Göran Olsson is the Swedish film-maker responsible for The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, a documentary assemblage of interviews with black-power leaders from the 60s and 70s. In a comparable spirit, he has now made a dour, uncompromising film, with brutally explicit footage, structured around The Wretched of the Earth, a 1961 work by Martinique anti-colonial revolutionary Frantz Fanon. It is about African independence movements, including those in Guinea, Mozambique and Rhodesia (as it then was), and maintains that colonisation and decolonisation were about the same thing: violence. Violence was and is necessary for African nations to rid themselves of their colonial masters. Gandhi is not mentioned. Ostensibly, this is simply the truth. After all, did anyone tell the Poles or Russians to espouse non-violence when Hitler invaded? Why do African and South Asian people have to be burdened with saintly non-violence when European victims are entitled to retaliate? The problem is that – as an Arab spring campaigner commented in Greg Barker’s We Are the Giant – you may need outside help to get arms, perhaps from another colonial power. The film is a bleak but real portrait of an era, though it has nothing to say about what these nations are thinking and feeling right now.
