CAIRO: Kunta Kinte is the well-known hero of “Roots, one of the most touching American TV serials on the history of African slaves kidnapped by white slave dealers to provide cheap labor to the New Land.
There have been other works of fiction that have preceded and followed Roots, intertwining the modern history of black Africans marked by apartheid and racism to highlight the tragedy of an entire race.
It is a gloomy page of human history, yet only a few have been aware of the necessity of documenting it using channels other than fiction.
Journalist Serge Bilé, a French citizen from the Ivory Coast, has been one of the first to fill this gap. He produced a number of documentaries and wrote books about these historical tragedies as told by the people who lived them or their grandchildren.
He took the initiative of relating the tragedies of the African race in sheer realistic terms. His work also covered cultural aspects of African history.
Martinique-based, Bilé (44) is currently the leading presenter of the televised news transmitted as part of the evening broadcast of one of the TV channels of Reseau France Outremer (RFO) Martinique (French Network Overseas, Martinque).
He believes that the initiative aimed at redressing the wrongs suffered by black Africans should come from the Africans themselves. It is their duty to rewrite their history and become unified in the face of apartheid, racism and oppression.
His work covered the black victims of the Holocaust. It also includes the Paroles D’ Esclavage (Words on Slavery), a website that records the memories of the grandchildren of Martinique’s slaves. He produced “Saint Maurice, the Black Saint, a documentary about the first black Christian priest, whose history questioned the church’s discrimination against black people. “Les Bonis De Guyane is another documentary by the journalist on the Amazon-based community of African origin, who succeeded in reviving its African identity in remote territories.
In “Noirs Dans Les Camps Nazis (Blacks in Nazi Camps), a documentary-turned-book, Bilé exposed the conspiracy of silence over the massacre of what he estimated to be between 10,000 and 30,000 black Africans in the Holocaust. The Europe-based older generations of Africans knew about the issue which had, according to him, been biased to the interests of Jews worldwide.
In the 1920s, some 24,000 Africans were living in Germany, most of whom hailed from what later became known as Togo, Cameroon, Namibia, and Tanzania. But following its defeat in World War I, Germany lost all its African colonies to the Allied Forces which also swept over the Rhineland in western Germany.
Some black Africans made up part of the French troops that invaded Germany, which had later exacerbated racism in Germany. The “Discrimination Law , promulgated in Germany in the beginning of the 1930s, was enforced against the Africans as well as the Jews.
The only difference in the discriminatory approach was that the Jews were marked by the yellow star while the Africans were sterilized, Bilé wrote in “Blacks in Nazi Camps.
Bilé’s book was the fruit of extensive travel throughout Africa, the US and Europe in search of eye-witnesses who suffered the torture inflicted by the Nazis.
In Germany, Belgium, Spain, the US, Norway, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Martinique he stumbled upon Africans who were lucky to have fled the concentration camps.
When released in 2006, “Blacks in Nazi Camps caused ripples in France. It was nominated for the French Television Award but two of the award’s jury members reportedly refused to give the book their vote.
This was the reason why the book missed out on the award and was, instead, sent to be examined by German historians, reports in French media suggested. Some Jews who had fled the camps viewed the book as African propaganda, the same reports claimed.
Undeterred by this act, Bilé launched “Words on Slavery a website he has dedicated to the elderly black people of Martinique. He wanted them to “detail the slavery experienced by their grandparents and great grandparents who had recounted it to their grandchildren, writes Bilé in the introduction to the website which went live last May to mark the anniversary of the abolition of slavery on the French Caribbean island, which was declared in 1848 as a result of the slaves’ revolt.
One of the most touching recollections that figured on the website is one contributed by Gaston Jean Michel, 96. Michel remembered his grandfather’s brother, a slave who revolted against his master who was also his father.
Another is that of Christian Renyal, 83, a descendant of a family of slaves. Traumatized by the heritage of slavery, Renyal became a priest so that he would assuage the pain of fellow sufferers.
Born in 1913, Elisa Renard reported her grandmother, the daughter of a master and a slave, as she described how liberated slaves took part in the first elections on the island, which were held in 1848.
But one of the most controversial of Bilé’s works is his documentary “Saint Maurice, The Black Saint, released in 2002. Born in Egypt, Saint Maurice was appointed commander of a combat legion that was sent to the Swiss Alps under the order of the Roman emperor Maximus.
He was beheaded along with his followers for having renounced the Roman gods, thus becoming the first black saint and martyr in the history of Christianity.
For several centuries Saint Maurice was always portrayed as a white martyr, owing to the fact that “black sainthood was regarded impure in the eyes of the Church, according to Bilé.
The true color of the martyr was revealed only during the 12th century. While focusing on the issue of the saint’s color, the documentary also highlighted that many black churchmen were often sidelined.
But Bilé’s work is not entirely restricted to history and documentation. On the cultural side, Bilé has managed to establish a link between the Africans in remote lands and their counterparts in Black Africa.
A few years ago, he has established the Akwaba association in a bid to set up a cultural bridge between the black people of Martinique and Ivory Coast. Earlier, Bilé was shocked to realize that in Martinique people didn’t know anything about Black Africa other than that it was synonymous with poverty and slavery.
But for Bilé the black Africans, like all oppressed people, crave to have their own distinct identity. In his award-winning documentary “Les Bonis De Guyane (The Bonis of Guiana), released in the late 1990s, Bilé depicted the attempt of the Amazon-based Bonis, a community of African descent, as they managed to preserve their own customs and traditions despite long centuries away from their homeland.
For Bilé, Africans will continue to be torn between history and traditions and the challenges of the modern world, but for the young people to rise and prove their own worth they should always be armed with will, “a sacred will.
