African Filmmakers Research Articles

African film in the 21st Century: some notes to a provocation

As a transnational cinema event, the release of Marvel Studios’ Black Panther (2018) is arguably a monumental moment in the African experience of cinema. Coincidentally, this is followed in 2019 by the 26th edition of the bi-annual festival of Pan-African cinema, FESPACO, which will mark fifty years of the festival’s existence. In addition to the programme of screenings, African filmmakers, critics, theorists, among others, are expected to gather in Ouagadougou to engage with issues of memory, identity and the economy in relation to the idea of a sustainable and diverse Pan-African cinema. These issues have long been prominently placed on the agenda of those concerned with African filmmaking. That they remain a preoccupation of current debates, suggests their persistence, and perhaps, an urgent need for these debates to move beyond the metaphorical polarities of ‘dog eat dog’ and ‘dog eat nothing’. These ‘notes’ are therefore, in anticipation of new perspectives that would shape the futures of African filmmaking. Importantly, a perspective will be sketched to help frame an approach to the idea of Pan-African cinema as a global and transnational economy – cultural, financial and ideological.

The Filmmaker's Triage: The Doctor Figure and Images of Trauma

ABSTRACTWhile writing a fictionalised feature film screenplay set around the character of a South African doctor during his year of compulsory community service in a rural hospital, I began researching how this figure has been represented in other narrative films, particularly those stories told in an African setting. A number of films and television dramas, some made by African filmmakers and others by filmmakers from outside of Africa, have been produced around the medical encounter. My interest lies not in assessing the health messaging found in these films and programs, which is better left to the health educationalists and medical sociologists, but in examining the fictional doctor figure as the main protagonist in these films. While the sociocultural and political dimensions of medicine, health and illness are relevant, I refer to them only in passing while exploring the fictional imagery of the doctor figure within the imagined filmed-Africa as it appears in the films The Last Face, Beyond Borders and Le grand blanc de Lambaréné.

Biographies and the Mediatization of Religion

ABSTRACTSince the genesis of democracy in South Africa, religious broadcasting has constituted an important national pedagogical site for presenting the state’s vision the character and function of religion in public life. Regulated by the institutional policies of the South African Broadcasting Corporation, religion on public broadcast television is conceived of as both a site and tool for nation building. While this arrangement might imply that actors working in the field of religious broadcasting are merely animators of policy, this article presents a glimpse of the biography of Munier Parker, a prolific South African filmmaker and television producer in order to show some of the ways that the complexity of religious mediatisation is interpreted and negotiated within the context of religious broadcasting in the post apartheid context. For the past sixteen years Parker has been solely responsible for the production of the public broadcasters only Islamic magazine program, An Nur The Light. By drawing on the personal and professional experiences of Parker along with the material he has produced, this paper contends that in his capacity as a filmmaker Parker and subsequently a national religion educator Parker has played an unofficial yet significant role in interpreting and producing stories, discourses, and images of Islam and Muslims in post apartheid South Africa.

Queer African Cinema, Queer World Cinema

Queer African Cinema, Queer World Cinema Lindsey Green-Simms (bio) In their wonderfully ambitious and carefully argued book Queer Cinema in the World, Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt discuss the difficulties of defining precisely what queer world cinema is. Citing the limitations of narrow definitions that reduce queer world cinema to productions by or explicitly for queer people, the authors prefer a model that is more capacious and that is free from Western cultural presumptions about what a gay director or gay audience might look like. They argue for an approach that does not "determine in advance what kinds of films, modes of production, and reception might qualify as queer or do queer work in the world" (Schoonover and Galt 2016, 14) and they set out to answer an equally capacious question: given that queer world cinema is such an open-ended category, "where in the world is queer cinema?" (14). Their response takes them to queer film festivals in New York, India and Botswana, and to video stores, bit torrent sites, underground DVD markets in Iran and Egypt and, of course, to sites such as YouTube or Vimeo. Such an itinerary allows them to leave open the definition of cinema, claiming that it is "a space that is never quite resolved or decided" (3), and to side-step the tangled debates about how one defines world cinema. Rather, they opt for a discussion of a queer cinema that "enables different ways of being in the world" and "that creates [End Page 652] different worlds" (5). But to what extent do these claims apply to queer African cinema? Is queer African cinema simply a subset of queer world cinema? Or is it a category that requires new modes of inquiry? Because the categories of "queer" and "cinema" can encompass so many different forms, it does make sense to follow Schoonover and Galt in keeping the definition of the terms as capacious as possible. Moreover, one must always keep in mind that "the invention of Africa" by colonialists, as V.Y. Mudimbe (1988) puts it, means that "Africa" as an epistemological object of knowledge is also always a bit unresolved. But, nevertheless, I contend that it is also productive and generative to step away from some of the expansiveness, open-endedness, and "worlding" of Schoonover and Galt's project to think more particularly and regionally about queer African cinema and the politics of place. In other words, while Schoonover and Galt write about the difficulties of defining queer world cinema, a different set of questions arises when trying to define queer African cinema, especially considering the paucity of queer-identified filmmakers, the absence of any coherent queer film movement, and the role of state censorship boards in trying to limit or prohibit films with queer African characters. What I argue is that in order to understand the world of queer African cinema, one must pay attention not only to the porousness of categories, but also to the various material and political constraints faced by African audiences and African filmmakers in a global world. Any account of queer African cinema must address the multiplicity of worlds and possibilities, as well as borders, censors, budgets, and geographical and financial limits. Whereas Schoonover and Galt are concerned with locating queer cinema in the world or with locating queer worlds in cinema, I ask two more situated questions: "Where in Africa is queer African cinema?" and "Where in queer world cinema is Africa?" Here are my provisional answers. Where in Africa is queer African cinema? Questions of spectatorship have long been important to African cinema studies. Before the rise of the Nigerian and Ghanaian popular video film industries in the 1990s, a constant lament among African filmmakers was the absence of their films from screens on the African continent. African movie theaters tended to exhibit Hollywood or Bollywood films or Kung Fu movies, but the films made by Africans were mostly shown at film festivals (only a handful of which were located on the continent), embassies, or art house cinemas abroad. And though the situation [End Page 653] has improved, African celluloid films are still typically more accessible outside of Africa. When one is talking...

The Pains of Colonialism: Examining Tsitsi Dangarembga's novella Nervous Conditions (1988)

The condition of a native is a nervous condition. (From the introduction to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth) Tsitsi Dangarembga is an African novelist and filmmaker from Zimbabwe. Nervous Conditions (1988) was her first novella after her 1987 play She No Longer Weeps. Her works usually have a feminist purview. However, the particular work would be scrutinized from a colonial lens. As a student of comparative literature, I found this text worthy of study. It gave me an insight into a completely different culture from mine. Africa and India share many similarities in relation to tribal culture, orature and community-based living. Also, since we both were co-sufferers in our shared struggle against colonialism, therefore this piece was found apt to be taken up. It is a quest to find out how their colonial experience differed from ours by deeply analyzing the text. The stance taken would be of the twenty-first century post-colonial Indian student. DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2018.00001.8

Waywardness of mood and mode in Love the One You Love and Necktie Youth

Abstract At a time when the reconciliation narratives peddled during the Mandela and Mbeki eras are increasingly coming under stress, a number of South African filmmakers have been offering viewers deeply felt, often autobiographically inflected and experimental filmic engagements with the everyday, affective textures of contemporary political disillusionment. This article reads two films associated with the so-called ‘New Wave’ in South African filmmaking – namely Jenna Cato Bass’s Love the One You Love (2014) and Sibs Shongwe-La Mer’s Necktie Youth (2015) – in order to map the contours of waywardness as a mood and mode of cinematic narration peculiar to a particular post-transitional South African political conjuncture. Inspired by a recent flurry of international scholarly activity on the topic of mood, my analysis of these films considers the nuances that a reading of mood bring to understanding the aesthetics of ‘wayward feeling’ in contemporary South African visual culture.

Beyond the entomological critique: re-thinking Rouch and African cinema

Having worked in West Africa for over 60 years, Jean Rouch has long been a contentious figure in African film circles. Though his collaborative and participatory methods aimed to challenge the colonial and postcolonial status quo, they did so from within the very structures and systems of support that secured the French presence in West Africa. Taking the prickly relationship between Rouch and Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène as a starting point, this essay argues that, while understandable and instructive in many respects, the distance maintained between Rouch and post-independence African filmmakers has done a disservice to Rouch’s collaborators hailing from West Africa, effectively effacing them from both French and African film histories. Given that African cinema is in a moment of profound transformation, the author contends that the time is ripe to open up a new kind of dialogue between Rouch and his African contemporaries.

Towards a Theory for African Cinema (Férid Boughedir, 1974)

Towards a Theory for African Cinema is an English translation of a talk given in French by the Tunisian filmmaker and critic Férid Boughedir (1944–) at a conference on international cinema, which took place in Montreal in 1974. In his presentation Boughedir discusses the vocation of the African filmmaker, who must avoid succumbing to the escapism and entertainment values of Western cinema and instead strive to reflect the contradictions and tensions of the colonised African identity, while promoting a revitalisation of African culture. Drawing on the example of the 1968 film Mandabi (The Money Order) by the Senegalese director Sembène Ousmane, Boughedir conceptualises a form of cinema which resists the influences of both Hollywood and auteur film and awakens viewers, instead of putting them to sleep. Boughedir‘s source text is preceded by a translator‘s introduction, which situates his talk within contemporary film studies.

Perspectives on new popular African cinema, history and creative destruction in Viva Riva! (2011)

Abstract Perspectives on new popular African cinema, history and creative destruction in Viva Riva! (2011) reflects on Viva Riva! and the resurgence of contemporary African cinema in a rapidly changing knowledge economy. This new creative environment is embedded in a shifting power dynamic where digital platforms, have revolutionized viewing habits on the continent and in the diaspora. This new knowledge economy and social changes affect how the African filmmakers work, identify and mobilize cinematic resources in order to create a unique approach when developing new cinematic aesthetic sensibilities that match technologies with the Zeitgeist in Africa. These new expressive film techniques capture and resonate with an audience whose particular modes of reception have migrated from the movie theatre to emerging and converging digital platforms such as streaming technologies, social media and Internet movie downloads on laptops, iPhones, iPads, smartphones, YouTube, Netflix, DVDs, VODs, cable and satellite.

Speaking with Earth and Sky: Oral Storytelling in the cinema of Craig and Damon Foster

The focus of this article is the documentaries of the Foster Brothers and in particular their bold experimentation with form. A brief historical overview of developments in South African documentary filmmaking from the late 1970s till the 21st century contextualises some of the important thematic concerns in the work of Craig and Damon Foster, namely marginal characters, the forced removal of people from their land, as well as the destruction of indigenous cultures. The directors are among very few South African film-makers, who use the African tradition of oral storytelling in their documentaries. In many ways the documentaries combine the social concerns of the progressive political documentaries of the 1980s with the oral aesthetics of film cultures elsewhere on this continent.

Cannes 2015: Where Is Africa?

Cannes 2015:Where Is Africa? Olivier Barlet Translated by Nzingha Kendall and Julie Le Hégarat We’re reading everywhere that Africa will be almost absent at this year’s edition of Cannes. But which Africa do we mean? With the last-minute addition of Lamb (2015, Ethiopia), by the Ethiopian filmmaker Yared Zeleke in the official selection of Un Certain Regard, African cinemas are present in the most prestigious international competition, the event where the largest concentrations of journalists worldwide assemble for a film festival. The anxiety was this: the continent’s absence, its invisibility, and also its rejection—the lack of recognition of its value. Herein lies the point of contention. Until Mahamat Saleh-Haroun’s Un Homme qui crie / A Screaming Man (2010, Chad) was awarded the jury prize in 2010, Sub-Saharan African filmmakers had been absent from official competition for thirteen years, despite being represented almost every previous year. During this time North African filmmakers were not present either, except for Rachid Bouchareb with Indigènes / Days of Glory (France) in 2006 (whose main actors won a collective award for Best Actor) and Hors la loi / Outside the Law (dir. Rachid Bouchareb, France) in 2010. Since then African filmmakers have been present. However, gone are the days when the French Minister of Foreign Affairs pressured the festival to include films that were financed by the Ministry in competition. Why, moreover, should a program that aims for excellence, be obliged to represent all five continents if none of the continents produces a film that supersedes the rest? Especially since the Official Selection assembles a large group of established cineastes (with a few exceptions), whereas A Certain Regard welcomes up-and-coming directors. The secret of Cannes’s program, and its enduring success, is that the selected films maintain a balance between demanding auteur films like Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2010 Golden Palm winner Loong Boonmee raleuk chat / Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Thailand), and others that [End Page 234] bet everything on cinema’s magic power over a more general audience. The selection committee is also equally attentive to choosing films from the most diverse number of countries—without overrepresenting one over another—especially in the case of French films. The creation of Un Certain Regard in 1978 allowed more daring and original films and lesser-known auteur films to be shown. In 1962 the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics created International Critics’ Week, which was reserved for first and second films. The French Directors Guild established the Directors’ Fortnight in 1969, and later ACID (Association for the Diffusion of Independent Cinema) started their own program [in 1993]. Thanks to these associations, a large number of films that normally would not receive as much attention have a showcase at Cannes—which does not necessarily imply that they have greater visibility overall. The relative absence of Africa at Cannes corresponds to an ongoing crisis (due to the reduction of international funding) in African auteur cinema. Currently African films increasingly rely on digital equipment, but their low budgets and filmmakers’ lack of formal training mean that these productions are geared toward a local audience. Thus, very few of these filmmakers make their mark on the international scene. Nonetheless, every choice brings frustrations, and at times resentment. Every year has its hard feelings or misunderstandings reinforced by the awards: the selection committee is called misogynist (not enough films by women), too intellectual (too many auteur films), or ethnocentric (not enough films from the global South). Of course we are most interested in this last point. Due to too much competition or lack of recognition some great films have not been accepted or were only shown at less popular special screenings which are out of competition. Such was the case of Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako (2006, Mali), which had a successful theatrical release (195,444 tickets sold in France in 2006). Although his Timbuktu (2014, Mali) did not win any prizes in competition at Cannes in 2014, he got his revenge winning seven Cesars, and at last count, the film had sold 1.2 million tickets in France, breaking the record for African film held by Youssef Chahine...

Five West African Filmmakers on their Films

Prior to 1960, such countries as England and Belgium trained a number of Africans in the technical areas of “movie-making” through their colonial film units which produced health and educational documentaries as well as propagandist shorts praising the colonial order and/or disseminating the Christian faith. Nevertheless, little had been done to encourage native “movie-thinking.” The late Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (Benin/Senegal), one of the pioneers and early historians of African cinema, often pointed out how the French colonial authorities would refuse scholarships to aspiring African film students, arguing that priority was to be given to the training of African doctors and teachers. One could very well suspect that there also might have been some concern as to the kind of politically detrimental anti-colonialist images these film students would have later produced.

Soft power and South African film: Negotiating mutually incompatible agendas?

Abstract This article offers the first analysis of the role of film as a soft power asset in South Africa. It examines ways in which the policy priorities of the South African government have, until recently, seemed to work against the nation’s strategic aim to use film as a tool to leverage soft power in order to gain political influence across Africa, as well as to maximize the economic potential of globalization. The South African film economy is booming. Cape Town, in particular, has become a key production centre globally. International productions are attracted to the country by the versatility of its locations, its weather and its low cost, high quality, facilities. This has provided great employment opportunities for local production staff. However, it has done very little to support the development of local creative talent. Thus, unlike, for example, Nollywood, which supports the entire ‘value chain’ of production and which is allowing creative and technical expertise to develop in tandem, the success of the South African production infrastructure is to the detriment of South African filmmakers. In this article I investigate the extent to which the government’s economic imperative to develop the industry is working against its soft power aim to project South African stories both locally and internationally, and with it, the national ‘strategic narrative’, considered to be one of the country’s prime soft power assets. I then go on to suggest that the landscape would currently seem to be changing as a new generation of South African filmmakers is starting to gain ground.

Copyright Legal and Practical Reform for the South African Film Industry

Copyright’s interest in promoting creative production is often described as requiring a “balance” between exclusion and access rights. Owners of copyright receive exclusive rights to control copies of their works, which enables authors to earn returns on their creations through sales or licensing transactions. But as important to promoting creation are the user rights in copyright law which permit building on the work of predecessors. The necessity for balance in order to promote creation is clearly evident in the documentary film industry, where producers rely on copyright ownership to facilitate the dissemination of their works through broadcasters and other distributors, and on user rights to incorporate excerpts of other copyrighted material in their work. This article draws on a collaborative South African research project that has been working since 2008 to document influences of copyright law on the production of documentary films. The results of that research, summarised in the first part of the article, show that South African filmmakers are hampered by a legal environment that denies them copyright ownership in the majority of their projects while also denying them adequate rights to use, in their own works, elements of the works of others. The second part of the article describes capacity-building approaches and legal reforms that could be advantageous to the local film industry.

Copyright legal and practical reform for the South African film industry

Copyright's interest in promoting creative production is often described as requiring a "balance" between exclusion and access rights. Owners of copyright receive exclusive rights to control copies of their works, which enables authors to earn returns on their creations through sales or licensing transactions. But as important to promoting creation are the user rights in copyright law which permit building on the work of predecessors. The necessity for balance in order to promote creation is clearly evident in the documentary film industry, where producers rely on copyright ownership to facilitate the dissemination of their works through broadcasters and other distributors, and on user rights to incorporate excerpts of other copyrighted material in their work. This article draws on a collaborative South African research project that has been working since 2008 to document influences of copyright law on the production of documentary films. The results of that research, summarised in the first part of the article, show that South African filmmakers are hampered by a legal environment that denies them copyright ownership in the majority of their projects while also denying them adequate rights to use, in their own works, elements of the works of others. The second part of the article describes capacity-building approaches and legal reforms that could be advantageous to the local film industry.

The Cinema of Jans Rautenbach

THE ANGUISH OF A DREAMER: ABRAHAM (2014) AND THE CINEMA OF JANS RAUTENBACH Introduction: Rautenbach's cinemaA few pioneers in the Afrikaans film industry of the sixties produced a number of films that could be labelled "involved films". The theme of these films was an examination of the cracks in apartheid ideology. They included Emil Nofal-Jans Rautenbach's films like Die Kandidaat (The Candidate, 1968) and Katrina (1968). Several film historians regard Jans Rautenbach as the pioneer of modern, bold and South African filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s. Together with producer Emil Nofal he made ground-breaking films during a time when South African cinema hardly reflected the socio-political realities of the country. Born in 1936 in Boksburg, Jansen Delarosa Rautenbach grew up in a very poor household. His father worked in the mines. He started his school years at a primary school in Boksburg. Early influences in his life...

(Re)inventing African oral traditions and national heritage(s) through film images: The case of Keita! The Heritage of the Griot [1995] and Kare Kare Zvako: Mother's Day [2004

ABSTRACTThe aim of this article is to explore how African films such as Keita! The Heritage of the Griot and Kare Kare Zvako: Mother's Day reinvent oral traditions on-screen, so that the traditions are revitalised and given new life in a contemporary world where visual and literary narratives have tended to dominate the collection and dissemination of information. The ontological and cosmological dimensions of African oral traditions provide the cultural humus that continues to feed the narrative structures of most African films. It is argued that the films' conscious refusal to be totally submerged in European modernism or their capacity to merge some traditional aspects with modern values is what constructs the multiple subjectivities that most African filmmakers strive to bring out. By using oral narrative structures embedded in songs, storytelling, myths, legends, poems, riddles, anecdotes and proverbs, the selected African films recreate traditions and heritage; they help to preserve African values that face a Western onslaught, promoted through European languages. Oral narratives carry a freight of cultural meanings infused in different modes of expression, while articulating the philosophies and beliefs of African people. It is important to recognise and [re]discover the critical role played by oral narratives in order to understand the epistemologies and ontologies that inform the construction of African films. A study of this nature is critical in that it builds on the existing indigenous knowledge systems embedded in orature (oral literature) that remain threatened by European cultural imperialism, which is promoted through the Hollywood film paradigm.

North and Sub-Saharan Africa at the Rencontres internationales pour un nouveau cinéma in Montreal, 1974: Background Notes

This article focuses on the North and Sub-Saharan African guests at the Rencontres internationales pour un nouveau cinéma in Montréal in 1974. It seeks to situate them within the film environment they participated in shaping at home, in order to better understand their contribution and the dialogues they engaged with in Montréal. These participants came as representatives of specific instances and organizations, a testament to Africa’s growing regional and national film industries, which positioned the continent as a major actor in the defense of cinema in the Third World struggle against imperialism. I examine how the challenges and successes African filmmakers meet in developing regional alliances intersect with broader concerns in the Third World expressed at Montréal 1974.

The D Is Silent: Django Unchained and the African American West

Although director Quentin Tarantino has described Django Unchained as belonging to a “new, virgin-snow kind of genre,” the African American western is not new at all. Following Tarantino’s lead (his claim of striking out into virgin territory with Django), reviews of the film suggest a too ready willingness to attribute to a white screenwriter and director a generic innovation that African American writers and filmmakers have been creatively inventing and reinventing for centuries. As a post-spaghetti western, Django Unchained also extends and revises (but does not invent) a signal trope of the spaghetti western, the casting of African American actors—from Woody Strode to Jim Brown to Fred Williamson—in films with western plots. My presentation looks at Django Unchained not as something new but as an interesting variation on something old—the African American western—examining Tarantino’s contribution to a genre that has long been in existence. Only against the backdrop of that representational history can we fairly judge what Tarantino’s film does and does not accomplish.

Out of Bounds

This article looks at the works of several artists who examine in their films the emergence of new sociocultural spaces born from immigration that cannot be configured—limited—by traditional geopolitical borders.1 Instead, these spaces are drafted by the experiences and stories of the people who are migrating to and from them. Because such spaces shift constantly, dynamics of adaptation and transformation are an integral part of their definitions. Cultural productions that reflect on this situation are located at the nexus of this dynamic and harbor important messages for the foreseeable future. Indeed, the displacement of populations—forced or voluntary—will increase dramatically in the decades to come, whether triggered by economic crisis, climatic catastrophes, or wars. The crisis created by the increasing displacement of populations, trespassing over national borders, results in part of a phenomenon often described as the global North–South divide. In African countries such as Mali or Niger, which suffer from extreme climactic conditions and poverty, immigrants hoping for better lives for themselves and to support the families they leave behind brave the dangers of sea crossing from the West African coast, pay exorbitant prices to smugglers who promise to bring them safely to Paris, London, Rome, or Berlin, where they endure precarious life conditions.2 Since the 1950s, reflections about postcolonial and postmigrant identities, themes examining immigration, the tension between the homeland and Europe, as well as problematic politics of development instituted in Africa by the former colonial powers, have been examined in films by well-known directors such as Muhammad Abderrahman Tazi from Morocco, Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina from Algeria, Ousmane Sembene and Djibril Diop Mambety from Senegal, or Souleymane Cisse from Mali. A younger generation of African filmmakers continue to bring these issues in film and video, as for example the recent film La Pirogue by Moussa Toure presented at the Cannes film festival in 2012, which told of the ordeal of thirty men on board a small fisherman boat trying to reach the Canary Islands.3 The emergence of new cultural spaces and their relation to immigration have become central themes in the current discourses of the contemporary social and cultural arena. Several exhibitions have focused on these themes. “Continental Drifts: Contemporary Time-Based Works of Africa,” was an exhibition curated by Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts at the Fowler Museum in spring of 2009 that addressed themes of memory, exile, and the experience of dislocation between the African continent and Europe in works by Yto Barrada, Berni Searle, Alfredo Jaar, Claudia Cristovao, and Georgia Papageorge. Similar themes and issues were explored in “Intense Proximite” at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in spring 2012, or in “Lines of Control,” at the Herbert H. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, also 2012, or in the recent programs of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Most recently, in spring 2014 the New Museum in New York presented “Here and Elsewhere,” an extensive exhibition featuring the work of contemporary artists from the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, expanding on the notion of plural identities and the political and social issues (including immigration) that define contemporary societies of the Arab world. Here I investigate the works of Katia Kameli, Zineb Sedira, Mounir Fatmi, Mohamed Bourouissa, Yto Barrada, and Lamia Joreige4 who—by birth, choice, and throughout their lives— navigate in the interstitial spaces that emerged from patterns of immigration. Some of these artists were born in France to immigrant parents, others in Algeria or Morocco, countries whose long, entangled histories with the French colonial power have