90% of Africa’s cultural legacy resides outside the continent; audiovisual restitution is a battle for memory as urgent as artefact restitution. When film director Alain Kassanda set out to tell the story of his grandparents in colonial Belgian Congo, he wanted to collect films from the period. The images he found spoke of Belgians civilising the local population – building roads and schools, and depictions of black folklore. “The Congolese always appeared as ghosts. It was racist propaganda in which the Congolese perspective was never shown,” says Kassanda. To make matters worse, he had to pay 25,000 euros to be … Continue reading Decolonising African cinema in the time of Netflix