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by looking to Africa as the epicentre of black culture and the celebration of a ‘pan-African identity’ as a distinctive cultural heritage, counter to centuries of Eurocentricism (217). For some, this was again primarily a matter of a political identification but for others, such as Patricia Hill Collins, it was based on an understanding that ‘in spite of varying histories, black societies reflect elements of a core African value system that existed prior to, and independently of, racial oppression’ (Hill Collins, 2001: 188). As noted in Chapter 1, this identity was
Cleaver (in contrast to his framing of Malcolm X) does reveal moments when the subject suddenly makes himself untrustworthy, when the camera’s patient scrutiny allows something contradictory to leak out into the mise en scène, and an impassioned speech suddenly becomes the performance of a performance. Not long after achieving independence in 1962, Algeria sought to consolidate its identity as a model of national liberation and pan-African solidarity. In 1969, Cleaver had become persona non grata in Cuba (where he had fled after jumping bail in December, 1968), and he
few direct references to government policies and ideology. They are in fact far more interested in politics ‘from below’, and this attention to the specific details of daily life in Africa nuances the ideological dimension of his work. Sembene’s Marxism must also be seen within the context of his profound pan-Africanism, a belief in the unity of purpose and destiny of the different peoples of his
minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba's avowed Pan-African anti-colonialism led to his political opponent Mobutu Sese Seko deposing and later executing him, while Mobutu received US and Belgian backing. In his final speech to his nation, Lumumba explained the two nationalisms competing for control of the Congo: Those powers that are fighting us or fighting my government, under the false pretense that they are fighting communism, are in fact concealing their real intentions. These European powers favor only those Africans who
chaos of Afro-American jazz musician Archie Shepp’s ‘Brotherhood at Ketchaoua’. What is significant about the music used is that, even while the image track drives energetically forwards, the sound-track evokes a relation with history, a glance back at the golden age of the newly independent Algeria. Shepp’s performance was recorded live in 1969 with Tuareg musicians at the first Pan-African festival, the acme of Algerian
the events) and both, in its aftermath, turned to an examination of the black movement in America: Godard, in One + One and One A.M./P.M. (1972); Klein, in his documentaries on Eldridge Cleaver and on the Pan-African festival. Both were preoccupied by the need for an appropriate form for true political films, although Klein, unlike Godard, avoided a specific political line, and their conclusions seemed antithetical (Klein moved away from stylisation, Godard explored it). Both found inspiration in the schematisation and
protest. One that permits the development of playwrights and actors, one that permits the growth and self-knowledge of a Negro audience, one that supplements the current struggle for freedom. (Dent et al., 1969 : 3–4) Such an aesthetic refocusing would feed into, complement and finally merge with the broader Black is Beautiful movement of the 1960s that reinvoked some of the Pan-African spirit earlier in the century called ‘Negritude’ and questioned the broadly