In the introduction of The Wretched of the Earth (1963, 17), Jean Paul Sartre writes that “the status of the natives is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settlers among the colonial people with their consent”. Fanon’s book was describing the psychology of colonialism which has left the colonized in a precarious mental state.
The independence movement, which swept most African countries in the 1960s, however, was supposed to inaugurate a different landscape by rising above the ashes of colonization and settle that “nervous condition” by creating an utopian African space glued together by the healing of the native’s soul from the grave injustice of slavery and colonization, regenerating its spirit and reinstituting the moral imperative of social justice. All of these hopes gain a magnetic resonance through the artfully expressed “independence Cha Cha”, a song from the Grand Kale from Empire Bakuba, which perfectly captured the zeitgeist to become an unofficial anthem for the newly independent countries. In Jean-Marie Tenos’ Africa, I will Fleece you (1992), “Chef” (1999), and Vacances au Pays (2000), however, that dream seems to have turned into a nightmare. In Cameroon, the “nervous conditions” of the natives seems to have endured. This is because, as Teno suggests, the successive failures of indigenous program of development. Indeed, the internalized guilt over colonization is now manifesting itself as political lethargy and shameless suck up towards the former colonizer: France. As a result, Cameroon turned into a country which has won its paper freedom, but continues to wallow in intellectual slavery which explained its misery. The consequences of behaving as if decolonization had never happened explains why the culturally lost generation in power in that country is completely self-alienated, cynical and corrupt.
This paper will analyze Jean-Marie Tenos’ “Africa, I will Fleece you” (1992), “Chef” (1999) and Vacances au Pays (2000) to show how Teno uses films as critical devices to explore the trauma of a country caught between the guilt of a past it does not want to deal with and a present it does not fully grasp. These films will serve as pretext to discuss the limit of denial in politics and how it trickles down to intrude and affect personal lives. Teno’s ability to collapse the public work of denial to the private lives of citizens will be debated in this paper and ways out of that process considered.