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As part of "on the way: From/To Europe" a talk by Dierk Schmidt and the film program ROT LAG IN DER LUFT/3 (The Base of the Air was Red/3) will take place on 25/26 November 2005
Dierk Schmidt (Berlin):
Conférence de Berlin 1884/85 (2005)
Friday, 25 November, 19.00 Uhr
Hosted at les complices, Zürich
At the Berlin Africa Conference in 1884/85, the thirteen European conference participants and the US granted the Belgian king Leopold II the Congo Basin as a paradigm example of a supposedly “modern” colony. There were no representatives of the continents in question present at this meeting. The European powers responded to the crisis of the transatlantic slave trade and the criticism of colonialism, which had existed since the revolution on Haiti, with the declaration of an (African) “free state“, with the aim of the repatriation of slaves from the American continents and with the fight against the Arabian slave trade. One of the goals of this conference was to also legitimize and define colonialism anew. However, the real reason for the conference was the European resolution for preventative conflict avoidance among the states present. This was subject to the “Acte Général“, its terms and conditions according to articles 34 and 35, the “obligation to disclose” and the “effective occupation”. Under the influence of these regulations, the plan was that the signatory powers divide the continents up among themselves over the next fifteen years. The so called “Berlin borders” were established, which still apply to the majority of the national borders within the African continent today… This conference, to a large part a business conference, is not something that belongs to the distant past, indeed it can be considered to be a precursor of the renowned economic summit.
ROT LAG IN DER LUFT/3 (The Base of the Air was Red/3)
on the way to: From/To Europe:
compiled and presented by Remember Resistance (Berlin)
26. November 2005, 16.00
The 8th of May 1945 marks the day Europe was liberated from the Nazis. In Algeria, however, the date marks the massacres performed by French colonial troops in Sétif and de Guelma: the end of World War II, in which the French military forces were supported by tens of thousands of Algerian soldiers, was to be celebrated all over the country. However, when participants of the memorial parades took the opportunity to demand independence, the French security troops intervened. The resulting bloodbath claimed the lives of up to 15,000 Algerians. After that, the Algerian War-of-Independence raged on for further 18 years.
The film programme Rot lag in der Luft/3 (The Base of the Air was Red/3), which will be supplemented with commentaries and paradigmatic extracts, explores anti-colonial liberation and wars that were hardly noticed. Chris Marker’s documentary-agitation Le Fond de l’Air est Rouge is taken as a reference.
Extracts from: Emitai Gott des Donners (God of Thunder), directed by: Sembène Ousmane, Senegal 1971, 90 min
By referring to the events of 1942, Emitai reports the emerging of resistance in a Senegalese village, in which the French colonial power first recruits soldiers for the defence of the “fatherland” France and later confiscates the rice crop. The recruits are sent to Europe to fight fascism. In the village itself, a poster of the new “boss“ de Gaulle is hung up while the women set about organizing the resistance.
Extracts from: Camp de Thiaroye (Camp at Thiaroye), directed by: Sembène Ousmane and Co-Director Tierno Faty Sow, Senegal 1988, 154 min
Proud to have fought for France, the West African soldiers from the various colonies return to the interim base Camp de Thiaroye near Dakar in 1944. All they found there was bad food, contempt and unpaid discharge wages; a fact that was ignored by the French colonial officers who where mostly followers to the old Vichy Regime. As France attempted to release the Africans back into the old colonial way of life, the black contingent of the forces involved in liberating Europe began to rebel.
Sembène Ousmane 1995: “During the war, we saw those who had colonized us yesterday without any clothes on. We fought side by side; we all suffered from hunger and thirst, and we cried from the same pain. After that, it was clear that there was no difference between us. However, the French preferred to befriend the enemy German soldiers rather than their black comrades. That made us feel bitter very much. This experience changed a lot.”
Sembène Ousmane re-processes an authentic and almost forgotten story in his film Camp de Thiaroye. He is the most prominent black African director south of Sahara. In 1942 he joined the French colonial troops, fought in the artillery and took part in the liberation of Alsace. He also took part in the great railway worker strike along the Dakar-Niger route in 1947/48, which became a defining moment in African independence politics. Afterwards he went to Marseille and worked in the dockyard, where he became a union member and joined the Communist Party.
Extracts from: Paisà (Paisan), directed by: Roberto Rossellini, Screenplay: Sergio Amidei / Federico Fellini, 1946
Rossellini’s episodic film tells six stories about Italian, German and American soldiers, whose paths cross in Italy at the end of the war. In one scene a black GI ends up in a bar where a historical puppet theatre play is being shown. When several puppets fight against a “moor”, the GI jumps on the stage and interferes with them. This is reminiscent of Camp de Thiaroye: As long as the West African soldiers went out in American uniform, they were treated with respect. However, as soon as one noticed that they were not black GIs, they were thrown out of the bars and brothels.
La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers), directed by: Gillo Pontecorvo, Italy/Algeria, 1965, FR/Arab. w. eng. subtitles, 136 min
Children shoot at soldiers from close range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon, the entire Arab population will be in the grip of a mad fever. The French have a plan: torture by electric shock (using an apparatus the French named “la gégène”), by submersing the head in water, by hanging the victim up with contorted limbs and by burning.
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Gillo Pontecorvo,
Die Schlacht um Algier |
Because Ali la Pointe and a handful of his clandestine colleagues refuse to surrender, the French army decides to blow up th whole house – and thus their hideout. In the long run, however, France will lose the war. The ruins can still be visited in the Kasbah, the old Arabian centre of Algiers.
Shortly after the war, the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo was commissioned by the Algerian FLN to make a feature film with documentary character about the street fighting during the occupation. It was based on Yacef Saadi’s material for Souvenirs de la Bataille D‘Alger and he himself played the role of the military commander of the autonomous zone. The film was banned for a long time in France. The first re-screening took place in Cannes in 2003. The trailer for the event proclaimed: Screened by the Pentagon 2003 reminding us that the battle of Algiers has served as educational material for street fighting in Latin America as well as in the Iraq war.
The anti-colonial film group Remember Resistance (Berlin) was founded as a consequence of the anticolonial africa conference 2004. Guests in Zurich will be: Jochen Becker, Madeleine Bernstorff, Julien Enoka-Ayemba and Sonja Hohenbild.
Rot lag in der Luft/1 (The Base of the Air was Red/1) was made possible by the exhibition NON-STOP: a project dealing with the ambivalence of war and peace, in the Kunstverein Wolfsburg. www.africa-anticolonial.org
We would like to refer you to the latest publication Unsere Opfer zählen nicht - Die Dritte Welt im Zweiten Weltkrieg, (Our Victims Don’t Count - The Third World in the Second World War) published by: Rheinisches JournalistInnenbüro,
Verlag Assoziation A (Berlin/Hamburg). www.assoziation-a.de
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