Against the official history of the colonizers, this striking fresco reverses the gaze to tell, from the point of view of the colonized, one hundred and fifty years of struggle against domination, and to make the present resound with a denial that persists.

How can one synthesize, in less than three hours, one hundred and fifty years of a planetary history whose unsaid, like denials, reactivate the present fractures and polemics? To retrace this hidden past that continues to concern each and every one of us intimately, the authors have chosen to weave chronologically large and small stories, continents and events, with powerful biases. First of all, by telling history from the point of view of the colonized, they take the opposite side of a historical narrative which, however critical it may be of the crimes of colonization, reflects first and foremost the view of colonizing Europe. Secondly, because embracing the essence of the events that have taken place over nearly two centuries in countries as different as India and the Congo, for example, is impossible, they have preferred to turn the spotlight on a series of emblematic fates and battles, some famous, some unknown. From Lakshmi Bai, the Indian princess who led the first anti-colonial struggle in 1857-1858, during the Cipayes revolt, to the Mau-Mau veterans who in 2013 forced the British Crown to acknowledge the atrocities perpetrated against them in Kenya sixty years earlier, their three-part fresco allows itself to ellipse to highlight these continuities and similarities that, from yesterday to today, cut across the fault lines of globalization. Said by actor Reda Kateb - whose great-uncle Kateb Yacine is one of the figures of the anti-colonial struggle brought to the foreground here - the punch commentary unfolds a subjective and choral narrative. Carried also by striking and largely unknown archives, animated sequences, film extracts, from Bollywood to Nollywood, and a rock and hip-hop soundtrack bursting with energy, this highly embodied history of decolonization highlights the burning topicality of the common heritage it has left us.

1. Learning
From the revolt of the Cipayes in 1857 to the astonishing Republic of the Rif, set up from 1921 to 1926 by Abdelkrim el-Khattabi before being crushed by France, this first episode shows that resistance, in other words decolonisation, began with the conquest. He recalls how, in 1885, the European powers shared Africa in Berlin, how the Germans committed the first genocide of the 20th century in Namibia, rivaling the horrors accomplished under the leadership of Belgian King Leopold II in the Congo. He also retraces the journeys of the Haitian anthropologist Anténor Firmin, the Kenyan Mary Nyanjiru, the English missionary Alice Seeley Harris and Lamine Senghor, a young Senegalese skirmishers turned communist and anti-colonialist activist.

2) The release

This second episode, from 1927 to 1954, is that of the confrontation. Whether through the pen of the Algerian Kateb Yacine, who discovered at the age of 15, in 1945, during the Sétif massacre, that the French republican motto, just restored, did not apply to everyone, or that of the poet Sarojini Naidu, close to Gandhi, who in 1947, in the bloodbath of the partition of India, will see his dream of brotherhood shattered, a wind of resistance rises, which will lead in the 1960s to the independence of almost all the colonies. But at what cost? This episode also follows the battles of the elusive Komintern agent Nguyên Ai Quoc ("the Patriot"), who later takes the name of Hô Chi Minh, future winner of Diên Biên Phu, or that of Wambui Waiyaki, intrepid young recruit of the Mau-Mau.

3) The world is ours

From independence to the post-colonial era, this third episode, from 1956 to 2013, opens with the words of West Indian psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952), who joins the FLN maquis in Algeria. It continues in Indira Gandhi's India, which acquires the atomic bomb, in the Congo under the influence of Mobutu, or in the London of 1979, shaken by the revolt of the immigration district of Southall, to end with the rise of a 100% Nigerian cinema in the 1990s and the legal victory of the last Mau-Mau against the British government.


Documentary series by Karim Miské and Marc Ball (France, 2019, 3x52mn) - Authors: Karim Miské, Pierre Singaravélou and Marc Ball - Commentary by Reda Kateb - Coproduction: ARTE France, Program33, AT Production, RTBF, RTS Senegal

Summary for official catalogues