“It was not a dream, it was a threat”: a film festival that celebrates the rich and complex history of African unity | film

AAlgeria, 1969. What had been, for seven years, the capital of a newly independent nation, became, over the course of 12 days in July, the global center of an entire continent. That summer, Algeria hosted the first Pan-African Cultural Festival (PANAF) and the capital’s streets were transformed into a spectacle of lively performers, lined with banners announcing each country’s delegation: Ethiopia, Liberia, and Mali.

Imagine an Olympics-style opening ceremony, then ignore it, because the images taken by William Klein in the event’s documentary, The African Festival of Algeria, suggest the dissolution of the barriers between spectator and spectator – an act that brings to life an on-screen quote from Guinea’s first president Sékou Touré: “We have to make this revolution with the people… and the songs will come.”

Far from abstract, as a cinematic accompaniment to the Barbican Project’s ongoing exhibition Black Planet, the film program opens with these shots and, over the next three months, will bring together a body of work that showcases how the Pan-Africanist project has impacted the lives of people of African and African descent.

Some, including Ruy Guerra’s 1979 film Mueda, Memória e Massacre From Mozambique, he examines the legacy of colonial crimes such as the 1960 Moida massacre by Portuguese forces, and how the act of remembering becomes part of the struggle for liberation. Others, like Timiti Basori The Woman with the Knife (1969) and Djibril Diop Mambéty Hyenas (1992), reflects the postcolonial condition through psychoanalysis and satire.

For program coordinator Matthew Barrington, the film’s “inherently populist” medium is one way to show how “pan-Africanism is evident in the way people interact and how they interact,” with the aim of bringing the choices “all into dialogue” with each other.

It invites people from different backgrounds and generations to “come into the space and see some of these films” and draw connections between them, while finding new entry points into the subject, through music, panel discussions and performance lectures designed to stimulate “different ways of thinking about these films.” In addition to the performances, there will be concerts by poets Lynton Kwesi Johnson and Sarah Laswe, in addition to a musical score by DJ Kobe C.

The selected films also seek to draw inspiration from classic works of African cinema without relying excessively on a canon that risks focusing on a select number of male auteurs. Since the first edition of the Black Planet Project in Chicago, Sarah Maldoror’s works have accompanied the traveling exhibition and will do so again at the Barbican, under the guise of Fogo, l’île de feu – It was released in the same year as Guerra’s Mueda – Which takes Cape Verde as a place to contemplate the land and work after the dawn of independence.

Anoushka de Andrade, founder of the Friends of Sara Maldoror and Mario de Andrade, spent several years working to secure the rights, restoration and distribution of her mother’s cinematography, while preparing a film and book project about her life.

In the case of Sambizanga, perhaps Maldoror’s most famous work, de Andrade noted that it had been “held by a producer for 40 years… and she never had a copy” with Maldoror having to challenge racism and sexism in the industry as a black woman. This battle has been exacerbated by the lack of financial resources available to it, as more than 50 of its planned projects remain unrealized.

Although Maldoror has been credited as a collaborator in Klein’s endeavor to film Banaf—a production often betrayed by a condescending male gaze and described in Elaine Mokhtari’s autobiography Algeria, Capital of the Third World as “beyond Klein’s organizational skills”—the danger of her being marginalized from mainstream narratives of pan-Africanism is an all too familiar situation.

De Andrade highlighted that “her first three films were dedicated to the struggle in Angola and Guinea Bissau, but they were not part of the masculine discourse, and when you see the picture of all the people at the first conference of black artists and writers, you only have one woman.” [but] “Sarah was in the room,” not to mention the participation of writers like Suzanne Césaire, a prominent intellectual in the Négritude movement.

Negritude is clearly a point of contention in Banaf, serving as a cultural proxy for the political disputes between the Algerian government seeking to wear the mantle of “Third International” against the conservative regimes embodied by Léopold Senghor’s Senegal, which hosted the first World Festival of Black Arts (Wessmann) three years earlier.

Some of these nuances appear in this season’s mysterious encounters, curated by Abeba Koulibaly, marking 60 years this September since the Wiessmann and Tricontinental Conference was held in Cuba.

Inspired by her curatorial work in Brixton community cinema and her academic background in geography, Coulibaly highlights African cities such as Dakar, Algiers and Lagos (which was the venue for the second edition of the World Black Arts Festival in 1977) without aiming to deconstruct Pan-Africanism, but rather to “sit with all the discomfort and contradictions within them”.

Regardless of its borders, the season explores the non-border spaces of Pan-Africanism to include the influence of Havana and diaspora cinema such as the Nigerian-Brazilian Ola Balogun collaboration, Black Goddess.

How then do we understand African unity? That’s the question posed by Kodo Eshun, co-founder of the Autolith Group, whose films In the Year of the Quiet Sun and The Kernel of the Great Union will also be screened during the season and “speak directly” to this. Eshun said that although the term has many definitions, the group’s argument is that “pan-Africanism is the transformation of the continent, which implies the transformation of the planet… If pan-Africanism was a dream, why did Belgium, the United States and Britain go to the extent they did to assassinate Lumumba? It was not a dream, it was a threat.”

On the eve of Panaf, while Africa’s eyes were focused on Algiers, another event was taking place, though not on Earth – July 1969 was also the month of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. Decades later, in an age once again looking to the sky for distraction from the planet, the underpinnings of the transformative vision of pan-Africanism make compelling viewing.