African Apocalypse | Storyteller

[NOTE: African Apocalypse available until October 23, 2023.]

About the film

African Apocalypse tells the story of a young man’s epic journey across Africa in search of a colonial killer. It is an urgent and timely non-fiction retelling of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Armed with a copy of Conrad’s classic novel, British-Nigerian Oxford University student Femi Nylander goes in search of the meaning and legacy of colonial horror in West Africa. He discovers the unknown story of a French army captain, Paul Voulet, who descended into unspeakable barbarity in the conquest of Niger at the very moment Conrad wrote his book. Femi finds communities still traumatised by the century-old violence of Voulet. For many Nigeriens, their unenviable status as what the United Nations describes as the world’s least developed country dates from the moment of Voulet’s arrival in their land. But amidst a tragic history, Femi also encounters a beautiful spirit of hope: young people learning to find a way out of colonialism’s darkness, and a country determined to harness the power of its most precious resource, the light of the sun.

He returns to Britain just as a new global confrontation of the legacy of empire and racism emerges in the Black Lives Matter protests. Empowered by his journey, Femi joins up determined to play his full part in this growing movement against oppression.

My sense of belonging has never been more in question

By Femi Nylander

My white English grandmother tells me that whereas she is looking at the problems of colonialism from ‘the outside’, I see it from ‘the inside.’ She spent decades of her life in Africa. I grew up in Britain. I studied at Oxford, so does that make me part of the establishment? I started African Apocalypse wondering if the descendants of Voulet’s victims would trust and accept me, see me as another European, disengaged, like Marlow in Conrad’s book, swooping in from afar to document their story for them - or worse, another Kurtz…exploiting them for my own gain?

Our guards in Niger, the soldiers, young men my own age, told me that because I am from Europe then, to them, I might as well be white. Meanwhile, porters in Oxford used to call the police on me because all they saw was a black man with locks hanging around the college. So where do I belong?

Niger is a country still in shock. Before me, school children recounted stories of Voulet from which they were separated by generations. Recounting an oral history of pain without retribution or even recognition with a calm yet firm resolution. They spoke as if the invasion had only happened last week.

It was here I saw the wisdom of Nigeriens, school kids crying for murdered ancestors and a stolen future, women lamenting the loss of their sons to migration, old men telling of their suffering in the (post)colonial mines and the loss of their culture and community, young men angry that all they feel they have is the grave of Voulet - in case Europeans, like me, one day want to come and spend some euros to see it.

I realise these Nigeriens all share something with my guides Amina and Assan that as an outsider, as a European, I could never truly understand. But it’s more complicated than that. Where do I belong? In Britain, I’m the other. In Niger, I am too. I feel the weight of being an outsider when I expect to feel like an insider. I thought my experience of being a Black man in Britain, my Nigerian mother and father, my own African lineage, and the racism I’ve experienced would bring an affinity, but it took time for me to connect, and to understand the truth of how Nigeriens live to this day.

I look back on the African Apocalypse and I can see my struggle. Amina and Assan did too. Talking to the mothers, the elders, and the children of Niger I was internalising so much, I forgot how to show my emotion. Expressionless when ordinarily I’m so very expressive. Appearing as the disengaged European I worried I may have been taken for. Yet simultaneously discovering an identity I hadn't yet had the chance to explore.

The scene in the garden cafe was a turning point, at the time it felt confrontational - but it was necessary. Amina and Assan pulled me up and I’m grateful that they did. I was hearing these terrible things, such raw testimony and yet to them I seemed impassive. As if nothing was making an impression.

The reality is that I felt as though I needed to be given permission, as a European, an Oxford student, a young man with so many opportunities, living in a nation made rich on colonialism, to connect. And in a way, criticizing my ‘zen like’ tranquillity opened me up. I was being given permission to grieve alongside those whose suffering was so much more concrete, whose stories recounted the full scale and horror of colonialism rather than University campus microaggressions.

But grief alone cannot give us solutions. As the journey continued, I found myself connecting more and more with people. I found myself confident to speak and sing in their language (I had learned some Hausa) talking about their customs, planning and learning about how they could harness the energy of the Sun for their future and envision a brighter tomorrow both for Niger and for the Africans whom I now feel comfortable saying are, in a sense, my people.

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