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Film
Review |
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Adanggaman.
(Ivory Coast, 2001). Directed by Roger Gnoan M'Bala. 90 mins. In Bambara
and Baule with English subtitles. On film only from New Yorker Films (www.newyorkerfilms.com).
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American cinematic portrayals of slavery
and the transatlantic slave-trade generally put America at the center. The
middle-passage serves largely as prelude to narrative whose soul lies in
this continent. In contrast, world history scholarship often explores the
slave within its African or Atlantic context. The African film Adanggaman
does much to restore the balance, depicting the slave-trade entirely from
an African perspective. Indeed, Europeans have been relegated here to an
off-screen presence. |
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Directed by famed Ivory Coast-born Roger Gnoan M'Bala,
and featuring an all-African cast, the film was briefly controversial in
2001 for its frank representation of the role of 17th century West African
elites in the slave trade. No doubt, scenes of Africans marching in chains
and brutally overseen by other Africans may shock American audiences unfamiliar
with the continent's history, but instructors can broaden the discussion
by asking students to investigate the film's complexities. |
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Attentive viewers might, for instance, connect the
cowrie shells worn by the slave-raiding soldiers to the use of cowries as
currency in many forms of African commerce, including the slave trade. That
these shells (cypraea moneta) are found only off Maldive Island
coasts in the Indian Ocean dramatizes the fact that the slave trade, far
from being one leg in the a misleadingly simplified "triangle trade", was
embedded into global exchange. Students might be more surprised that the
film's African soldiers are all female. This detail also has a firm, if
somewhat obscure, basis in history. King Dossou Agadja of Dahomey (reigned
ca. 1708–32), in what is now the nation of Benin, relied upon a corps of
women shock troops, deploying them first in his victory over the neighboring
kingdom of Ouidah. Considered Amazons by European observers, these female
soldiers remained a dynastic tradition until the kingdom's demise in 1894.
Those students who come armed with a solid history of the slave-trade will
find much to think about; those who know less will find much to learn. |
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Fritz
Umbach
John Jay College, City University of New York |