A wandering procession lost in a mirage, on the route of the slave caravans--Mandingue, Arada, Bambara, Ibo, Ashanti, Fanti, Yoruba--moans a song, choked by iron collars.

This new film by the Ivoirian director Roger Gnoan M'Bala opens with a prologue in which a slave is fitted out with the irons of bondage ("I am as free as my heart!" he cries.), then gives us a lovely panorama of the West African savannah. A title tells us that this is somewhere in Africa, late 17^th Century." A carefree young couple, far from the censorious eyes of the village, are delightedly doing what carefree young couples do. But when the young man, Ossei, returns home, he is immediately assaulted by the weight of paternal authority. His father tells him that he must give up his lovely girlfriend because of her lower-class, servant status. "The bad blood of that slave girl will not tarnish our noble blood," he declares. Instead, the father has found his son a proper bride, Adjo, someone who will bring status (and presumably a dowry) to the family. When Ossei refuses, his father calls upon the weight of tradition: ancient law must be respected, and a son must obey his father.

During this public haranguing, Ossei's mother, Mo Akassi, tries to calm her son and get him to obey his father. (Mo Akassi is played by the excellent Ivoirian actress Albertine N'Guessan, featured in the 1985 film Faces of Women, which played in the first year of our festival.) When they are away from public eye, however, Mo Akassi berates her husband, displaying good sense and spirit. Still, the father will not be dissuaded. In order to convince his son that he'd better be obedient, he hires some young men to attack Ossei and give him a beating that night. Affronted and disgusted, the proud young man takes his bow and arrow, has a last look at his now-sleeping girlfriend, and slips petulantly away from the village.

When he is some distance away from the village, he looks back to see the village on fire. We then cut to the village, where we see that the warriors of King Adanggaman have descended upon the villagers, burning their homes, rounding them up, cutting down any who resist or who are of no use. ("All here belongs to Adanggaman! Whoever cannot serve the empire must die!" they cry.) Their leaders are women, "Amazons," who had themselves been enslaved by Adanggaman's troops as girls and then turned into ruthless killers. By the time Ossei makes it back to the village, they have left with their captives. Left behind are the corpses of Ossei's father, his girlfriend, and his intended bride. He looks at his father with a mixture of pity and contempt--"What about your noble blood now? God rest your soul." Only his mother is nowhere to be found. He immediately pursues her.

We get to see the prisoners in shackles and iron collars ("the wandering procession") being led to Adanggaman's town, under the firm control of the Amazons. None can escape. After one escape attempt, there is a powerful scene in which the villagers--understanding that they are now slaves--spontaneously begin collectively to hum a haunting lament. Ossei finally catches up with them, sets fire to the savannah, and takes advantage of the resulting confusion to sneak his mother away. However, he is pursued by the fiercest of the women warriors (whose name, we will learn, is Naka). A striking fight sequence ensues (the camera bringing us right into the action as it circles the combatants), and Naka stabs Ossei, then chooses not to finish him off.

We move to the royal seat of King Adanggaman and meet the ruthless, dissolute ruler in person. He is played by the great Rasmane Ouedraogo, whom we've seen in two films by Idrissa Ouedroago--Yaaba (1989) and Tilaï (1990). He is hungry for slaves--in fact, we see him punish a general who'd had the poor sense to kill the inhabitants of a village rather than keep them as slaves. Selling slaves means acquiring guns (i.e., the ability to maintain and extend his power) and rum (i.e., pleasure to which he as ruler is entitled), from the Dutch or the English. When the new slaves are presented to him, Ma Akassi challenges Adanggaman in a powerful scene that encapsulates the film's moral perspective: "You sell your own flesh and blood! You sell your soul." She accuses him of betraying their common traditions. He dismisses her comments by declaring that as the supreme ruler, he makes the traditions. He is the head of the patriarchy, and his word is law.

Ossei makes it to the village and is befriended by an old man who turns out to be a traditional healer, and, we later learn, Naka, the woman warrior, is his long-lost daughter. He is a powerful moral counter-force to Adanggaman, a strong believer in the values of the past. After healing Ossei's wound, he explains to the young man this new version of slavery that Adanggaman espouses--the strongest of the slaves are sold to the Europeans to be sent over the sea, while the weaker are sold off to local people. The young and the old are simply killed off. He reveals himself as an oracle, and when he casts the cowries to reveal the future, he shares with us the awful fate that awaits his people over the coming centuries: "We will suffer a humiliation that no other people has known."

Ossei gives himself up to the king, seeking to gain freedom for his mother by sacrificing his own (his right within the traditional internal slave trade). The king scoffs at him--why give one up when he can have both? And so Ossei himself becomes a slave, and his mother and the old man will soon depart this world. With the help of Naka (who has recognized her father ), he will again taste the sweetness of freedom--but this sweetness will be brief. Ossei, like Africa in general, must succumb to the winds of history.

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Most of the discourse surrounding Adanggaman, has focused on its handling of the controversial issue of the internal African slave trade: the fact that most of the African slaves transported to the Americas had originally been captured and sold to the Europeans by other Africans. Indeed, this is an aspect of the film that requires analysis and discussion. There are some who feel that this aspect of history relieves Europeans from responsibility for the horrible trade in human cargo--"Black Africans," goes the argument, "were just as responsible for this practice as White Europeans, so the descendants of Black Africans have no right to demand

reparation of the descendants of White Europeans." On the other side are those who argue that the African slavers were accustomed to a relatively benign internal slave trade, and had no idea what kind of fate those being transported abroad were facing; in addition, they would point to the fact that the system was always under the control of the Europeans and the colonists, who extracted nearly all the profit from the trade. And there are many who would rather leave the subject alone.

Obviously, this film refuses to do that. But I would argue that the slave trade is only one aspect of what this film is about, that it is ultimately not so much a "historical tale," a period piece, as it is a moral allegory for Africa today--as are so many of the great African films.

At the heart of Adanggaman is the notion of power and its abuse. We see a foreshadowing of this in the beginning, with Ossei's father using his traditional authority to force a bad choice on his son. His wife understands that he is acting like a petty tyrant, abusing (and hence distorting) his traditional authority. With Adanggaman, we see the ultimate tyrant, someone who uses his royal authority literally to sell off his birthright for personal gain.

The misuse of tradition in order to maintain patriarchal self-indulgence and legitimize political corruption is a theme that we see in a number of African films, and obviously it has contemporary overtones. It takes little imagination to extend the lessons of Adanggaman to colonial and post-colonial times, as traditional structures were and are corrupted in order to promote personal gain, to the advantage and profit of non-African outsiders. King Adanggaman is a stand-in for any number of petty despots, puppets for outside forces, enabling the continuation of a system in which Africans--soldiers, police, or bureaucrats--will terrorize their compatriots either for personal gain, internalized values, or simply in order to save their own skins.

As we see in the film, though, then as now there will be those who embody alternative values. With Naka's father we see the positive (though doomed) alternative perspective--someone who truly respects tradition, is committed to its healing nature, and sees the future through the lessons of the past. Ma Akassi is his female counterpart. These are people who know how to listen to the song of the Sankofa bird--those who heed the true values of the past in order to proceed to a moral, community-building vision of the future. Ultimately, Adanggaman is asking the same of us.

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In addition to the ideas and moral system embodied in Adanggaman's , the film must be appreciated as a work of art. The cinematography of its Algerian cinematographer, Mohammed Soudani, is frequently stunning (e.g., the duel between Ossei and Naka; the vision of the orange tunics of the Amazons glowing in the near-dark). Perhaps even more remarkable is the music, by the Congolese singer Lokua Kanza, whose haunting, melancholy voice, fills the film with what could be a blend of traditional music and African-American spirituals. (One wonders the extent to which this music is influenced by African-American spirituals or is the source of those spirituals.)

This visual beauty and technical adroitness is a result of its director's extensive filmmaking background. Roger Gnoan M'Bala, born in Grand-Bassam in 1941, has been working in media in the Ivory Coast since the late 1960s. He began in television, doing sports and entertainment programming, then moved into short films in the early 70s, with La Biche (1971), Amanie (1972), Gboundo (1973), Elevage Moderne (1980), France-Côte d'Ivoire (1982), and Bouka (1987-89). His first feature film was Le Chapeau (1974-75), followed by Ablakon (1984-85), and Au Nom du Christ (1993). This last film won the Giovani Prize at the Locarno Film Festival and First Prize for African Film at the Perugia Film Festival. Adanggaman (2000), his fourth feature, has received wide distribution and critical success in Europe and the West. It is our pleasure to be able to introduce this veteran director to CFAF audiences at last.

--Notes by Michael Dembrow