perhaps he is light-skinned because he lifted the curse of Cain in through studies of English and French.

Another mural shows children with long, straight hair studying. The mural advertises literacy, English, and entrepreneurship:

On the school grounds there are murals of Dora the Explorer. Perhaps an innocent depiction, but certainly a racialized one that is explicitly not African.

In AAE's enrollment ads, they show a stock image of white child as they tell you that your child should enroll to their kindergarten class.

These examples are small, perhaps inconsequential individually. But as a whole they align with a racialized narrative that upholds whiteness and proximity to it as "desirable" and "prosperous." These narratives are snuck into programs that people are depending on to have very basic economic opportunities, because foreign evangelical church entities have bought up almost all of the schools and other institutions in their community.

An Imperialist Geopolitical Agenda

AAE's curriculum also very clearly serves a personal agenda in that it is decided upon partly by Robert and the Maingots. Can economic prosperity and excellence not be taught in the language that is spoken by the community? Or must it only be taught in English and French?

French one could understand if one excuses the fact that French only entered the country through Belgian colonization. French is a lingua franca spoken across Congo's many nationalities, used in official state documents. It has utility for local trade within the country.

But why English? It seems there is an economic agenda at play here. In a country that has been underdeveloped so much and faces so much violence due to foreign extraction, the Mormon church steps in to aggressively manufacture psychological assimilation pressure. By advertising both schools like AAE and the BYU EnglishConnect and Pathway programs, the church offers promise of economic opportunity on the condition, whether it is implicitly stated or not, of conversion to the Mormon church[18].

In a recent panel on Mormon activities in Africa, Riya Ngambi describes the economic pressures where she is from on the border between Zambia and Congo. The Katanga border region includes many mining towns such as Lubumbashi, Likasi, and Kolwezi where the church has a presence. She also describes an economic flight away from Congo that happens when people join the church, likely due to economic help, travel privileges, and visa opportunities that Mormon converts are more likely to get:

So, returning to the question, why English? With AAE's focus on entrepreneurship, the obvious answer is trade with foreign English-speaking countries. It seems there is a major geopolitical reason for this, a transformation that is taking place which the U.S. and Mormon church as a whole are very interested in.

In February of 2026, President Félix Tshisekedi signed a unilateral deal with Donald Trump, allowing U.S. companies mineral rights estimated to be worth $24 trillion dollars[19].

This all falls under a plan engineered by Trump's trade secretary Jaimeson Greer called Project Vault[20]. Deals were made with various U.S.-aligned countries in the Americas such as Mexico to create mineral stockpiles that U.S. and Canadian companies can then take advantage of. Jaimeson Greer happens to be a member of the Mormon church, who also served a Mormon mission in Rwanda and a number of other French-speaking countries. The strategy? To pull supply chains away from China as a direct challenge to their economic hegemony, and to manufacture closer to the U.S.A. for the benefit of U.S. companies. It's a trade war, and the Rwanda-backed genocide in Congo's east is being weaponized for this purpose.

It seems to me that Hermés Itina Mayamba is a valuable foreign policy asset to the U.S. and U.S.-based tech companies. Hermés, of course, is the member of a political party (AVC-A) that swears complete loyalty to the president Félix Tshisekedi.

This geopolitical move is evolving into an outright militaristic one. In April, a U.S. and UAE partnership gave $100 million in funding for mercenaries to guard specific mining sites that are invaluable assets to U.S. big tech[21]. Their purpose, of course, is to keep the ore flowing at all costs.

New economic legislation is being introduced by Félix Tshisekedi, which Hermés highly praises in his parliamentary work[22]. The "Local Content Act" claims to aid Congolese capital, Congolese entrepreneurs, by ensuring 20-30% of social capital for key mining sector companies go to Congolese nationals[23]. If this is what it claims to be, it would seem to be a great though too small step towards Congolese economic independence. But one must consider what kind of industry is being protected. While there are plenty of "local companies" in Congo that extract and launder minerals for export, some of which are presently dominated by Chinese entities, most manufacture that results from these supply chains take place outside of the country. Perhaps this is not changing the situation at all, and instead a move directed towards tightening the U.S. dominance—it is designed to kick out Chinese-owned companies that currently dominate parts of the mineral extraction supply chain, and give preference to "local" small businesses which ultimately sell their products to U.S-dominated supply chains at cheaper rates. The mineral deal made in February points to Tshisekedi's commitment to U.S. interests in removing China from their supply chains.

Teaching English to Congolese people thus has a very immediate interest to U.S. foreign policy. The businesses mining and laundering the cobalt from within Congo may be transitioning towards a Congolese-owned model. But if the business owners speak English, they may be able to work out new contracts with much larger English-speaking tech giants seeking a more vertical integration that bypasses China altogether.

Another political shift being overseen directly by Hermés Itina Mayamba is a major educational reform. The current law setting up the framework for Congolese education was established in 2014[24], under the second Kabila regime that took power in Congo by military coup. In 2024 there were attempts to amend this law and declare English as an official language of instruction in all Congolese schools[25]. Hermés Itina Mayamba has filed a proposal for new legislation to reform this law while he holds conflicts of interests in the schools which he runs that played a major part in his political career[26].

To Critique a Charity

There are many complexities to the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Certainly it is a good thing for Congo to develop its economy, to have schools built and be refurbished, even to have local businesses and industrialize across its nation, if this is done on an independent economic basis and on Congo's own terms. It would be better still if this happened in all of Congo, in exploited mining towns as well and not just Congo's capital city that sees a much greater level of wealth than the rest of the country, and headquarters businesses that make foreign contracts affecting the rest of the country. The issue here is that charity, as an economic structure, normalizes paternalistic and racist viewpoints that believe Congo cannot be trusted to create its own schools, teach its own languages, develop its own economy without European and European-settler economies intervening and dominating these institutions through privatization of schools. Charity paints an image of saviorism over exploited people, even if the wealth that funds it comes from unchecked mineral extraction that exploits them to begin with. If Congo were never invaded by Europe, its society would evolve on its own terms, accepting aspects of modernity on its own terms, industrialization, and technological development. Hundreds of languages would have been preserved, social structures would have not been fractured, life would have not been lost, and people would not have been enslaved and impoverished. Imaginary borders would have not been carved up; traditions and religious values indigenous to Congo would have prevailed, and Congo would have prospered in its own structures through economic independence and unity on its own terms.

It a fundamentally wrong to view rich foreigners giving away their wealth as a good thing because there should not be rich foreigners to begin with given that their wealth comes from exploiting the very same people supposedly benefiting from charity. This should not even be seen as the bare minimum of what a wealthy entrepreneur should do with their wealth. The bare minimum would be to never tap into unjust economic structures in the first place which gave rise to this inequality in the first place. The bare minimum would be to leave Africa alone to solve its problems independently, free from exploitation. This might not be so lucrative to the white philanthropist upstart, but it means that power is never given to a white man to impose their idea of excellence onto victims from whom that economic power has been taken. Robert Workman has not only decided to build his own profitable venture from an unjust economic system, he has imposed unsound ideas and created an assimilation campaign that blames victims for their economic situation that the wealth of entrepreneurs like himself systematically reproduce. Though TIFIE and the LDS church represent one offender of the Neo-Colonial violences generated in the schemes outlined in this article, I hope it can be made clear how they are but one part playing into a larger imperialist system that needs to be defeated as a whole for this scheme to be brought down.

The white settler community of Utah hypnotically pushes all within it into classism, apoliticality, and comfort within a life that depends on continuous terror enacted over the African and Indigenous lives that sustain it. It praises white Mormon wealth as righteous for its own sake. And it weaponises racist idealism to explain that the economic state of Congolese people is the result of some fault in their identity, rather than viewing it in terms of the material reality and history that has created this exploitation. This relative comfort and disconnection from material reality can be observed through the way the white saviors visiting RDC speak paternalistically about the Congolese people. To them the secret to prosperity is so simple, in their culture it comes so easy to them, and it is puzzling why the Congolese people cannot live in the same comforting simplicity that they experience.

For this reason Robert Workman can perhaps truly believe himself to be a saint from his lavish homestead property on violently-dispossessed Shoshoni land, property which itself has displayed indigenous tepees and African and indigenous art as backdrop for his new-age spiritual retreats. He is praised by his neighboring Mormon community and his own family because he was most skilled, above all else, at public relations. He tactfully swept under the rug the exploited South and East Congolese labor that built his wealth by pointing to the crumbs he gave the West Congolese. By donating a small fraction of his camping toys to the Navajo Nation (assuming he even donated them this time and didn't just loan them out with an installment plan like what happened with the Bwe village) he can even build an image of himself as a friend to the indigenous people whose land the Mormons dispossessed and he still occupies a large share of. Through this pacifying narrative control, the LDS church can send missionaries, finance schools and orphanages, and engage in political interference in the parts of the global south they have victimized. The opulent temples they erect among impoverished communities, dilapidated by imperialist violence the church was complicit in, are a symbol of racialized economic aspiration. They teach the exploited that their exploitation by Mormon wealth is the fault of some wickedness or backwardness within their own culture, their Lamanite ancestry, their religion, their family values, and even their own language. This is the "independence" that Robert's TIFIE supposedly teaches to individuals and families. A civilizing mission that insults its victims and aims to erase their culture in its own white, culture-less image.

All around the global south in places like Guayaquil, Ecuador, the opulence of the Mormon temple strikingly stands out as it is juxtaposed with the economic neglect and corruption fuled by U.S. imperialism that surrounds it. In Ecuador's case, their own president was born in Florida and his famly runs a drug traficking and fruit export monopoly which benefits Europe and the U.S. To those that the church targets in its missionary work, the monumental temples are a symbol of what accepting assimilation into the Colonizer's cosmology can offer you.