Journal of African Cinemas - Current Issue

Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s ‘mockumentary’ film Le président (2013) exposes the dangers of a single story and absolute political rule by presidents-for-life. He not only mimics but also mocks the ‘visible evidence’ thesis of the documentary film genre and blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction. Bekolo’s film opts for multiple voices to entice political dissent and believes in the power of art to imagine liveable African futures.

In Mudimbe’s Things and Words (2015), Jean-Pierre Bekolo and Valentin-Yves Mudimbe draw upon notions of colonial cultural politics, the imposed past and the regulatory brutality of the colonial library as integral to the relationship between knowledge and power. In fact, they discuss how knowledge itself is a production of power as Mudimbe deconstructs the work of Michel Foucault. Mudimbe fills the gaps between the ontology and homology, between the invention of Africa and colonial violence as processes harnessed and coded, weaponized and deployed for the exploitation and destruction of the continent. Consequently, notions of the imposed past and the colonial library are not reducible to symbolic questions but demand to be continually confronted. This past continues to live on as a precondition to the mutually enforcing role of colonial logics of power, violence and its legacies in the continent of Africa. This way, this invention of Africa connects the dots between colonial cultural politics, the desacralization of Indigenous African traditional knowledge and practices opening the way for the development and legitimation of a White supremacist materialistic perspective driven by liberal individualism and racial capitalism. Jean-Pierre Bekolo and Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, on the other hand, through their politics of friendship, poke holes to the invention of Africa foregrounding the resilience of an Indigenous objective and an economy of meanings as resources for ordinary Africans to understand themselves better as a collective constantly challenging contemporary politics and aesthetics as in a symbiotic site of Ubuntu’s emancipatory politics through reciprocities, obligations and consequences.

In 2018, Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Miraculous Weapons won the Sembène Ousmane Prize at FESPACO. The film carries the title of a 1946 poetry volume by the ‘father’ of negritude, Aimé Césaire, and it feels very familiar, but also quite distinctive from the rest of Bekolo’s oeuvre. There are old themes (revolt, race, freedom), but they are represented with updated artifices (e.g. drone shots) and new stylizations (at least for Bekolo), such as high contrasts relying on vivid colours. The end result is a (textual) meditation on life, death and the role played by art and negritude, all coloured by overt postcolonial tensions. Consequently, this article explores the representations of death in the film (with support from previous films by Bekolo) and aims to answer the following question: Could negritude (the movement that refuses to die, as it were) and art (as literature and as film) really ‘erase the traces and the symbols of death’ in the postcolonial, as the main character of the film, Djamal, boldly claims?