Sambizanga, one of the first feature films made by a woman in Africa, was cowritten by filmmaker Sarah Maldoror’s husband, Mário Pinto de Andrade, a leader in the Angolan resistance. “The film was seen to be so effective at mobilizing action that the Portuguese colonial authorities banned it from being screened in their then province of Angola. It was first seen publicly in Angola only after the country won its independence in 1974. Based on a novel by Luandino Vieira, a political prisoner of the Portuguese from 1961 to 1974, Sambizanga is a fictionalized chronicle of the arrest and fatal imprisonment of a man whose underground activities were an impenetrable secret to all around him. It was at a prison near the Luandan suburb of Sambizanga on February 4, 1961, that the first uprising of what was to become the Angolan resistance movement was staged. The film is set a few weeks before that uprising, during a time of increasingly desperate and repressive security measures by the colonial government” (Tom Mulcaire, Cabinet Magazine).

We will play a selection of music featured in Ntone Edjabe’s new book La Discothèque de Sarah Maldoror beginning at 3:30, when the doors open.