Above is the image from the poster of a documentary in development co-produced by a member of The Kopanya Institute.
The documentary engages with post colonial Africa’s attempt to develop an atomic bomb as a political strategy during the Cold War. This event is situated firmly within the wider context of the Pan African world and movement, both historical and contemporary, and blackness as a political, as opposed to racial, identity.
We include it here as a thought piece, as an example of a visual representation of the complexity, and the complexification, of identity.
We invite the viewer to peruse the image and allow themselves to experience the feelings it evokes, the issues it depicts, and the concepts it subverts.
These include racialisation, exoticisation, nationalism, celebration, protest, violence, radicalism and the re-visioning of history.
The image hopes to challenge the viewer on their perceptions of blackness, and what it is to be of African ancestry, while at the same time celebrating blackness, and Pan Africanism, as a political movement.
The image is also a remapping of geography, depicting a Pan African world layered onto the globe.