Africa addio

Action, adventure, horror, drama, tantalizing Technicolor, and real uncensored communist-sanctioned terror and exterminations are just a couple of the classic ingredients that make Africa addio (1966) aka Africa Blood and Guts aka Farewell Africa co-directed by the great Guido mondo movie masters Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi (Mondo Cane, Mondo candido) the authentic African epic and singular celluloid safari that it is. Indeed, forget the ethnographies of ethnomasochistic frog bastards like Jean Rouch and René Vautier, Africa addio is the real no bullshit deal in terms of depicting the rarely good, mostly bad, and uniquely ugly in regard to the reasons as to why post-colonial Africa is a virtual hell-on-earth that is plagued by rape, murder, poverty, starvation, and countless other tragic things that most people rather ignore (did the colonialists forget about the history of Haiti?). Condemned by exceedingly effete mainstream film critic Roger Ebert as “racist” because he felt it “slanders a continent” (since when do Africans have time to worry about petty pansy white liberal things like slander?), Africa addio depicts the horrors that ensue when blacks are left to their own devices when handed a European model for civilization and are expected to run it on their own. Needless to say, the results are not pretty. Arguably one of the most, if not the most, damning depiction of humanity ever shot in Technicolor, the film portrays, among other things, real depictions of genocide and extermination, collective racial and religious hatred, the mass slaughtering of wild life, the nonsensical destruction of imported foods in a place where one cannot afford to waste food, the exodus of affluent whites to their mother countries, the communist-ordained slaughter of white Christian missionaries and school children, and the destruction of legions of black Marxist-Leninist murder squads by a handful of white mercenaries. On top of featuring a uniquely unflattering depiction of humanity, Africa addio is a rare example in cinema history where real anarchy is depicted in the purist form, not to mention it is a work where the viewer bears witness to the very potential death of the filmmakers, who constantly carry rifles in plain sight. The film is also notable for being a rare instance where the filmmaker was arrested on a murder charge relating to the work, as co-director Gualtiero Jacopetti was accused of staging the much deserved execution of a Congolese Simba Rebel prior to the film’s release, though he was ultimately cleared of all charges. Indeed, as Jacopetti, who himself was a journalist, has described in interviews, he was the victim of a witch hunt executed by the left-wing press in Italy for obvious reasons (after all, as described in the film, most of the extermination squads, which the left-wing media depicted as morally righteous black liberationists, where backed by communist regimes), but in terms of documentaries on 'The Dark Continent' (a phrase that the viewer comes to realize has more than just one meaning after watching the film), Africa addio is as objective as they come as a work that criticizes whites just as much as blacks, ultimately blaming France and Great Britain’s premature withdrawl from the continent for the savage depravity and full-blown social chaos that took place during the decolonization era of the 1960s and still lives on to this very day. Hated by leftists not just for political reasons, the documentary also dares to entertain with seemingly immaculate direction, witty and insightful narration, and music that acts contra to the anti-entertainment ‘distancing’ techniques of celebrated commie avant-gardists like Jean-Marie Straub and Jean-Luc Godard. In its lavish (yet literally guerrilla-style) direction and extravagant original musical score, Africa addio has the look of a big budget Hollywood production, albeit minus the phoniness, sappy sentimentalism, and tagged-on happy ending. Indeed, forget Zulu (1964), or any other mainstream Hollywood movie set in the Dark Continent for that matter, Africa addio is the work one must see to properly understand the Africa of today and why the continent will probably never get out of its precarious predicament as the rape, murder, slavery, and starvation capital of the world.

Right from the beginning, Africa addio prepares the viewer for what they are about to be in store for with the following introductory prologue: “The Africa of the great explorers, the huge land of hunting and adventure adored by entire generations of children, has disappeared forever. To that age-old Africa, swept away and destroyed by the tremendous speed of progress, we have said farewell. The devastation, the slaughter, the massacres which we assisted belong to a new Africa–one which if it emerges from its ruins to be more modern, more rational, more functional, more conscious–will be unrecognizable. On the other hand, the world is racing toward better times. The new America rose from the ashes of a few white man, all the redskins, and the bones of millions of buffalo. The new, carved up Africa will rise again upon the tombs of a few white men, millions of black men, and upon the immense graveyards that were once its game reserves. The endeavor is so modern and recent that there is no room to discuss it at the moral level. The purpose of this film is only to bid farewell to the old Africa that is dying and entrust to history the documentation of its agony.” Indeed, the viewer is about to enter a perturbing, if not equally penetrating, place of no return, at least for about 140 minutes or so, where any semblance of civilization and sanity has been flushed down a Marx brand toilet that has become clogged and has caused shit to overflow everywhere.

For anyone watching Africa addio, it is quite apparent that post-colonial Africa is a real-life nightmare of rape, torture, and destruction, but who is to blame?! The director’s offer the following speculation: “Europe is in a hurry to leave and on tiptoe even if, all things considered, it has given far more than it has taken. Europe, the continent that nursed Africa, can no longer manage this big black baby that grew too quickly, keeps bad company and what’s more, hates it because of its white skin. And so it is abandoned, still cranky and immature, just at the moment when it needs Europe the most.” Indeed, the British and French, who are finally accepting the fact that they no long have empires and barely have the time to waste on teaching savages how to be civilized pseudo-Brits and Frogs, have left civilization in the hands of people without civilization who, until relatively recently, ran around naked in hunter-gatherer tribes and had no interest in worrying about things like democracy, literacy, liberalism, badminton, rationalism, and clothing. Desiring their own independence and looking to blame whites for every single one of their misfortunes, many of the black liberationists find themselves enticed by anti-Occidental communist propaganda from the Soviet Union and China, who back their genocidal revolutions of extermination and anti-religious hysteria. As depicted early on in Africa addio, the communist-backed Uhuru Movement, which wrecked havoc all across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania and rid these areas of white rule, as well as a number of whites and black people with it, demands all black Africans adopt Pan-Africanism. On top of giving white property and farms to blacks (with many of the original owners being tortured and exterminated during the revolutions), Uhuru even made sure to rid Africa of white graveyards, even hiring Indians to carry out the dirty deeds of exhuming the corpses. The whites have been in Kenya for three generations, but now have to give up their rights and safety to blacks that hate their very being, so many of them naturally opt for leaving the Dark Continent and going back to the old country for good. Although the crimes relating to the Mau Mau Uprising are not depicted in the documentary, the aftermath is and one learns via trial footage how black nannies would take part in slaughtering white children that they had brought up since birth, among other countless atrocities that make those of the SS seem rather civil by comparison. One of the more heinous criminals on trial is convicted of cannibalism, which is now a fairly common occurrence today in places like the Congo and Liberia. After the Uhuru’s ‘liberation’ of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, senseless animal slaughterings, including the lynching of monkeys (!) and mutilation of cows (who have to be put down by white farmers), and poaching became all the rage and it even got so bad in the Uhuru countries that the blacks literally begged the French and British whites that they originally kicked out to come back to restore order, but it was short-lived, though privately funded Anglo-Saxon organizations did pop up to help save the animals (in one of the most breathtaking scenes of the doc, a baby zebra is airlifted out of a dangerous kill zone via helicopter right before sunset). Psychopathic rich whites also used the chaos as an opportunity to kill elephants and whatnot, with something called the “1/2 hour safari” becoming especially popular where wealthy whites would land in a helicopter, shoot and kill an elephant at close range like true cowards, and then take a photo of themselves with their effortlessly earned prize as a souvenir. Of course, although more murderous, blacks were much less proficient hunters, as while whites would only need two and three people and a couple rifles to take down an elephant, it was not uncommon for a giant mass of 10,000 spear-chucking negroes to occupy an area the size of a large city and kill animals collectively with archaic weapons. As the documentary reveals, the blacks had a special hatred for horses as they associated them with whites and saw them as “physically racist” due to their supposed aversion to negros.

One of the more standout segments of Africa addio is the depiction of the Zanzibar Revolution, which involved the extermination of large segments of the Arab Muslim and Asian populations. Backed by the Soviets, a genocidal negro named John Okello overthrew the thousand year old government of the Sultan and ordered the extermination of Muslims, even dropping off 500 rifles and propaganda leaflets on one island demanding that the blacks kill all the Arabs because they were ostensibly ‘cursed slave traders.’ Rather nonsensically, the blacks mindlessly followed Okello’s demands, with Africa addio being literally the only live document of the genocide, which features thousands upon thousands of Arabs piled up in mass graves and sprawled out on the beaches in gruesome postmortem poses. The reason why the Zanzibar Revolution is so under documented is because killer Okello closed all communications and airports in the area, thus only a handful of brave Europeans managed to sneak in and bear witness to a most horrendous piece of history. In one rather disturbing scene featured in the documentary, directors Jacopetti and Prosperi's German colleagues are taken hostage and have their helicopter burned by a Marxist murder squad, with the Italian filmmakers themselves barely getting away as they are being shot at while taking off in a helicopter. The documentary also depicts the war of the Bantu against the Watusi (aka Hutu), which is described as, “nothing more than racial persecution fomented for political purposes by the presence and propaganda of China in the state of Rwanda Burundi.” Over a two month period, the Bantu massacred 18,000 Watusi people with mere machetes, thus revealing that the sentimentalized revelations featured in phony Hollow-wood garbage like Hotel Rwanda regarding genocidal racial hatred in Rwanda is nothing new. Another hell on earth scenario depicted in the documentary involves Dar es Salaam, the largest city in Tanzania, after it went into complete anarchy when the military decided to mutiny and the president disappeared, with the filmmakers describing merely being there amongst all the society insanity as a, “nearly a suicidal endeavor.” The aftermath of the commie Simba Rebellion of 1964 in the former Republic of Congo is also depicted in graphic detail, with bloated, mutilated and dismembered corpses covering nearly every couple square feet of the area. The Simba ultimately had tortured and, in part, eaten 12,000 people during their 100 days of neo-bolshevik occupation, but luckily 100,000 Belgian/European paratroopers and mercenaries came in and saved the day. Among other things, the Simba burned children alive in their schools, participated in collective cannibalism, and raped and killed white Christian missionaries for the mere rare pleasure of defiling the white devil and his God.

Undoubtedly, my favorite scene of Africa addio is a segment on Tshombe’s army of eccentric white mercenaries, who are aptly described as follows: “the last surviving soldiers of fortune from another century. They’re former citizens of a world that kicked them out or that they’re running from. Dead and survivors, all of them are or were ex-something. From a restless past, an uncomfortable present, a ruined adventure, lost faith.” The white mercenaries are made up of every type of European race imaginable and represent the old school type of Faustian man of yesteryear that were responsible for conquering Africa and other parts of the world in the first place. Highly adept killers, it only takes 14 white mercenaries to kill 400 commie rebels from Kisala and only 40 men plan to execute an operation that 93,000 UN soldiers failed to do: the conquest of Boende. In one scene, the mercenaries save a group of overjoyed white Christian missionaries literally just a couple of seconds before they are about to be slaughtered. Indeed, as narrated in the documentary, “Simba propaganda teaches to strike the white man, especially at his God, a white-skinned God responsible for the centuries-long arrogance of his faithful.” After recovering a booty of 50 million Congolese Francs (which was apparently going to be used by a fellow named General Olenga to send 3000 Mulelist warriors to ostensibly occupy America!), the mercenaries celebrate by getting naked and drunk. Indeed, even in war torn and corpse-covered post-colonial Africa, there are still ways to have fun, thus demonstrating that the white man is always at his greatest during moments of complete chaos.

Ultimately, Africa addio concludes quite aptly with a rather foreboding segment on the apartheid in South Africa, which is described as follows: “Racial separation, which is called “apartheid” here, is a short-lived, provisional dam. It is the hysterical reaction to the hysterical situation that threatens to darken the smile of the new generations into hatred.”  Undoubtedly, South Africa is the only place featured in the entire documentary that has any sort of order and functional infrastructure, which, whether people want to admit it or not, is a direct result of apartheid. In the very last scene of the documentary, the narrator makes an excellent metaphor between Arctic penguins that long ago colonized the southernmost beaches of South Africa and the dubious future for western civilization in SA, stating: “At the end of the Ice Age, a warm current broke this little colony of penguins off of the glaciers of the south and carried them here on huge rafts of ice that then melted in the sun. Isolated and without the possibility of returning to their original homeland, they have for centuries been strangers in a strange land that is becoming more and more heated and hostile toward them surrounded by a sea that grows higher and more and more filled with rage. Perhaps a little peace will descend upon these waters sooner or later, before a wave stronger than the others tears them away forever from this last rock that forms the geographic end of the Dark continent.” Of course, since the nearly half a century of time that has passed since the documentary was first released and the inevitable end of apartheid two decades ago, South Africa has more or less degenerated into a country just as corrupt and crime-ridden as the rest of Africa, with the rarely acknowledged extermination of the white population already well under way as demonstrated by the epidemic of Boer farmer murders committed by blacks. In fact, one of the most amazing things about Africa addio is that it demonstrates how eerily similar modern day South Africa is to how Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania were during the 1960s.

Undoubtedly, when everything is said and done, the white man’s biggest crime in Africa was ever setting foot there in the first place, thus forcing blacks to adopt a European way of life that they were never fit for. Indeed, they might not have their homes, iPods, cellphones, rap CDs, sanitation, antibiotics and basketballs if it were not for white colonization, but they would probably be much happier and less resentful were they still living the hunter-gatherer way of life that they were used to before enterprising Europeans showed up on the Dark Continent and began carving up land, mixing together rival tribes, and creating countries. It should be noted that the perennial problem of starvation in many African countries is itself a direct result of western medicine because, like the rest of the third world, the introduction of antibiotics skyrocketed the survival rates among Africans, thus resulting in unsustainable amounts of mouths to feed.  Of course, when white do-gooder philanthropists and so-called nonprofit organizations began providing these starving people with aid for rather dubious reasons, they only guaranteed that even more people would be starving in the next generation. As the history of Haiti clearly demonstrates, which involved the black population exterminating the entire white population, as well as the mulatto aristocracy that was setup by the French, negroes always revert back into the same behavior that they engaged before they adopted a “white mask” (as Fanon once called it), albeit in a degenerative form, as they have already been long robbed of their indigenous culture and do not have much to return back to. Notably, one of the major themes of Africa addio is the inability of blacks to accept whites as ‘Africans’, even if their ancestors have been there for 400 years. In a scene featuring idealistic Portuguese soldiers being killed by members of the FREILMO in Mozambique and MPLA in Angola during the early stages of the Portuguese Colonial War, the narrator rightfully states, “This is the destiny of a people who wanted to ignore the color of skin. This is Portugal. White or black, we’re all Portuguese. But the rebels of Angola don’t agree. This is Africa. Only blacks are Africans. White and black, a dilemma which is present, current, universal that is more and more being colored red.” It should be noted that I watched the original Italian cut of the film (there are at least three versions of the film), which is less brutal than the American cut entitled ‘Africa Blood and Guts,’ which was condemned by the directors and features none of the scenes of nudity and ‘comic’ relief that give the viewer a little bit of time to digest all the blood, destruction, and racial hatred that makes up the majority of the film. Indeed, Africa addio features a real and uncensored depiction of the rotten fruits of engineered racial diversity in action, ultimately offering a taste of what is to come to Europe, American, Australia, and all the other white-majority areas if they continue allowing hostile aliens (be they legal or illegal) into their countries, for nature is the ultimate fascism and has no sympathy for ethno-masochistic bleeding heart pussies who hate reality and somehow think they can save humanity by throwing everyone into a melting pot that has never and will never melt, as demonstrated by the abject failure of multicultural entities of the past like the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.  In their masterful follow-up epic docudrama/documentary/mockumentary hybrid Addio zio Tom (1971) aka Goodbye Uncle Tom, directors Jacopetti and Prosperi would predict the largely unspoken war against white American that has transformed the United States into the hate-ridden, divided, and ultimately broken nation that it is today.  With that being said, I think it is about time some new filmmakers pick up Jacopetti and Prosperi's torch and carry on their legacy of uncompromising and uncensored documentary filmmaking, as there is no better time then now, as the race-baiting news headlines demonstrate.

-Ty E