A Luta Continua: radical filmmaking, Pan-African liberation and communal empowerment

Abstract

While the anti-apartheid movement has emerged as the premier illustration of transnational solidarity activism, little attention has been paid to the earlier success of the Portuguese African liberation movements. During the 1970s, parties like Mozambique’s FRELIMO established global alliance networks that helped sell their revolutions to ambivalent western societies. In the African American community, the construction of these transnational linkages was aided tremendously by radical filmmaking in the form of American Robert Van Lierop’s A Luta Continua. This transnational collaboration created a film that captured the universal and practical elements of FRELIMO ideology in a way that became a model for local organising, particularly in the African American community. Activists concerned about solidarity with southern Africa, communal control of resources and racial equality all used Van Lierop’s interpretation of FRELIMO’s socialism in A Luta Continua to construct grassroots movements that would spread nationally in the 1970s and lay the groundwork for more familiar anti-apartheid activism in the next decade.