This programme is based on Notes pour une série télévisuelle de fiction sur l'histoire de l’Afrique noire (notes for a fictional television series on the history of Black Africa), an unrealised project by poet and playwright Abdoul War and filmmaker Med Hondo. In the late 1980s, War and Hondo began working on a script for a 28-episode pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial history of Africa inspired by the writing of Burkinabe historian and politician Joseph Ki Zerbo. The project, which they would never complete, was conceived as an ‘action of public salvation’ which is ‘imperative for all those who want to help Africa and who are convinced that a people, a peoples, cannot really face their future without having a vision of their own past. We cannot live with the memory of others. History is the collective memory of peoples.’

The films in this screening each allude to a different episode in War and Hondo’s planned series: Segu jango evokes the Bambara kingdom of Ségou; Réou Takh the slave trade; Sarraounia the historical figures of resistance to the colonists; Monangambé the struggle for independence in Angola; and E’ville the emblematic figure of the former Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.

The screening is followed by a Q&A with Abdoul War.