As part of the Project a Black Planet Programme, this film screening helps us pull at the threads that hold the African diaspora together.
On 6th September, the Barbican held a screening of Ola Balogun historical epic Black Goddess.The screening was held as part of the wider Project a Black Planet programme, a collection of workshops, films and an exhibition dedicated to exploring and celebrating Pan-African thinking across the 20th and 21st century. With the tagline, ‘forging new worlds beyond imperial legacies’ the programme had the aim of imagining future diasporic possibilities by restoring forgotten or desurfaced expressions of Pan-African ideas. This cemented that there is no single definition of Pan-Africanism, but that it was and is a relational movement that held significance in different ways to different groups at different times.
The film was selected by Pelumi Odubanjo, who specified the difficulty in sourcing archival diasporic films, as the ownership over them isn’t always clear cut, and they are often buried, in poor condition, and safeguarded by the colonising countries. This further highlights the logistical difficulties of unearthing these films and the implications of power in the ownership of film archives. Odubanjo suggested that although the restitution debate focuses on museums, the restoring and reclaiming of archival material also needs to be addressed.
The screening of Black Goddess is even more important with this in mind. Balogun’s film was released in 1978, one year after the largest Pan-African festival to ever take place at the time was held in Lagos. FESTAC was the second First World Festival of Negro Arts. The festival paved the way for international co-productions between Nigeria and Brazil, led by Balogun, and forged a chance to creatively explore the historic and present day fusions of Nigerian and Brazilian cultural heritage. Balogun’s film starkly expresses the difficulties of separating the cultures, and depicts how Brazilian culture especially is inextricable from cultures brought over by enslaved Africans, in this case, Yoruba-speaking people.
The film itself is an ambitious, precise piece of historical fiction. It follows Babatunde, whose name means ‘my father has returned/lives in me’. He journeys to Brazil after promising his father that he would reconnect with family members lost after slavery’s abolition and bring them back to Nigeria. Babatunde is told to identify them by their possession of a physical symbol of Yemoja, a Yoruba water deity, which is identical to the one he owns. Babatunde’s discovery of the pieces of Yoruba culture still held in Brazilian dance, music and spiritual practices sharpens his sense of shared identity, and makes his soul feel at home. He also laments the tensions and war brought on by the colonial borders that created Nigeria as we know it today.
FESTAC was about bringing together a displaced diaspora, and the theme of homecoming rings strongly in the film, no doubt inspired by Balogun’s own connection to the Brazil; the director’s great grandfather had been enslaved in the country, bought his own freedom and returned to Lagos. The Project A Black Planet programme has encouraged us to reflect on the present day threads that members of the African diaspora must pull to unearth a shared history. In this way, Balogun parallels Babatunde’s narrative with a second story, the origin of his ancestor’s presence as enslaved people in Brazil. He depicts the capture and enslavement of Yoruba people, and the ways in which they fought for dignity and a life beyond enslavement.
The film is an odyssey of cultural discovery, embracing the creativity of cultural fusion that members of the diaspora themselves have spearheaded. Balogun himself, during the zoom Q&A held after the film, referred to the importance of film as a ‘visual music’ and the need to resist colonial narratives that seek to obliterate a history that has essentially been confiscated. Black Goddess is doing just that.