Sarah Maldoror

Cabral unblocked the road to independence, the task left to us was to pave it! An interview with Sana na N’hada

He tells us about the important and complex mission that Amílcar Cabral delegated to them and what it was like to learn the crushing news of his assassination in the middle of this process. It fell to him as his first job to film Amílcar Cabral at an exhibition on the struggle in Conakry, in 1972, and then the transferring of his body to Bissau, capturing the commotion of the Guineans at the death of their greatest thinker and anti-colonial resistance leader.

Face to face

17.03.2025 | by Marta Lança

To what extent was Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga shaped by the ideology of MPLA?

How MPLA’s ideology, in particular its Marxist-Leninist values, shaped Sambizanga? In which ways the film was shaped, by both Maldoror and the MPLA, as a piece of propaganda, in order to gain international recognition for the injustice of the Portuguese rule in Angola and credibility for the MPLA in the international community. Maldoror has said that she tried to accomplish three things with Sambizanga: capture a particular movement in the history of the Angolan liberation struggle; create a film that would educate Westerners to the situation in Angola; and tell the story of a revolution from the perspective of a woman. This dissertation will argue that these three aims can be linked to the propagandistic elements of the film and the ideology of the MPLA.