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DISCONTINUED
Afrique, je te plumerai provides a devastating overview of 100 years of cultural genocide in Africa.
Director Jean-Marie Teno uses Cameroon, the only African country colonized by three European powers, as the basis for a carefully researched case study of the continuing damage done to traditional African societies by alien neocolonial cultures.
Unlike most historical films, Afrique, je te plumerai moves from present to past, peeling away layer upon layer of cultural forgetting. Teno explains: "I wanted to trace cause and effect between an intolerable present and the colonial violence of yesterday...to understand how a country once composed of well-structured traditional societies could fail to succeed as a state."
Teno begins with present-day cultural production in Cameroon, examining press censorship, government-controlled publishing and the flood of European media and books. He next looks at his own Eurocentric education during the 1960s. "Study, my child," he was told, "so you can become like a white man." Condescending newsreels from the 1930s reveal that France conceived its "civilizing mission" as destroying traditional social structures and replacing them with a colonial regime of evolués (assimilated Cameroonians). Survivors of the independence struggle recall how the French eliminated any popular nationalist leaders, installing a corrupt, bureaucratic regime which continues to pillage the country.
Afrique, je te plumerai, like the Newsreel releases Lumumba and Allah Tantou, develops what could be called an "anti-documentary" style - juxtaposing many conflicting types of images to decenter the eye (and the I). An authentic African reality, these films suggest, can only come from a rigorous deconstruction of Africa's past and present.
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"Provocative, idiosyncratic, playfully arch and sardonic...Even 30 years after independence, this African nation is searching for its identity." |
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Philadelphia Inquirer |
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"Lays out what could be African modernity. It constructs the African landscape as a place of loss and places the African subject as divided between what is and what never was." |
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Liberation (Paris) |
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?A stinging rebuke of European colonialism?gives potent evidence that the independence won from the French was more ceremonial than substantial.?
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San Francisco Chronicle |
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"A vast mine of information...a sound investment for all types of libraries. Four Stars." |
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Video Rating Guide for Libraries |
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