BLACK LIONS – ROMAN WOLVES is a film story that has taken me now over 30 years to tell. It is a three-decade long obsession that has transformed my own idea of storytelling extensively. It is a story of remembrance and my right to remember a history that is completely dominated by a European narrative, by way of monopolizing archival resources and official records that detail Italy’s second or third attempts to colonise my country, Ethiopia. This is the struggle to unearth, return, and bring to fruition my right to tell that story.
Contrast the very children of the colonisers, playfully toying with the medium of motion pictures, belching ‘What an audacity!’ while here I am telling a story that is both personal and historical, even while it is unauthorised by European dominance. Fascist Italy almost hanged my own father, who dared to fight them as a guerrilla fighter and warrior. A father who is also a historian, playwright, and folklorist.
This is a film about my father and his comrades facing the military might of a highly industrialised, fascist country – a country that had sired into its children a determination to avenge their defeated ancestors of 1896 at the Battle of Adwa. After 40 years, intellectuals, religious figures, artists, and filmmakers descended onto Ethiopia with horrific intention. It is a story of remembrance passed down to me so that I can preserve the traditions and culture that were equally a part of the war strategies of the Ethiopian resistance.
BLACK LIONS – ROMAN WOLVES also exposes the League of Nations and the superpowers of the time, England, the United States and France, who handed my country over to fascist thugs spearheaded by Graziani, Mussolini, and Badoglio. I have lived my entire life seeing this history allotted a mere three minutes in the official narrative of pan-Europeans, including the United States. In their chapters on the Second World War, they skip over the fact that Ethiopia was the first casualty of fascist wrath, begging for support in the 1930s and continuing into the 1940s, when countless Ethiopians were slaughtered and poisoned with gas. In my father’s narrative, and that of his comrades who fought the Italian aggressors, the Second World War began in Ethiopia.
Furthermore, the fascist Italian invasion of Ethiopia aimed at annihilating the historical, cultural, and spiritual fabric and heritage of the country. In trying to treat this colossal historical legacy, a significant part of these 30 years of production was spent trying to secure the rights to the images of my own people. Even now that BLACK LIONS – ROMAN WOLVES is complete, I cannot say that I have had unencumbered access to the principal Mussolini-era archive, Luce, based in Rome, as well as the superpowers like Great Britain, who generally copied images from conquered Germany and Italy. They have built a commercial industry by withholding and estranging official history from its owners.
Once I learned the power of cinema, I committed my entire life to employing the medium to empower my narrative logic and thought system.
Finally, I want to address the point of view of colonial archives and the supremacy over meaning and interpretation using archival visual material. I am speaking to the disadvantages of inheriting a past without the technological benefits of the camera. In this case the Italians, the raiders, are the ones armed with the camera. The camera being a weapon in itself to effectively arrest the targeted people. In this case, my people who could not wage or supply a counter-image to a colonised, non-human, enslaved status. It is mainly through oral history that their spirit of refusal to be defeated has arrived to me...
Consider with me, how does an African filmmaker utilise pre-fabricated, colonial, racist imagery? Imagine the reality of having to rely on a device leveraged to prove the barbarianism of a hunted people? How, then, should I image them accordingly? For me, it has never been enough to just make a film to tell a story clutched by the cyclical violent colonial visual documentations. Once I learned the power of cinema, I committed my entire life to employing the medium to empower my narrative logic and thought system. In other words, I have to use it against its own design. It is my way of advancing the cultural struggle to release our stories from the clutches of white supremacy. I hope the effort of this film, however imperfect, enables rather than denies viewers to mull over the declarations I have stated above.
The very title BLACK LIONS – ROMAN WOLVES responds to the actions of Italian fascist goons committed during this historical moment. Many monuments were taken, but one specifically, the statue and monument of the Lion, the Ethiopian symbol, was abducted, alienated, and artificially planted in Europe. Ironically, they had the symbol of the She-Wolf, the Roman Wolf, manufactured and sent to Ethiopia, an act that underscores the inherent power struggle of historical erasure.
Haile Gerima
