African films confront slavery's scars ridge of cowrie shells braided into her hair, the Amazon reaches out and smashes a rebellious slave to the ground with a brutal blow. The she-warrior is just one member of an elite army running slave raids for King Adanggaman, a powerful African monarch who seizes villagers to sell to European slave traders. This is the 17th century coast of West Africa, as reconstructed by Ivory Coast film director Roger Ngoan M'bala in one of three new African films that take a new and controversial look at one of the continent's most painful chapters. As African cinema increasingly becomes a force to be reckoned with, film makers are multiplying efforts to use the big screen to tell stories about their politics and history.
Slavery is a wound that nobody talks about.
Already screened at the Toronto and Vienna film festivals, Adanggaman made its African premiere last month at Fespaco, the pan-African film and television festival held every two years that is the continent's version of Cannes. Key film industry players flock to Ougadougou, the capital of West Africa's Burkina Faso, to cut deals and test audiences in a city where entire families whiz by on mopeds and women balance platters of freshly picked strawberries on their heads. Adanggaman pulled large crowds at Fespaco. Audiences were so hungry for an alternative approach to the slave narrative than offerings from Hollywood that many could only find space to sit on the floor of packed cinemas. Following recent US films tackling slavery such as Steven Spielberg's Amistad and Oprah Winfrey's Beloved , Adanggaman dares to tackle the role of Africans in orchestrating the trade.