As a follow-up to Bassek Ba Kobhio’s The Great White Man of Lambarene (1995), Clemente Biccochi’s Black Africa, White Marbles brings a new perspective to the story of Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, known as “The Great Eternal White Ancestor of the Teke people of the Congo Basin.” Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza was indisputably a towering colonial humanistic figure; however, as with all larger-than-life figures, the real interest lies in the details.
Hence the premise of Black Africa, White Marbles seems simple and commonsensical at first. De Brazza, a well-known critic of extractive imperialism and the genocidal politics that he termed “animalicide,” is to be buried among the Teke people of the Congo basin, who had come to see him as one of their own. His Mission Report of 1905, which provided damning evidence of slavery practices, famine, and the theft of resources from France and Belgium in Equatorial Africa, had been buried by the French parliament and led to his dismissal as governor of French Equatorial Africa.
Unlike such famous explorers as Henry Morton Stanley, de Brazza was known for his gentle approach. He repudiated violence and coercion as part of his colonial policy, an attitude that endeared him to the Teke people with whom he forged a strong friendship. However, in the Francophone political landscape, commonly called “Francafrique,” nothing ever is as it initially appears.
The notion of “Francafrique” has been capably documented by such scholars as Francois-Xavier Vershave, Pierre Pean, and Dominique Benquet, who exposed the corrupt relationship that France maintained, and still maintains, with its former colonial satrapies on the continent. In this movie Clemente Bicocchi incorporates puppetry in a standard documentary format to capture the strangeness and absurdity that has coexisted with the sinister “abuses of history” in Francafrique. The product of the Faustian bargain among the French government, its former colonies, and large corporations—in this case oil companies such as Total and Elf-Aquitaine—Francafrique perpetuates the exploitation of lands and ordinary people. Significantly, as the return of de Brazza’s ashes to the Congo was being prepared, Jacques Chirac, the godfather of Francafrique, was attempting on February 23, 2005, to push a law through the French National Assembly that would compel all history teachers to teach the “positive values and contributions” of French colonialism. This overt act of historical revisionism had to be squared with the sordid actions of Chirac’s co-conspirators in the Congo, Denis Sassou-Nguesso and his son-in-law, Omar Bongo Ondimba, of the republic of Gabon. (The late Omar Bongo Ondimba was married to the late Edith Sassou Nguesso, a daughter of the Congolese president.) Indeed, Sassou Nguesso and Bongo-Ondimba seized the opportunity to expropriate de Brazza’s aura as defender of the Congolese people in order to rehabilitate their own brands of autocracy and kleptocracy, seeking international recognition as human rights fighters and portraying the new de Brazza mausoleum as evidence of their ethical rectitude and commitment to peace and social justice.
In contrast, the film highlights the empathy, wisdom, and human understanding of Idanna Pucci, a great niece of de Brazza, who displays the same qualities of her uncle that had won over the Teke people. During her visits to the Congo Pucci, to her dismay, quickly realized that the return of her uncle’s ashes was not going to evoke a spirit of mea culpa or the celebration of human rights and social justice from the Congolese authorities, but rather serve as a pretext for the dictators’ cult of personality.
At this point, the documentary returns full circle to evidence that if Idanna’s great-uncle fired the first shot against Francafrique, the fight against that corrupt entity is far from finished, and she was not going to let this occasion be exploited by the local authorities. Pucci takes on the incredible task of literally staring down Denis Sassou Nguesso, insisting on a new protocol agreement in which the relocation of de Brazza’s ashes will take place solely on condition that the Congolese president face up to his responsibility toward his own people with new programs providing clean drinking water, paved roads, electrification, and investment in education instead of the $9 million he was planning to spend on the de Brazza mausoleum. Even though Sassou-Nguesso agreed to these propositions, he predictably reneged on these promises. He also showed himself to be opposed to any payment of reparations in a country still dealing with the traumas not only of colonization, but also of the recent civil war of June–October 1997.
The movie, however, succeeds on many counts, in part because of its pedagogical qualities. Black Africa, White Marbles offers an entry into the world of Francafrique and the need to open a valuable discussion on issues of history, memory, and personal responsibility. The documentary also responds partially to the question raised by Jean-Marie Teno in Africa, I Will Fleece You (1992): “Why do well-structured traditional societies fail to succeed in modern Africa?” The film reveals the constant meddling of the war machines of Francafrique. It also presents the idea that in the long run de Brazza’s humanistic intercultural approach has been vindicated, in contrast to the brutalities and pillaging of Stanley, his patron King Leopold of Belgium, and Francafrique. Idanna Pucci shows how that approach is slowly leading to the downfall of satrapies on the African continent, with the recent abdication of Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso signaling to all the autocrats of Francafrique the tenuousness of their rule.
