| Afrique,
je te plumerai (Africa, I Will Fleece You)
Director Jean-Marie Teno uses Cameroon, the only African country colonized by three European powers, for a carefully researched case study of the continuing damage done to traditional African societies by alien neo-colonial 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 could fail to succeed as a state which was once composed of well-structured traditional societies." 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 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. |
"Provocative,
idiosyncratic, playfully arch and sardonic...Even 30 years after independence,
this African nation is searching for its identity." "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." "A vast mine
of information...a sound investment for all types of libraries. Four
Stars." Director: Jean-Marie
Teno Video
Purchase: $195
|
Afrique,
Je Te Plumerai provides a devastating overview of one hundred years
of cultural genocide in Africa.
