The Right to Speak

“‘Africa was colonized, and so is its cinema,’ Sokhona wrote. His films subvert traditional documentary and ethnographic models, using a variety of overt explanatory devices—voiceover, radio segments, text, classroom scenes, interviews, speeches—to identify the way information is kept and deployed. His tongue-in-cheek didacticism gives the films a nuanced skepticism appropriate to the postcolonial moment, when the values of the colonizing West—freedom, equality—were glaringly absent in day-to-day life.”