Monday, 28 April 2008 — screenings at 4.00 PM and at 7.30 PM
Stirn Auditorium, Amherst College — free and open to the public


Afrique, je te plumerai/Africa, I Will Fleece You (Cameroon 1992; 88 minutes; French with English subtitles) provides a devastating overview of 100 years of cultural genocide in Africa.  Jean-Marie Teno uses Cameroon, the only African country colonized by three European powers, as the basis for a carefully researched case study of the continuing damage done to traditional African societies by alien neocolonial cultures.

Afrique
Unlike most historical films, Afrique, je te plumerai moves from present to past, peeling away layer upon layer of cultural forgetting.  Teno explains: “I wanted to trace cause and effect between an intolerable present and the colonial violence of yesterday...to understand how a country once composed of well-structured traditional societies could fail to succeed as a state.”

Teno begins with present cultural production in Cameroon, examining press censorship, government-controlled publishing and flood of European media and books. He next looks at his own Eurocentric education in the 1960s. “Study, my child,” he was told, “so you can become like a white man.” Condescending newsreels from the 1930s reveal that France conceived its “civilizing mission” as destroying traditional social structures and replacing them with a colonial regime of évolués (assimilated Cameroonians). Survivors of the independence struggle recall how the French eliminated any popular nationalist leaders, installing a corrupt, bureaucratic regime, which continues to pillage the country.

 — California Newsreel


Jean-Marie Teno was born in Famleng (Cameroon), studied communication in Paris (France), and graduated from the University of Valenciennes with a degree in audiovisual techniques and a Master’s degree in audiovisual communication. He worked as a film critic for Buana Magazine and an editor at the television station France 3.  In 1985, he made a short film Hommage, which launched his career as an internationally recognized filmmaker. His other films include Schubbah (1984), Yellow Fever Taximan (1985), La Gifle et la caresse (1986), L’Eau du misère (1988), Mister Foot (1991), Afrique, je te plumerais (1992) La Tête dans les nuages (1995), Clando (1996), Chef! (1999), Vacances au pays (1999), Le Mariage d’Alex (2002), and Le Malentendu colonial (2004). Teno is currently a Copeland Fellow at Amherst College and completing his latest film entitled Lieux saints.