Le grand blanc de Lambarene

Cameroonian filmmaker Bassek ba Kobhio provides a fascinating revisionist perspective on Albert Schweitzer, Nobel Peace Prize winner and secular saint of the colonial era. Like FRANTZ FANON: BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASK, this film begins to rewrite the history of colonialism from the point of view of the colonized. LE GRAND BLANC DE LAMBARENE is not, however, a facile exercise in iconoclasm but rather a deeply-felt lament for a missed opportunity, for a cross-cultural encounter between Africa and Europe which never happened. The film reveals that the ultimate tragedy of colonialism may have been its refusal to see and value the colonized as autonomous, creative human beings. The film's epigraph, ironically, is a famous remark by Schweitzer himself: "All we can do is allow others to discover us, as we discover them."