Concerning Violence

In 1961, Frantz Omar Fanon, the Creole intellectual from Martinique, didn’t mince words when he declared that violence was the only way forward if the people wanted to caste off the oppressive shackles of colonialism. He described his radical theories in (), which was banned in France the day it was published. In , the American hip-hop singer Lauryn Hill reads passages from Fanon’s treatise in voice-over to accompany footage featuring a variety of African liberation armies in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Events moved quickly from 1960 onwards, when one by one African countries ejected their European colonizers, 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 , in which Swedish journalists tracked the rise of the Black Power movement. Olsson didn’t discover much footage on decolonization, doubtless because Sweden barely played any role in colonial Africa. The material he does show clearly demonstrates how much geopolitical and interpersonal relationships have changed over the last 50 years.