Message To The Black Man
- Dr. Ben

Mhenga Amos N. Wilson: The Psychology of Co-operative Economics

Africa’s colonial overlords brutally stripped it of countless cultural treasures. Now, the fate of these items is being hotly debated in Europe and Africa as well. Some say the pieces should be returned, while others have reservations.European museums proudly present art and cultural artifacts from all over the world. But until recently, many of them have never considered their own complicity in the brutal ways in which the pieces were acquired. Only slowly are they starting to include the people to whose ancestors these artifacts once belonged in their decisions, although European colonial overlords pillaged and looted them in the first place.The issue of restitution is taking on a new urgency in Germany, last but not least because of the controversy surrounding Berlin's Humboldt Forum, which is home to non-European collections. It's estimated that more than 1.5 million artifacts from all around the world are held in storage at Germany's ethnological museums. The Linden Museum in Stuttgart alone holds 60 thousand pieces from Africa. How many of them were stolen? And how do museums address the fact that their colonialist collectors had blood on their hands? This documentary takes an African perspective on some examples, including valuable bronzes from Nigeria, an ornamental prow of a boat from Cameroon, and what is known as the Witbooi Bible from Namibia. What do the people in the African countries where the pieces originated think about all this? What are the views of researchers, museum directors, artists and curators? What emotions arise when the frequently painful past is stirred up and examined? And how significant is the issue in the context of problems such as poverty, hunger and corruption in former colonies?

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DW Documentary gives you knowledge beyond the headlines. Watch high-class documentaries from German broadcasters and international production companies. Meet intriguing people, travel to distant lands, get a look behind the complexities of daily life and build a deeper understanding of current affairs and global events.

Africa: War is Business reveals how war economies come into being in Africa, and how they are maintained. The film investigates the causes and effects of these economies, and where we as Western consumers fit into the equation.

The film follows Prince Jaime de Bourbon de Parme, son of Princess Irene of the Netherlands, as he travels through Sierra Leone, Liberia and Congo looking for the cause of these wars in Africa and the role the continent's natural resources play in creating conflict. He wonders how countries so rich in these resources could be so overwhelmed by poverty.

⁣Eritrea - French Documentary [1980]

This 9 minute film is an insight into the work of soil and water conservation expert, Dr Chris Reij. In June 2012
I joined him on a whistle-stop tour of communities in southern Niger. This area is right on the edge of the Sahara and yet growing in the sandy soil are an abundance of vegetables, cereal crops and trees.
The film was made with funding support from IFAD.

The videoclip Ponto de Luz, of Sara Tavares, was created using the Stop Motion technique, which means taking pictures to objects, persons or situations, frame by frame, putting then everything together in a video sequence which creates the illusion of movement. From here, comes also the Timelapse technique, which means taking pictures with a regular constant break, for example, minute by minute, during a long period of time which creates the illusion of time passing by (shadows, clouds, sea, cars, people, etc)

For this vídeo it were taken 4500 photos, and used in the final edition 3000.

This vídeo was made and directed by Mercês Gomes e Ricardo Oliveira Alves.