neither/nor


tourists honking their car horns—are few and far apart, however. (And some the “input” of meddling producers and distributors.) Te presiding tone of Africa Addio is one of an all-encompassing mournfulness for both the departing colonials and for their former black subjects who, as the voice-over postulates, have been left to their own devices without sufficient preparation for self- governance. Europe stands accused, in the words of the narration, of “abandon[ing] her so-called baby just when it needs her the most”—putting emerging Africa in the position of the orphaned zebra we later see standing over its dead mother.


Jacopetti and Prosperi present themselves as an objective 18


third party while commenting on the colonial divestment, a position made at least somewhat tenable by the fact that they are from Italy, whose imperial accomplishments had been limited to a hunk of Somaliland, a piddling concession in Tianjin, and various misadventures under Benito Mussolini. Tis feeling of otherness would appear to be borne out in one famous scene in the film when, cruising through the streets of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania during anti-Arab riots, the filmmakers are pulled from their car and designated for the firing squad until another soldier, seeing their passports, halts the proceedings and declares, “Tey aren’t whites… Tey’re Italians.” (As with much in the film, and the Jacopetti and Prosperi filmography as a whole, the veracity of this moment is in doubt, but those who know the whole truth have, for the most part, taken it to their graves.)


As depicted by Jacopetti and Prosperi, Africa in the days,


months, and years following European


disinvestment is a continent bursting with new self- confidence… and also a free-for-all. “Te old laws are suspended, the new ones not yet written,” says narrator Sergio Rossi. “For those who want to rob Africa of


mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s


the most they can in the least possible time, this is the perfect moment.” While the boys are still demonstrably fond of the shock cut accompanied by a blast of brass—a sign reading “european farms for sale” after a court hearing on killings in connection with the Mau Mau Uprising, for instance—here they are less compelled to match like images with like, instead creating a more complex system of rhyming visuals. A graveyard of white crosses decorated with the names of colonial farms is later recalled by a vast field of blanched elephant bones. A funeral pyre for poached wildlife is echoed by another for Rwandan Watusis, butchered in reciprocal slayings by rival Hutu. As the camera follows a dead hippopotamus being dragged from the lake in which it was harvested, the sight of its gaping mouth scooping up mud recalls the earlier image of a bulldozer rolling up a bed of daisies outside of a home in the so-called White Highlands, recently abandoned by its British owners. Te result is a kind of epic poem of destruction.


Africa Addio doesn’t gloss over the abuses of the


departing colonial powers. In the former Belgian Congo, the setting of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, now encountered in the grips of political crisis and internecine fighting, we are told that “so much killing and torture was so cruelly and persistently practiced that the black population decreased from 20 million to 12. And now we reap what we have sown.” Te exiting Europeans “created their own racism, and allowed other racisms to fester, then abandoned Africa to those merciless passions, to the new rulers who are creating new racisms, and to the new exploiters, east and west, who spread false promises so they can increase their own profits or power.” Despite Portuguese claims of brotherhood with its colonies, we are informed that “less than one-half of one percent of Angola’s blacks were granted citizenship.” South African apartheid, here just


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