From Disney to the great empires: Africa becomes a TV series

'Iwaju' and the fighting sovereigns: the interview with director Sébastien Onomo

ROME – It could be said, 2 thousand years after Pliny the Elder, that even Disney realized that “something new always comes from Africa”. And that it is worth paying attention, or rather investing. As happened with ‘Iwaju’, a future in the Yoruba language, the title chosen for a cartoon mini-series also available in streaming in Italy since last month, the first collaboration of the American multinational in the South of the Sahara. The six episodes are signed by directors Olufikayo Ziki Adeola and Tolu Olowofoyeku, the founders of Kugali, a production company founded in 2017 in Lagos, Nigeria, the home of ‘Nollywood’, as the national film industry is known.< /p>

The story revolves around the meeting of a little girl from a wealthy neighborhood and a self-taught “geek” from the suburbs: between flying cars and fluorescent colors, the two go together to discover the dangers and secrets of Lagos. Adeola, the director, celebrates “a unique fusion of tradition and futurism”. The thesis is that there is not only the future but also the past to discover. Because there was Africa before Disney. And also of Europe. Great people and vast empires, strategists and princesses with a vision. Protagonists to know and recognize so that it is never said again that history in Africa begins with the arrival of the European colonizers.

Credits: TV5 Monde

This is told by a new television series, ‘African Empires’, with four episodes broadcast by the French broadcaster Tv5Monde and also available for a few weeks south of the Sahara on the Canal+ Afrique satellite platform. “If I had known about these events before, I would have been different,” explains the producer, Sébastien Onomo, a 37-year-old French-Cameroonian, founder of Creative Touch Studios, to the Dire agency. “And I would never have listened to those who claim that Africa has no history”..
In the episodes, signed by four different directors, cartoons, fiction with actors and interviews with historians that help to go in depth. The protagonists are kings, leaders, princesses and warriors who lived in different eras and contexts. The first episode is dedicated to Soundiata Keita, the child who could not walk who became “the lion of the Mandé”: in the 13th century he reigned from Senegal to the Sahara desert and founded the empire of Mali. The second character is Shaka, a reforming ruler and military genius who brought glory to the Zulu communities in southern Africa in the 19th century.

Credits: Creative Touch Studios
Two legendary fighters are portrayed in the series: Yennenga, an Amazon princess who founded the kingdom of the Mossi in the territories that are now Burkina Faso in the 12th or 13th century and Ghana; Amanirenas, the “kandake” of the royal palace of Meroe on the banks of the Nile. It was Amanirenas himself, between 27 and 22 BC, in Aswan and Philae, who led the troops to victory over the Romans.