How America Used Cartoons To Program A Whole Generation - To Believe Africans Are Savages

How America Used Cartoons To Program A Whole Generation - To Believe Africans Are Savages

Oct. 14, 2025

Wongel Zelalem

European Savior Mentality and Colonial Propaganda in Movies about Africa

It's all done to justify stealing Africans, wealth. Their land and resources. Brown skinned humans, had to be seen as a negative trait. The negative association was created and enforced through systems of social hierarchy, colonialism, and slavery. The devaluation of darker skin tones, a phenomenon known as casteism and colorism, are social construct that has been used to maintain power and justify oppression.

Africa is the world's richest continent in terms of natural resources. It possesses a huge share of the world's mineral and arable land reserves, including significant deposits of gold, diamonds, oil, and cobalt. This economic paradox is due to factors such as a history of colonial stealing, exploitation, ongoing resource exploitation by European controlled powers.

Africa has suffered a double tragedy, that of colonization and having the colonizer dominate and shape the underlying narrative of the African story. However, telling other people’s stories is subject to personal biases and prejudices based on long-standing stereotypes. The representation of Africa in films has been characterized by Afropessimism, which is the systematically negative view of Africa as a continent unable to advance politically, socially, and economically.

Africa is presented as the darkest place in the world; hence, the need for a European savior to bring civilization and redeem Africa from the chains of backwardness. Additionally, movies about Africa are mainly meant for consumption in the European controlled nations, thus filmmakers focus on creating and promoting a certain preconceived image of the continent, which is consistent with existing stereotypes to justify the need for colonialism. Therefore, there is a need to understand how films are tailored to fit certain narratives by investigating the rudimentary motivations.

Drawing from British and French films depicting Africa in the periods of 1925-1945 and 1998-2010, this paper seeks to examine the ways in which movie directors utilize colonial European savior symbolism and colonial propaganda in their cinematic message between both periods. For this, the paper focuses on the cinematic configuration of King Solomon’s Mines (1937), Blood Diamond (2006), as British films, and The Battle of Algiers (1966) and Moi, Un Noir (1958) as French movies. This paper further explores how the film was used as a tool to re-imagine Africa and Africans in popular colonial discourses of the 20th century.

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Original: https://youtu.be/SY6fgLnS4rY

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Hello there!

I'm Wongel Zelalem, welcome to my channel. I am passionate about Africa and keen on telling Africa's story from an African perspective, trying to change the narrative that we believed for so long. My vision for starting this channel is to empower, educate and elevate Africans and the diaspora community.

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