Until it was conquered by the British in 1897, the city of Benin, in what is now Nigeria, was the centre of a powerful kingdom. Its rulers, the Obas of Benin, were mysterious, secluded figures who

The filmmaker and two historians went into the village of Banjeli in 1985 to recreate for the film the traditional iron smelting techniques (which are no longer used) of the area. By focusing on the

Kwabena wants to move back to Ghana, the country he left more than 30 years ago. This film shows one of the many journeys that he has to take in preparation for his return. It explores the motives

Adolescents in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, create a play for their peers in Europe and the USA. They enact an African folktale about a girl who faces a painful dilemma because she is determined to stay in school.

The communal rituals of most villages of the Eastern Niger Delta focus on two great classes of spirits - the heroes and the water people. The heroes once lived with the men, founded their

Among the Yoruba of Western Nigeria and Dahomey the Gelede cult honours the earth spirits, the ancestors and especially the Great Mother. The festival filmed here emphasises the status of women and

In search of the righteous way of living, the Liberian rapper CyLover, aka as 'Jungle Cat' wants to make music for his people. Now based in Ghana, the big chance to finish his first album approaches

Four million Tiv people form the major culture of the Benue state of southern Nigeria. They are popularly known as the greatest democrats in Africa as their society is based on fraternal cooperation

The film is a brief description of life in a busy commercial centre that still depends upon and retains its ancient traditions. These are based on the history of the town which was founded on the

A decade since Sierra Leone's devastating civil war, from the ashes rises a new dawn of creativity in audio-visual media. Inspired by Jean Rouch's ‘shared anthropology’ and ‘ethno-fiction’,

In isolated mountain hamlets in Nigeria’s Jos Plateau the Ngas have traditionally observed the movements of the moon in the night sky. The moon is a key symbol in Ngas cosmology, believed to

Four Christian women work and live in a Muslim and patriarchic world. The ‘Sisters of the Consolata Missionaries’ are building a new library in Empada, a small village in the south of

In the 1980s Ursula Heimer leaves behind her husband and children in Germany and goes to live in the African bush. We meet her seventeen years later in a tiny village in Togo, where she has been

This ethnopsychiatric film shows the management of psychiatric disorders by the Yoruba of Nigeria. There are two basic types of institutions to deal with psychiatric disorders. First there are

Cape Verde is an archipelago situated 500km off the West Coast of Africa. On the island of Santiago lives Mano Mendi, the last player of cimboa, a one-string violin used to accompany the traditional