The documentary film ‘The Empty Grave’ (2024), co-directed by Cece Mlay, one of Tanzania’s fastest-rising filmmakers, 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.
In the film, 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. Cinema is one such platform as it is more popular with the youth than any other demographic in society.
Filmmaking that 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.
RM editors: other examples are:
- Dahomey
- The story of Ne Kuko
