Welcome II the Terrordome was the first theatrically distributed British feature film directed by a black woman. Believe it or not, that happened in 1995 and no other black British woman managed to make a feature film until 2004. By 2020, the number of black British women who had released a feature film in cinemas was only 6.
The name of the director is Ngozi Onwurah, born in Nigeria. Her father was Nigerian and her mother was British. Onwurah escaped to England with her mother and siblings when the Nigerian Civil War started. As an immigrant that grew up in a predominantly white neighbourhood suffering racism, she knows the black diaspora by heart, and that shows in her film.
Welcome II the Terrordome is a dystopia set in a black ghetto. The story is set to hip-hop music and the title refers to the song by Public Enemy. The film opens with a historical event, a mass suicide of Ibo—an African ethnic group. They chose suicide instead of slavery. Although the credits refer to the 1803 Ibo Landing in Georgia, the actual event on which the scene is based took place in 1652 in North Carolina. An Ibo slave family, in chains, walked into the sea to drown themselves.
Onwurah links colonial history with the current situation in the suburbs of the big cities. I say current because, although the film is almost 30 years old, the situation has not changed, as neighbourhoods such as Saint-Denis in Paris show. In the words of the critic Peter Bradshaw, ghettos were created by the cruelties of the past.
The film jumps from the colonialist introduction to today's ghetto. If you don't know your past, you don't know your future. In this nightmare called Transdean, better known as The Terrordome, black people are still enslaved, now by capitalism. Slavery is controlled by the drug trade, a business in the hands of the whites and the police, who are the ones that really rule the ghetto.
The plot centres on Spike (Valentine Nonyela) and his sister Angela (Suzette Llewellyn). Spike has a white girlfriend—Jodie (Saffron Burrows)—who is pregnant. Jodie's ex-boyfriend is an abusive white man who, upon seeing her with a black man, decides to set them up, which leads to a race riot.
Onwurah explains that, although it’s a genre film that mixes science fiction and fantasy, it was based on her own experiences. She had a friend who became pregnant by a black man and was beaten by her white ex-boyfriend until she had an abortion. Onwurah herself is the daughter of a black Nigerian man and a white British woman.
The film links all these different stories, her own and others’, in a single day. According to Onwurah, this decision was made because concentrating everything in such a short time amplifies the horror.
Part of the conflict in Welcome II the Terrordome is based on the no-man's land that people who transgress boundaries find themselves in. Spike and Jodie are outcasts even among outcasts, living in the limbo between two worlds into which they don’t fit. Onwurah suffered that limbo in order to get her project off the ground. No production company was willing to finance the film, so they had to turn to small investors. Once post-production was finished, no one wanted to give them money for marketing and distribution. It was only released in the UK and the US, and film critics didn't want to understand what they were seeing.
The Daily Telegraph critic said it was deplorable, both for having no cinematic value and for its nihilistic vision. The Empire reviewer misgendered Onwurah and said it was unacceptable to make such a film in the “peaceful 90s”. Sight & Sound claimed that she was so incompetent that everyone would laugh at black cultural activism. In Variety, they spoke of an inept script and shoddy, amateurish performances. It was even criticised by Channel 4, which had put some money into its post-production, because they thought it was blaxploitation.
The film is good, its only ‘problem’ is that it’s an angry critique of the system made by a non-white woman. The world doesn't want women, immigrants or racialised people to make these kinds of films. We’re part of those large sectors of the population who can only speak out when we’re submissive and conform to what capitalism needs to exploit us.
Onwurah explains that she never thought she could make films until she saw Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989). The influence is clear, although the style and genre are different. Welcome II the Terrordome’s style is closer to guerrilla films such as Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden, 1983), but mixed with more mainstream genres. It draws from B films and blaxploitation, but also from African mythology and Greek tragedy, remaining in a terrain of its own.
Today, it’s a cult classic that has been recovered by streaming platforms such as Criterion and Mubi and is being reviewed by critics with a less white heteropatriarchal gaze. I recommend it, especially if you are interested in Afrofuturism or dystopias, and also if you like non-mainstream genre films.
On a ship to another planet
The term “afrofuturism” was coined in the 90s by Mark Dery—the concept predates the coining of the term. Dery asks himself why so few African Americans write science fiction. He thinks—and I agree—that:
“African Americans … are the descendants of alien abductees; they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies”.
Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose, Mark Dery.
Dery speaks of African Americans, but Europe has also a slavery past and complex relationships with its colonies. In Barcelona, where I live, there were slaves—not only from Africa—from the 10th to the 19th centuries. In the 14th century, the city had around 35,000 inhabitants and around 3,500 of them (10%) were slaves. Many of the fortunes of the local upper classes—including politicians—come from their slave-owning and slave-trading past.
Here, this subject is quite taboo. Dery asks if it’s possible to imagine possible futures when your past has been deliberately rubbed out. His essay is from 1994, just one year before Welcome II the Terrordome was released, so it’s unlikely that Onwurah read it before making the film, but she raises similar questions and links between the past and the future.
Dery acknowledges that other media, such as film and music, are more prone to afrofuturism than literature. I don’t know much about science fiction literature, I’ve only read some well-known authors, so I don’t really have an opinion about why afrofuturism is more present in other media—or was in the 90s. What I can say is that there aren’t many films either.
How many science fiction films by black filmmakers do you know? Right now I can think of only 7. All of them are American, except Welcome II the Terrordome. Of course, the problem is more related to access to the film industry than to the interests of black filmmakers. I’m saying black because I’m talking about afrofuturism, but the issue is similar with women, American Indians, transgender people, or any other marginalized group.
And the problem is not just that there’re only a few examples, is that history erases them, as it erases the colonial past.
*The video that opens this section is by Black Quantum Futurism—Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips—two artists that explore the intersections of futurism, creative media, DIY-aesthetics, and activism in marginalized communities.
Modern-day slaves
Neptune Frost (Anisia Uzeyman and Saul Williams, 2021) is other good example of afrofuturism that was released last year. The film was written by Saul Williams—the poet and singer—and directed also by him and Anisia Uzeyman, an actress and playwright from Rwanda. It’s a narrative film, but it doesn’t use many of the codes of mainstream science fiction films.
To start with, it’s a musical with a naturalistic style, so it doesn't fit very well into the usual science fiction aesthetics. At the same time, it plays with some of the codes of poetry and video art, but as I said, it’s a narrative film, not experimental or abstract. The plot revolves around two main themes: the coltan mines and transsexuality.
Coltan is a metallic mineral from which niobium and tantalum are extracted. Tantalum is used to build capacitors for mobile phones, computers, cameras, and other technological devices. Most of the coltan mines are in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania. Many of the workers in the mines are children and teenagers.
They’re modern-day slaves whose only purpose is that we can consume. Uzeyman and Williams’ suggest that oppression could perhaps be resisted through social deviance, through queerness, but also through traditional wisdom and the very technology that enslaves the miners. The film is much more interesting on a discursive level than on a cinematographic one, but if you're interested in the subject it's worth a watch.
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