1. Afrique 50

“Afrique 50” In 1950, René Vautier was sent by the French government to make a documentary that showed the positive effects of colonization. Instead, he made “Afrique 50”, a short film that shows the misery that results from French imperialist exploitation.

The film was banned in France for 40 years and René Vautier, its producer, spent a year in jail for having produced it.

A brief article on the film was published at the British website “Far Out“.

Vautier had a strong political consciousness since his early years, having joined the French Resistance during the Second World War when he was just 15. A graduate of the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques, he made a splash with his first film – a short 1950 documentary which had a staunchly anti-colonialist vision.

Interestingly, Vautier was initially assigned to make a film about the “positive effects of colonisation” – an impossibility. Although they wanted him to document the educational mission of the French League of Schooling in West Africa, Vautier naturally only noticed the blatant exploitation and the unimaginable violence perpetrated by the colonial regime.

According to the director, he felt it was his duty to address the “lack of teachers and doctors, the crimes committed by the French Army in the name of France, the instrumentalisation of the colonised peoples.” The result is still a product of the colonial gaze, but it remains an important addition to the corpus of African cinema.

Subverting the initial objective of highlighting the “positive effects”, Vautier documents the repressive actions of the colonial oppressors. Ranging from the massacres that destroyed entire villages to the endless exploitation of African labourers, Afrique 50 does not hesitate to hold up an unforgiving mirror to French brutality.

One of the interesting elements of Afrique 50 is the constant juxtaposition of European technology and the hypocrisy of the colonial regime. Replacing technological progress with cheap labour and enforcing a ruthless taxation scheme, the consequences of colonisation are on full display in Vautier’s film, and they do not resemble the “positive” fabrications of Eurocentric propaganda.

While presenting his images of resistance, Vautier declares: “This is not the official image of colonisation.” Although he was thrown in prison for Afrique 50 and the film was banned for more than four decades, its legacy lives on.

2. Milena Bereket speaking at the Afr0-Asian Institute for Strategic Studies

In 20 minutes – no 19 – Milena Bereket, an Eritrean scholar, encapsulates what I tried to teach for half a century. So. Thank you Milena Bereket.

If Afrique 50 rips the mask off those pathetic attempts to paint European colonialism as “humane”, “lifting the backward peoples” and other such racist nonsense, Milena Bereket’s short expose on the nature of neo-colonialism in Africa does likewise for Africa’s post-colonial situation in which formal independence combines with “informal” but in many ways much more controlling and exploitative mechanisms of neo-colonial domination.

And all in a mere 19 minutes …

Links to both Afrique 50 (here) and Milena Bereket’s talk (here).

If I was still teaching – together, these two films would introduce classes in Global Political Economy, capsulizes a century or more of Euro-American colonialism and neo-colonialism in Africa as now Africans try to enter the post-neo-colonial stage … with growing success thanks to institutions like the BRICS.