Concerning Violence

A brief history of decolonisation in Africa, in a collage of archive material with Lauryn Hill reading the words of radical political activist Frantz Fanon.

In 1961, Frantz Omar Fanon, the Creole intellectual from Martinique, didn’t mince words when he declared that violence was the only way forward to cast off the shackles of colonialism. He described his radical theories inThe Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre), which was banned in France the day it was published. In Concerning Violence, American hip-hop singer Lauryn Hill reads passages from Fanon’s treatise in voice-over to accompany footage featuring African liberation armies in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Events moved quickly from 1960 onwards, when one by one African countries ejected their European colonisers, and not always peacefully.

The film’s director Göran Olsson has once again immersed himself in Swedish TV archives to illustrate the broad theme of breakaway African nations. He did the same in 2011 for The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, in which Swedish journalists tracked the rise of the Black Power movement. The material Olsson shows clearly demonstrates how much geopolitical and interpersonal relationships have changed over the last fifty years.