Reou-Takh (Big City), the name given to Dakar by rural Senegalese, is a film directed by Mahama Johnson Traoré and released in 1972.
According to the voice-over, John discerns no illusions of “trinkets fit for tourists” or mere folkloric spectacles; it's authenticity that beckons him to Africa.
The voice-over, illustrated by images, evokes misery, hunger, sickness in the ghettos, in the slums that John discovers to the tune of blues.
This fanaticism, combined with fatalism, renders it possible to endure suffering.” John sets sail to Gorée where “millions of slaves” left to the new world.
He meets a man who agrees to inform him that “it was on this shore that white slave traders and Negro kings met” to barter.
John gathers a couple of young people from Dakar and asks them about their occupation in his stammering French: one is a student and the other a teacher-poet.
[2] Thus, it was only screened at universities and festivals, in particular at the Cinémathèque québécoise in 1973, and as part of the retrospective Senegal: Fifteen Years of an African Cinema, 1962-1977 at the Museum of Modern Art on February 26 and 27, 1978.
[3] The westernization of the elites and the impoverishment of the low-income neighborhoods are considered direct consequences of the triangular trade mentioned in Gorée, but also of the politicians' herd mentality.
[1] “My protagonist finds that the notions of authenticity and tutti quanti are just for show, that they have no direct connection with real Black African culture,” Mahama Johnson Traoré tells Guy Hennebelle.
However, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra thinks that the film “is too superficial in its approach to issues in Senegal” and that “it lacks technical quality, which is particularly required in a work that aims to present a contradictory thesis”.