Le Retour d’un aventurier handles the question of cultural invasion in a manner likely to be misunderstood by the African and the American ‘masses’, but a manner certainly understood by concerned people. The fact that the adventurer brings back guns, instruments of destruction and death, indicates the poisonous nature of ‘borrowed robes’. Western ‘civilization’ has proved to be a little too expensive for human life. In Africa it has brought with it atoms of cultural wreck, separating the so-called ‘educated’ from their own people, teaching them how to cheat and rob others in a subtle way commonly misnamed ‘hard work’. The fact that Moustapha Alassane uses the ‘Westerner’ to illustrate his point is only too relevant in the sense that in the ‘Westerner’ one is a hero by virtue of his ability to live at the expense of others. He kills in the guise of protecting somebody else from danger, but in the final analysis, this proves to be an act of selfishness, at this somebody else always becomes his follower, his possession. In an African context nothing is more abominable.

Wilson Mativo, Cultural Dilemma of the African Film, “Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies”, vol. 1, n. 3, Winter 1971