Thousands of royal artifacts of Dahomey, a West African kingdom, were taken by French colonists in the 19th century for collection and display in Paris. Centuries later, a fraction returned to their home in modern-day Benin. This dramatized documentary follows the journey of 26 of the treasures as told by cultural art historians, embattled university students, and one of the repatriated statues himself.
Lucrèce Hougbelo(voice)Parfait Vaiayinon(voice)Didier Sedoha Nassangade(voice)Sabine Badjogoumin(voice)Dowoti DesirSelfMicheline AyinonSelfBicarel GnikpoSelfNadia Vihoutou KponadouSelfCarlos OunsouganRadio UniversSaturnin OlouRadio Univers
Germans colonized the land of Namibia, in southern Africa, during a brief period of time, from 1840 to the end of the World War I. The story of the so-called German South West Africa (1884-1915) is hideous; a hidden and silenced account of looting and genocide.
Sudan, Southern Kordofan, the Nuba Mountains in Africa. Scenes from the forgotten war that the fighters of the Nuba people have held since 2011 against the government of President Omar al-Bashir and the Sudanese army, which crudely show the hard daily life of Hannan, a brave woman fighting for the survival of her family; Jordania, a promising student; Mosquito, a reckless journalist; and Al-Bagir, a rebel leader.
The film tells of the beginnings of the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. At the end of the 1950s, the Tanzanian National Park Administration wanted to fence in the protected area around the Ngorongoro Crater. Bernhard and Michael Grzimek were invited by the national park administration in 1957 to get a precise picture of the animal migrations and to provide the national park administration with the values they needed for their project. Using a new counting method with two airplanes, the Grzimeks found out that the migration of the herds was different than assumed.
How African artists have spread African culture all over the world, especially music, since the harsh years of decolonization, trying to offer a nicer portrait of this amazing continent, historically known for tragic subjects, such as slavery, famine, war and political chaos.
The ruthless dictator Teodoro Obiang has ruled Equatorial Guinea with an iron hand since 1979. Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel is the most translated Equatoguinean writer, but he had to flee the country in 2011, after starting a hunger strike denouncing the crimes of the dictatorship. Since then, he has lived in Spain, feeling that, despite the risks, he must return and fight the monster with words.
The history of warfare as it relates to global Black society, broken down into 7 chapters that examines the ways the system of racism wages warfare from a historical, psychological, sexual, biological, health, educational, and military perspective.
Commissioned by the journal Présence Africaine, this short documentary examines how African art is devalued and alienated through colonial and museum contexts. Beginning with the question of why African works are confined to ethnographic displays while Greek or Egyptian art is celebrated, the film became a landmark of anti-colonial cinema and was banned in France for eight years.
An examination of how Africa's mythological stories have served as the basis for the world religions that came after, especially in Western civilization.
The armies of Fascist Italy conquered Addis Ababa, capital of Abyssinia, in May 1936, thus culminating the African colonial adventure of the ruthless dictator Benito Mussolini, by then lord of Libya, Eritrea and Somalia; a bloody and tragic story told through the naive drawings of Pietro Dall'Igna, an Italian schoolboy born in 1925.
In July 1860, the schooner Clotilda slipped quietly into the dark waters of Mobile, Ala., holding 110 Africans stolen from their homes and families, smuggled across the sea, and illegally imported to be sold into slavery. Surviving Clotilda is the extraordinary story of the last slave ship ever to reach America's shores: the brash captain who built and sailed her, the wealthy white businessman whose bet set the cruel plan in motion, and the 110 men, women, and children whose resilience turned horror into hope.
Tunisia itself is the subject; we wanted to render the genius of the site. Tunisia is almost the central character of this little film: we see the relation of the city to the sea, the traces that bear witness to its foundation, the remains of Carthage, the symbolism of the recently discovered Medina coin … The splendours of the house interiors and courtyards are associated with a scene of origin, what psychoanalysis calls a primal scene. Entering these houses opens up a world peopled by women: the child’s ‘homecoming’ in the hands of women is staged as an abduction, playing doubly on fascination and terror. These places were mine, from my childhood, they can be found almost intact – it’s the return of the exile visiting the kingdom. I let Ruiz discover all this, and immediately that led him to echoes and resonances ranging from Spain to Chile.
In the fifties, when the future Democratic Republic of Congo was still a Belgian colony, an entire generation of musicians fused traditional African tunes with Afro-Cuban music to create the electrifying Congolese rumba, a style that conquered the entire continent thanks to an infectious rhythm, captivating guitar sounds and smooth vocals.
In Brussels, Belgium, the Royal Museum of Central Africa is undertaking a radical renovation, both physical and ethical, to show with sincerity, crudeness and open-mindedness the reality of the atrocities perpetrated against the inhabitants of the Belgian colonies in Africa, still haunted and traumatized by the ghost of King Leopold II of Belgium, a racist and genocidal tyrant.
Jomo Kenyatta's death in 1978 brought to an end a political career that encompassed more than 50 years of African history. Kenyatta entered politics in the mid-1920s and then spent 17 years in exile in Europe. He returned to Kenya in 1946, and was elected president of the nationalist movement, the Kenya African Union. Arrested and imprisoned in 1952 for allegedly leading 'Mau Mau', he was released in 1961 and two years later became Kenya's first Prime Minister. In power, the man whom European settlers had once reviled as "the leader to darkness and death" was eulogized by them as a pillar of stability, while former allies challenged him by creating a left-leaning political opposition. Kenyatta weaves archival and contemporary images with interviews with friends and relatives, comrades and opponents, to create a biographical portrait of a key figure in 20th century politics, and a case study of what Frantz Fanon called the pitfalls of nationalism as a political force in Africa.
South Africa, July 11th, 1963. Several members of the African National Congress, an organization declared illegal, are arrested in Rivonia, a country house near Johannesburg. The detainees, along with Nelson Mandela, imprisoned since 1962, are charged with serious crimes for their radical activism against the apartheid regime.
There is an interlinking history of violent European colonialism and the cultural legacy of ethnographic collections in institutions. This documentary traces the progression of colonial history from the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 to the systematic elimination of cultural traditions, religions and lifeways which would occur sporadically through genocides and warfare until the early 20th century throughout the African continent—surveying the inquiries and movements for historical justice, the relationships between European institutions and colonial violence and following enduring struggles against these organisations to regain what was taken.
75% of all enslaved Africans coming to America came in through Beaufort and the sea islands of South Carolina. This beautiful and picturesque tourist destination, by its unique history is the epicenter of the Gullah culture and the foundation of African American history; the result of the mingling of West African slaves with the plantation culture awaiting them in America.
When Lena and Ulli start the engine of their old Land Rover, Lady Terés, they have a plan: to drive from Hamburg to South Africa in six months. What they don't know yet is that they won't ever get there. Two totally different characters, jammed together in two square meters of space for almost two years, they experience what it really means to travel: leaving your comfort zone for good.
On March 29, 1947, peasants armed with sticks and knives attacked the French garrisons in Madagascar. The revolt would end twenty months later with the death of the last insurgents, shot down by the expeditionary force. France, accustomed to memory lapses, knew nothing of this insurrection and its trail of torture and abuses. In Madagascar, well after independence, the events of 1947 were never discussed. For more than a generation, parents refused to speak of them to their children. It wasn't until the 1980s that the silence was broken.
Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (currently Zambia), September 18, 1961. Swedish economist and diplomat Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary General of the UN, dies mysteriously in a plane crash. Decades later, Danish journalist and filmmaker Mads Brügger and Swedish researcher Göran Björkdahl investigate the case in search of definitive closure.