The Pan-African Paradigm of Cultural Memory and Creative Sovereignty
Across the African landscape and its vast diaspora, the struggle for self-determination has never been confined to parliaments and treaties; it has been fought, remembered, and reimagined through culture, cinema chief among its instruments. Project a Black Planet: Film, the new season of screenings running at London’s Barbican Center through early September, positions itself squarely within this tradition, using William Klein’s 1969 documentary of the first Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers as its opening statement of intent. That footage, capturing twelve days in which Algiers became the cosmopolitan center of an entire continent, is less nostalgia than a working blueprint: an argument that pan-Africanism’s institutional and creative architecture were always meant to be built together. As curators Matthew Barrington and Abiba Coulibaly excavate the movement’s cinematic archive, from Mozambique to Cape Verde to Lagos, the season insists that reclaiming Africa’s cultural sovereignty requires confronting both the movement’s triumphs and its unresolved internal contradictions, including the marginalization of the women who built it.
Algiers 1969: The Architecture of a Continental Imagination
For twelve days in July 1969, Algeria transformed its capital into the staging ground for the first Pan-African Cultural Festival, seven years after independence, with delegations from Ethiopia, Liberia, and Mali among those filling the streets with performance. William Klein’s documentary of the event captures a quote from Guinea’s first president, Sékou Touré, projected on screen: “We must make this revolution with the people… and the songs will come”, a line that crystallizes the festival’s founding premise, that cultural production was not decoration for the political project of pan-Africanism but its structural core. The Barbican’s film program, running alongside its wider Project a Black Planet exhibition, opens with this footage precisely because it dissolves the boundary between spectacle and participant, treating the festival itself as an act of institution-building rather than performance. Sixty years on, that founding architecture remains the reference point against which the movement’s subsequent trajectory, its successes and its fractures, continues to be measured.
Sarah Maldoror and the Gendered Asymmetry of the Canon
The season’s curators are explicit that pan-African cinema’s canon has historically centered on a narrow set of male auteurs, and much of the program works to correct that structural imbalance. Central to this recalibration is the work of Sarah Maldoror, represented by Fogo, l’île de feu, made the same year as Roy Guerra’s Mueda, Memória e Massacre. Annouchka de Andrade, founder of the Association of Friends of Sarah Maldoror, and Mario de Andrade have spent years restoring and distributing her mother’s films, noting that Sambizanga, Maldoror’s best-known work, “was kept by a producer for 40 years, and she didn’t have any copy.” De Andrade says more than fifty of Maldoror’s planned projects went unrealized for lack of resources, despite her first three films being dedicated to the liberation struggles in Angola and Guinea-Bissau. Though credited only as an assistant on Klein’s Algiers documentary, Maldoror’s institutional marginalization, “you have only one woman [but] Sarah was in the room,” de Andrade notes, exemplifies how the movement’s own internal power structures replicated the very exclusions pan-Africanism claimed to dismantle.
Négritude, Dakar, and the Contested Geography of Blackness
The season’s Ambiguous Encounters strand, curated by Abiba Coulibaly and marking 60 years since both the Tricontinental Conference in Cuba and the first World Festival of Black Arts, foregrounds the political tensions beneath pan-Africanism’s cultural unity. Négritude, the literary and philosophical movement associated with Senegal’s Léopold Senghor, functioned, as Coulibaly frames it, as a proxy battleground between an Algerian government asserting “third worldism” and more conservative regimes elsewhere on the continent. By focusing on Dakar, Algiers, and Lagos, the second host city of the World Festival of Black Arts in 1977, Coulibaly says her intent is not to resolve these tensions but “to sit with all of the discomfort and contradictions within it.” This willingness to hold contradiction, rather than flatten pan-Africanism into a single triumphant narrative, is itself a form of intellectual self-determination, an insistence that the continent’s cultural historiography be written on its own complex terms rather than smoothed into an externally palatable story.
From Lumumba to the Moon: Why the Threat Was Real
Kodwo Eshun, co-founder of the Otolith Group, whose own films feature in the season, offers perhaps its sharpest political framing: “if pan-Africanism was a dream, why did Belgium, USA and Britain go to the lengths they did to assassinate [Patrice] Lumumba? It wasn’t a dream, it was a threat.” That assassination, and the covert Western involvement widely documented since, remains the clearest historical evidence that pan-African self-determination was treated by former colonial and Cold War powers as a genuine geopolitical danger rather than idealistic rhetoric. The season’s organizers note the historical coincidence that Panaf’s twelve days in July 1969 overlapped with Apollo 11’s moon landing, international attention fixed skyward even as a continental transformation unfolded on the ground in Algiers. That juxtaposition, the program suggests, still holds a lesson for the present era distracted by other horizons.
Cinema as Infrastructure for Continental Self-Determination
What Project a Black Planet: Film ultimately argues is that pan-Africanism’s cultural output was never peripheral to its political project; it was, and remains, part of the same institutional architecture. By restoring marginalized figures like Maldoror to the historical record, refusing to resolve the négritude-versus-third-worldism debates of the 1960s, and insisting on Lumumba’s assassination as proof of the movement’s real stakes, the Barbican season models a form of reclamation that goes beyond commemoration. It treats cinema as a durable infrastructure for continental memory, one capable of holding contradiction without collapsing into either nostalgia or despair. Running until 6 September, the season arrives as African and diasporic communities continue to debate what pan-Africanism should mean in a twenty-first-century context of climate pressure, migration, and shifting global power. Its answer, drawn from the archive itself, is that self-determination has always required building and defending your own institutions of memory, cinematic, cultural, and political alike.
