Renée Akitelek Mboya

Renée Akitelek Mboya is a writer, curator and filmmaker working between Dakar and Nairobi and is collaborative editor and member of the Wali Chafu Collective, Nairobi, KE. Her custom is one that relies on biography and storytelling as a form of research and production. A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, comprising a 3-week screening event and installation at Cell Project Space, was Akitelek Mboya's first solo presentation in the UK.
 
The eponymously-titled short film A Glossary Of Words My Mother Never Taught Me follows the heritage of the 1966 film Africa Addio (also known as Africa Blood & Guts in the United States, and Africa Farewell in the United Kingdom). Africa Addio is a sensationalist Italian documentary about the end of the colonial era in Africa, shot over a period of three years by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, who had gained fame as the directors of Mondo Cane in 1962. This film ensured the viability of the so-called Mondo film genre, a cycle of “shockumentaries” — a description that largely characterizes Africa Addio. In appropriating the form and material of Africa Addio, Mboya subverts the film’s material to articulate the forensic function of image as evidence of the racist regime that portrays certain bodies as criminal, or worse.