After Thomas Sankara’s tragic assassina­tion on 15 October 1987, many film­makers and journalists, including Haile Gerima and Roberto Silvestri, decided to protest by not going back to Ouaga­dougou and Fespaco. Along with Djibril Diop Mambéty, Taieb Louhichi and many others, we continued our biennial pilgrimage to Burkina Faso’s capital, but we boycotted the film festival’s opening and closing ceremonies with the new president, Blaise Compaoré, orchestrator of Sankara’s death and guilty of ending a great Pan-African utopia. We used those official occasions to gather around the murdered president’s family and express our gratitude and solidarity with them.
For more than a decade, my frustration grew as I saw Fespaco change from being a great meeting place for Pan-African cinema to an immense carnival of tour­ism, business and entertainment, dimin­ishing the domain of film.
In 1999, for the festival’s 30th anni­versary, I decided to pick up the camera and tell the story of Fespaco’s roots using rare archive materials. The hard work of Ousmane Sembène, Tahar Chériaa, Oumarou Ganda, Lionel Ngakane and many other pioneers brought into being this event, which over the years became an important occasion for reflecting on the birth, identity and resilient spirit of African cinema. Using the testimony of its founders and materials from the peri­od, I tried to tell the story of my Ouaga­dougou and my Fespaco.

Mohamed Challouf

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