Africa Addio (Goodbye Africa) (1966), co-directed,
co-edited, and co-authored by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi of Mondo Cane fame, is a must-see
red-pill documentary for race-realists. Filmed between 1963 and 1965 in Kenya, Tanganyika, Zanzibar,
Rwanda, Angola, the Belgian Congo, and South Africa, Africa Addiochronicles the exit of the
British and Belgian colonial powers from Africa, as well as the attempts of the
Portuguese and South Africa whites to hold on.
Many of you will find it simply unbelievable, for reasons of style and
content. Africa Addio is so superbly filmed and edited that it seems in places like a
feature film, not a documentary. Riz Ortolani’s lush Morricone-like music, as
well as the magic of Italian dubbing, reinforce this impression. But as far as
I can tell, only one sequence was created entirely by the filmmakers, and
obviously so: a graveyard with headstones for white farms in the Kenya
highlands.
As for the content: the colonial worlds created by whites as well as
the results of the African takeovers seem equally surreal.
In the Kenya highlands, British
farmers recreated English country life, complete with fox hunts (although the
quarry is an African runner carrying part of a frozen fox). The headquarters of
a British wildlife rescue operation looks like a set from a Bond movie or The Thunderbirds. The beach in Capetown, with
its high-rise hotels and beautiful blondes surfing and sunning, looks like
California or Australia. Surely it must all have been staged. But no. White
people actually did this.
The sequences in post-colonial
Africa seem so surreal, terrifying, and deeply unflattering to blacks that that
movie has been denounced as racist propaganda. It definitely leads to racist
conclusions. But all of it appears to be real. Still, one wonders: If blacks
really are that bad, why did whites ever settle there? Why did whites give
blacks power over them? And why, in the name of all that is holy, are we
allowing these people to colonize us today? But again, it is all real.
The first thirty minutes focus
mostly on Kenya. We see the trial of Mau Mau terrorists and their accomplices,
who slaughtered white families and mutilated their cattle. They also tortured
and killed baboons, for no fathomable reason. They are sentenced to life in
prison. A few years later, Jomo Kenyatta pardoned the Mau Mau. The white
farmers of the Kenya highlands are forced to sell. We see their houses and
European treasures being auctioned off by Indian merchants. Then we see their
yards and gardens being bulldozed, their trees dynamited, to create subsistence
gardens for hundreds of blacks, who fill the European houses to overflowing,
covering everything in filth and smoke, and slowly dismantling the houses to
burn in their fireplaces—since it is easier than fetching wood, and it does not
occur to them that at some point, the house will become unlivable. In a
stunning sequence, we see Boer farmers from South Africa who settled in Kenya
returning home with their herds the way they came: in covered wagons.
In colonial Kenya, blacks could
look at white women but not touch. In free Kenya, blonde British nannies become
a status symbol for the black elites, and an old blonde whore does a strip
tease for a roomful of sweaty blacks. At the end, she offers “Bwana” the
privilege of popping off her pasties. Unreal? No.
Africa
Addio is
filled with unflattering contrasts between blacks and whites. The white
colonists are remarkably good-looking in Kenya, Angola, the Congo, and South
Africa. The Africans, many filmed in extreme closeups, are often hideously
ugly, with alarmingly discolored eyes and teeth. The filmmakers could be
accused of seeking out exceptionally attractive whites and ugly Africans, but
there are a lot of goofy and plain-looking whites as well. There are scenes of
European order and grace: soldiers on parade—a ceremony in a church where the
former colonial flags are being entrusted to the clergy—contrasted with noisy
crowds of Africans swarming and rioting. We cut from disciplined and
well-dressed British soldiers to clownish, shambling African troops and
policemen. Post-colonial Africa began as a farce, a grotesque parody of
European civilization.
The
bodies of Arabs killed in the violence following the Zanzibar Revolution as
photographed by the <i>Africa Addio</i> film crew. Credit:
Wikimedia Commons
Then it descended into tragedy.
Throughout the continent, African rebel groups, usually backed by the USSR or
Communist China, used terrorism to eject whites. Then, once the whites were
gone, they went on to massacre their tribal enemies. In Zanzibar and
Tanganyika, the enemy was “Arabs,” meaning fellow Africans who had converted to
Islam under the rule of Arab slave traders along the East African Coast. In
1964, the newly independent government of Zanzibar was overthrown by a
Communist-backed revolution, and up to 20,000 Arabs were massacred. The
filmmakers hired a plane in Tanganyika to document what was happening. They
were fired upon when they tried to land but over two days managed to film from
the air burned out villages, columns of Arabs been marched to their deaths, as
well as mass graves and random heaps of corpses. One day, we see pitiful
refugees fleeing to the beaches; the next day the beach is littered with
countless corpses. It seems that genocide is part of every Communist
revolutionary playbook. That would include the playbooks of the communists that
Donald Trump is allowing to run amok in America today.
The filmmakers were on the
ground during the Arab massacres in Tanganyika. At one point, they were pulled
from their car by soldiers and put against a wall. They were about to be shot
when someone looked at their passports and said. “Wait, these aren’t whites.
They’re Italians.” The birth of a meme?
We also visit Rwanda, where we
see the aftermath of a genocide of Hutus against Watusis. I guess there were
many. We see Watusi survivors and their cattle streaming into exile in Uganda,
as well as rivers choked with the corpses of those who were not so lucky. It is
slick and cinematic, but the blood and bodies were real.
In the Belgian Congo, we see
European troops and mercenaries repelling rebels who seized Stanleyville. The
aftermath is sickening. The rebels had raped, killed, and tortured white nuns,
nurses, and schoolchildren. They had also tortured, killed, and sometimes eaten
12,000 fellow Africans. We see European families who had narrowly escaped rape,
torture, and death. Later, the filmmakers fly over a mission school where the
rebels were holding nuns and children. A few days later, the mission has been
burned to the ground. The grounds are littered with the corpses of nuns.
Fortunately, the rebels were rather easy to defeat. They believed that magic
made them immune to bullets. We see close up that this is not so as we witness
the summary execution of two rebels. The filmmakers were actually accused of staging
these murders, as if the Africans needed any incentive given the carnage we
have seen already.
Two sequences deal with the
mass slaughter of wildlife after whites pulled out and could no longer protect
them. It is totally sickening. There are two kinds of hunters: whites and
blacks. The white hunters are seen mowing down fleeing zebras by towing a rope
between two jeeps. Another has a helicopter drive an elephant toward him before
shooting it down. I have no patience for people who kill big game, even on
sustainable game reserves, even if they are white. No, especially if they are white.
But the most sickening
spectacle is of thousands of blacks cordoning off huge areas and killing
everything that moves by chucking spears at them. The attempts of white
conservationists to save the victims of the slaughter are touching but mostly
futile. Again, you will wonder, “Can this be real?” But the blood is real, the
fetal hippos and elephants ripped from their mothers’ wombs are real.
The final sequence is set in
South Africa, Africa’s “sanctuary for whites.” It begins with a huge crowd of
uniformed black children running toward a low set camera. The narrator declares
that five blacks are born for every white in South Africa. It is a very
effective way of communicating the demographic problem. Here comes the future!
We then visit the mines of
Pretoria, where armies of blacks mine gold and diamonds. Although ordinary
whites tried to build a nation in South Africa, it was always a colony, an
economic zone in which a tiny oligarchy imported cheap nonwhite labor to heap
up gold and diamonds. The lure of cheap labor plus high black fertility doomed
South Africans to demographic eclipse and political impotence. The film ends
with the Cape penguin colony, marooned far from their home in Antarctica. The
analogy with whites is obvious. We never belonged there.
Africa Addio is a strange and sobering
masterpiece. I highly recommend it as a tool for red-pilling young whites about
race.
https://www.unz.com/tlynch/review-africa-addio/
