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. Journalist Estelle Cornado had a different view.
White people are always the guilty ones.
Adanggaman interweaves several love stories, one of them between an Amazon and a slave prince she captures, but M'bala says his main mission was to confront slavery's horrors. It affects us. It's our history. Three centuries of slave trade - we're talking of 280 million people, from Angola to Senegal. Slaves have certainly been shipped from here.