Filmmakers can help to address colonial-era injustices in Africa

A woman with a professional video camera and headphone. (Courtesy/iStock)

On the night of April 23, 2025, I joined Innocent Onyango Adenyo, a friend and fellow playwright, at the Goethe Institut, Nairobi, for the screening of the documentary film 'The Empty Grave' (2024), co-directed by Cece Mlay, one of Tanzania's fastest-rising filmmakers. The film is about two communities' quest for the repatriation of their leaders' remains—taken custody of by the colonisers at the height of the Maji Maji Rebellion against the German colonial rule in Tanzania between 1905 and 1907—from German museums.

Set partly in Songea and Meru, in the south and north of the country respectively, the film follows the efforts, frustrations and occasional gains of the Ngoni and Meru People of Tanzania as they push for the return of the remains, including skulls of their chiefs as well as artefacts purloined between 1895 and 1900. Characters, who include a teacher and an advocate of the High Court of Tanzania, at some point travel to Germany where they are treated to the pathos-filled eyeballing of a panoply of the remains. Towards the end of the film, a rare apology from the visiting German president amid a widely held perception of unconcern on the part of the Tanzanian state only begins to promise hope for both the families and communities involved and those watching.

It's worth recalling that in colonial-era Namibia, between 1904 and 1908, members of the Nama and Herero communities were brutally massacred by the German colonial government and possibly hundreds of thousands of skulls shipped to Germany for use in scientific experiments.

In West Africa, the restitution of artefacts stolen from local communities—and that had been long stashed in museums across Europe—only started a few months ago. And in Kenya, efforts to get Britain, the former colonial master, to pay reparations for the imprisonment, torture, executions and landlessness of native Africans in the period during and after colonialism have yet to bear fruit for many.

So why and how is filmmaking important to the search for justice and efforts to right historical wrongs? Because filmmaking, as an art, is partly responsible for didactic, historical portraiture. In the  'The Empty Grave', for instance, students in both Tanzania and Germany are, for the first time ever, introduced to—and disgusted by—the horrors and brutality of the colonial enterprise in Africa through characters whose kin were casualties of the massacres, purges and clampdowns synonymous with the era. Today, when it's not just possible but more convenient to tell stories, disseminate information and even teach online, the place and role of filmmaking in the amplification of the voices of those clamouring for justice can only be augmented.

The youth are important to both the continuation of society's struggles for justice and future storytelling. If they are to be well-equipped, able recruits into the continual search for justice for victims of historical wrongs, information angled at them ought to be propagated through platforms they can easily access and readily enjoy. Cinema is one such platform as it is more popular with the youth than any other demographic in society.

The Gen Z Movement that organised and led the anti-tax protests across Kenya last year made near-instant and unbelievably huge gains partly because mobilisation was largely done through online platforms popular with the young people. They could easily access and share information about the William Ruto-led Kenya Kwanza regime's planned taxation measures. And they exuded incredible levels of political consciousness that many watchers and admirers alike attributed, rightly or wrongly, to the good karma of the digital onslaught.

A few Fridays prior to the screening of the film 'The Empty Grave', again at the Goethe Institut, I sat through an actors'-led reading of 'Parliament of Owls', a play by Adipo Sidang'. During the subsequent question and answer session, the youth, who accounted for the vast majority of the audience, indicated that they found it "more fun" to watch than read the play.

Around the continent, the literary works of playwright Athol Fugard, who died recently, achieved greater acclaim around the globe, and better portrayed the atrocious indignities and injustices of apartheid-era South Africa when they met the genius of cinema. The movie 'Hotel Rwanda', based on and inspired by the genocide in Rwanda beginning in April 1994, gave the world a window onto the fast-paced nature of hate-fuelled mass murder. And the 2006 novel 'Half of a Yellow Sun' by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, partly based on the Biafra War of 1967-70 in Nigeria, stung those who devoured its film adaptation into looking at ethnic relations with fresh eyes.

Such is the power of cinema. It lends the all-important impulse of emotional empathy and involvement to both the goals and labours of agitation, activism and campaigns. If taken advantage of, and incorporated into popular advocacy for action such as is called for by the film; The Empty Grave', it could easily and quickly turn the hopes, aspirations, enthusiasm, idealism and imagination of the youth into not-before-possible change for society.

In addition, filmmaking that effectively and extensively explores historical portraiture could help make up for the deliberate omissions in the history taught in our schools. In the film 'The Empty Grave', for instance, youthful Germans bemoan the omission of Africans' untold suffering at the hands of Europeans decades ago in Germany's classroom history-teaching. Filmmaking could as well be just as significant and potent a tool of both research and for-posterity archiving.