Counter-Currents
1,550 words
Africa Addio (Goodbye Africa) (1966), co-directed, co-edited, and co-authored by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi of Mondo Cane fame, is a must-see red-pill documentary for race-realists. Filmed between 1963 and 1965 in Kenya, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Rwanda, Angola, the Belgian Congo, and South Africa, Africa Addio chronicles the exit of the British and Belgian colonial powers from Africa, as well as the attempts of the Portuguese and South Africa whites to hold on.
Many of you will find it simply unbelievable, for reasons of style and content. Africa Addio is so superbly filmed and edited that sometimes it does not seem like a documentary. Riz Ortolani’s lush Morricone-like music, as well as the magic of Italian dubbing, reinforce this impression. But as far as I can tell, only one sequence was created entirely by the filmmakers, and obviously so: a graveyard with headstones for white farms in the Kenya highlands.
As for the content: the colonial worlds created by whites as well as the results of the African takeovers seem equally surreal.
In the Kenya highlands, British farmers recreated English country life, complete with fox hunts (although the quarry is an African runner carrying part of a frozen fox). The headquarters of a British wildlife rescue operation looks like a set from a Bond movie or the Thunderbirds. The beach in Capetown, with its high-rise hotels and beautiful blondes surfing and sunning, looks like California or Australia. Surely it must all have been staged. But no. White people actually did this.
The sequences in post-colonial Africa seem so surreal, terrifying, and deeply unflattering to blacks that that movie has been denounced as racist propaganda. It definitely leads to racist conclusions. But all of it appears to be real.
Still, one wonders: If blacks really are that bad, why did whites ever settle there? Why did whites give blacks power over them? And why, in the name of all that is holy, are we allowing these people to colonize us today?
The first thirty minutes focus mostly on Kenya. We see the trial of Mau Mau terrorists and their accomplices, who slaughtered white families and mutilated their cattle. They also tortured and killed baboons, for no fathomable reason. They are sentenced to life in prison. A few years later, Jomo Kenyatta pardoned the Mau Mau. The white farmers of the Kenya highlands are forced to sell. We see their houses and European treasures being auctioned off by Indian merchants. Then we see their yards and gardens being bulldozed, their trees dynamited, to create subsistence gardens for hundreds of blacks, who fill the European houses to overflowing, covering everything in filth and smoke, and slowly dismantling the houses to burn in their fireplaces — since it is easier than fetching wood, and it does not occur to them that, at some point, the house will become unlivable. In a stunning sequence, we see Boer farmers from South Africa who settled in Kenya returning home with their herds the way they came: in covered wagons.
In colonial Kenya, blacks could look at white women but not touch. In free Kenya, blonde British nannies become a status symbol for the black elites, and an old blonde whore does a striptease for a roomful of sweaty blacks. At the end, she offers “Bwana” the privilege of popping off her pasties. It seems unreal. Was it staged? Probably not.
Africa Addio is filled with unflattering contrasts between blacks and whites. The white colonists are remarkably good-looking in Kenya, Angola, the Congo, and South Africa. The Africans, many filmed in extreme closeups, are often hideously ugly, with alarmingly discolored eyes and teeth. The filmmakers could be accused of seeking out exceptionally attractive whites and ugly Africans, but there are a lot of goofy and plain-looking whites as well. There are scenes of European order and grace: soldiers on parade, a ceremony in a church where the former colonial flags are being entrusted to the clergy — contrasted with noisy crowds of Africans swarming and rioting. We cut from disciplined and well-dressed British soldiers to clownish, shambling African troops and policemen. Post-colonial Africa began as a farce, a grotesque parody of European civilization.
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Then it descended into tragedy. Throughout the continent, African rebel groups, usually backed by the USSR or Communist China, used terrorism to eject whites. Then, once the whites were gone, they went on to massacre their tribal enemies. In Zanzibar and Tanganyika, the enemy was “Arabs,” meaning fellow Africans who had converted to Islam under the rule of Arab slave traders along the East African Coast. In 1964, the newly independent government of Zanzibar was overthrown by a Communist-backed revolution, and up to 20,000 Arabs were massacred. The filmmakers hired a plane in Tanganyika to document what was happening. They were fired upon when they tried to land but over two days managed to film from the air burned-out villages, columns of Arabs being marched to their deaths, as well as mass graves and random heaps of corpses. One day, we see pitiful refugees fleeing to the beaches; the next day the beach is littered with countless corpses. It seems that genocide is part of every Communist revolutionary playbook. That would include the playbooks of the communists that Donald Trump is allowing to run amok in America today.
The filmmakers were on the ground during the Arab massacres in Tanganyika. At one point, they were pulled from their car by soldiers and put against a wall. They were about to be shot when someone looked at their passports and said. “Wait, these aren’t whites. They’re Italians.” The birth of a meme?
We also visit Rwanda, where we see the aftermath of a genocide of Hutus against Watusis. I guess there were many such massacres. We see Watusi survivors and their cattle streaming into exile in Uganda, as well as rivers choked with the corpses of those who were not so lucky. It is slick and cinematic, but the blood and bodies were real.
In the Belgian Congo, we see European troops and mercenaries repelling rebels who seized Stanleyville. The aftermath is sickening. The rebels had raped, killed, and tortured white nuns, nurses, and schoolchildren. They had also tortured, killed, and sometimes eaten 12,000 fellow Africans. We see European families who had narrowly escaped rape, torture, and death. Later, the filmmakers fly over a mission school where the rebels were holding nuns and children. A few days later, the mission has been burned to the ground. The grounds are littered with the corpses of nuns. Fortunately, the rebels were rather easy to defeat. They believed that magic made them immune to bullets. We see close up that this is not so as we witness the summary execution of two rebels. The filmmakers were actually accused of staging these murders, as if the Africans needed any incentive given the carnage we have seen already.
Two sequences deal with the mass slaughter of wildlife after whites pulled out and could no longer protect them. It is totally sickening. There are two kinds of hunters: whites and blacks. The white hunters are seen mowing down fleeing zebras by towing a rope between two jeeps. Another has a helicopter drive an elephant toward him before shooting it down. I have no patience for people who kill big game, even on sustainable game reserves, even if they are white. No, especially if they are white.
But the most sickening spectacle is of thousands of blacks cordoning off huge areas and killing everything that moves by chucking spears at them. The attempts of white conservationists to save the victims of the slaughter are touching but mostly futile. Again, you will wonder, “Can this be real?” But the blood is real, the fetal hippos and elephants ripped from their mothers’ wombs are real.
The final sequence is set in South Africa, Africa’s “sanctuary for whites.” It begins with a huge crowd of uniformed black children running toward a low set camera. The narrator declares that five blacks are born for every white in South Africa. It is a very effective way of communicating the demographic problem. Here comes the future!
We then visit the mines of Pretoria, where armies of blacks mine gold and diamonds. Although ordinary whites tried to build a nation in South Africa, it was always a colony, an economic zone in which a tiny oligarchy imported cheap nonwhite labor to heap up gold and diamonds. The lure of cheap labor plus high black fertility doomed South Africans to demographic eclipse and political impotence. The film ends with the Cape penguin colony, marooned far from their home in Antarctica. The analogy with whites is obvious. We never belonged there.
Africa Addio is a strange and sobering masterpiece. I highly recommend it as a tool for red-pilling young whites about race.
The Unz Review, 2020
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13 comments
I’ve watched it, and wholeheartedly agree. There other works are also fantastic, but this one is the best.
We watched this movie earlier this year on a recommendation made at AmRen. It is one of the top ones I’d suggest for slapping sanity into anyone still thinking everything is working out fine in the world.
I wish the author had pointed out that there are two versions of Africa Addio: the censored Italian dubbed version and the uncensored English dubbed version. Both have thier merits and the English one is much rarer even on the internet and it contains many amazing scenes not in the Italian version.
The segment with the white mercenaries was actually inspiring. They were a bunch of men from various places and backgrounds, I’m sure some of whom had very troubled pasts, who banded together and rescued a bunch of innocent people who were in terrible danger.
Thanks for the tip. The “Blood & Guts” version is available for free on YouTube, which still has its uses.
I first came across Africa Addio in a used bookstore, picking up a Ballantine paperback based on the movie which pulled no punches about what was supposed to be a glorious era of post-colonial liberation. The book even included some nifty photographs, massacres and all. It wasn’t until years later that I saw the movie itself, since at that time it was screened only in remote midnight art houses. So Africa Addio became a sort of holy grail, supplemented by the fare presented in the pages of Soldier of Fortune magazine. Of course, today you can get the DVD online or via streaming.
One thing to get out of the movie is the attitudes of White people back when there still was a semblance of racial consciousness.
In the English language version, the Lowell Thomas style narrator has an unironic detachment which would be almost impossible in today’s media personalities. And yes, the wildlife rescue operation HQ does look like a set from a Bond movie, with its mix of Pan Am ™ future chic uniforms and the Big Board of Africa, Britain still in control on the Serengeti. Then compare it with today’s dismal situation where the English do not even control their own capital city.
There’s the tactics used by the White troops during the relief of Stanleyville in 1964 (shown in a couple of up front sequences). You had Major Mike Hoare’s mercenaries, recruited from “ex-somethings” (former soldiers, students, farmers…South African, Rhodesian, French, Belgians with some anti-communist Cubans). There was also a Belgian paratrooper battalion dropping in, supported by the US Air Force, all in front of the cameras. Superior Western leadership and shock tactics routed much larger numbers of quasi-communist “Simba” rebels.
Very inspirational, and worth considering for those who see Whites as being outnumbered but not necessarily outgunned in the face of the rising tide of color.
The Congo rescue sequence goes on the assumption that when Europeans are threatened anywhere, it is incumbent upon other Europeans to come to their rescue. A far cry from today, whether we are talking farm-attacks in South Africa or the insurrections sweeping cities from Malmo to Portland.
Similar for the Portuguese Angola counterinsurgency sequence, Western soldiers fighting in the defense of Christian civilization in Africa. Where White people stand up and fight for themselves, Africans fall into line. Many of the troops serving in the Portuguese colonial army were Africans (as was the case in Rhodesia and SW Africa). They had more appreciation for White rule than does your average sh*tlib or cuckservative today.
It’s worth checking out other movies which were shot in White-run parts of Africa in this era. There’s a sequence in 1965’s Endless Summer on a SA beach where a comment is made to the effect that “integration has not yet reached here,” ironic in retrospect owing to more recent events in the Rainbow Nation ™. Another movie to check out is 1967’s Cape Town Affair, a crime drama with Jacqueline Bisset also set in South Africa and with lots of contemporary footage of civilization under White rule. Plus there are any number of websites with video from Rhodesia or South Africa way back when which show life looking so, well, normal. Sorta like 1980s era video of Americans going to shopping malls and late night convenience stores.
White rule, implicit or explicit = normalcy.
Something worth fighting for…
While we might say “addio” to Africa, it’s still not too late for the rest of the West. The movie definitely belongs in the Red Pill Collection.
Could it be that the white villains in Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust should be the filmmakers of Africa Addio?
Africa, the cradle of Art, Philosophy and Science, was a paradise before the White man stole from the Black man, and unleashed the whip and the sicknesses.
This is what the black diaspora earnestly believes: that they are only taking back what is owed them. The lying media are careful not to openly rehearse this infantile nonsense — not yet. They frame the afroislamic invasion in terms of prehistory (Cheddar Man was black), of payback for Empire (black labour powered the industrial revolution) and of demographic necessity to cover a declining birthrate.
I recall a heartwarming news story a couple of years ago about a charming Piedmontese village redeemed from final depopulation by the settlement of Sudanese refugees. But — what became of the incomers? Did they settle down to farm the land, raise olives and grapes, make Prosciutto, build and decorate churches in the steep hillsides? This report gives a strong hint.
This is the fate of all the West if the tide is not reversed. The wreckers of the order and progress that Europe once brought to Africa are on the march, out for vengeance, and they will submerge the fair cities and defile the lands our ancestors kept if we do not mobilise against them.
This certainly gives the lie to the myth of the mafia as princely defenders of the Mezzogiorno against foreign occupiers.
Hmmm, Mondo Candido, a modernization of Candide, has something on the Palestinian conflict, but I can’t seem to find it anywhere! I bet that would be interesting!
I have waited for Counter-Currents to cover AA. It is the most brilliant documentary. The racial reality in it is undeniable, but the filmmakers started out as liberals who just wanted to film the decolonization of Africa as a human interest story. They later made God Bye Uncle Tom which was equally as fascinating and illuminating about race. It was filled in Haiti under “Baby Doc” Duvalier the Caribbean dictator.
AA is not a film that is on the side of whites. It seems to hold the colonizers as partly responsible. The movie just tries to show the simple truth. Contrast that to modern media, where we always get a qualification or editorial to help us see things the right way.
Powerful review from Lynch, but I dissent from this ending:
“The film ends with the Cape penguin colony, marooned far from their home in Antarctica. The analogy with whites is obvious. We never belonged there.”
On the contrary, we belong everywhere. We are the human future. We must never cease acting accordingly.
Amazed to read this review and to learn that the movie is still available as I’ve never managed to source a copy. I saw it as a schoolboy when such movies were still shown in mainstream cinemas. It made an enduring impression on me and strengthened my commitment to white Africa even though such views were unpopular. In modern parlance, I got red-pilled. May it also be a beacon and a warning for today and the future. Great work Dr Johnson.
PS Understand, however, that the sequence of the Boers returning to SA in covered wagons was poetic licence. The rest, of course, was all too real.
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