Black Lions - Roman Wolves

nkozia
Mar 15
4 min read

"Black Lions – Roman Wolves Part II,” directed by Haile Gerima, co-owner of Sankofa, the Afro-centered café, video, and bookstore in Washington, D.C., stands as a monumental intervention in postcolonial historiography and cinematic epistemology, recasting the Second Italo-Abyssinian War (1935–1941) as a defining testament to Abyssinian (i.e., Ethiopian) sovereignty and a profound confrontation with genocidal imperialism. Through meticulous archival research and a radical reorientation of the colonial gaze, Gerima brings to light the extensively documented atrocities of Italian chemical warfare, including the deployment of mustard gas as an instrument of terror. His film reconstructs suppressed histories of Afrakan (i.e. African) resistance and restores them to the center of historical consciousness. In doing so, it establishes a counter-archive that recognizes Abyssinian sovereignty and moral authority in the face of imperial violence. Black Lions – Roman Wolves Part II is a transformative cinematic experience and also a testament to the vital role of independent artistic spaces and the creators who sustain them.

A fascist aircraft poised to deliver chemical death over sacred lands.

Gerima’s documentary constitutes a profound epistemological rupture, compelling a reexamination of the archive as a site of contested sovereignty rather than a neutral repository of facts. Drawing extensively from Italian, British, German, and/or French sources, he reclaims and reconfigures fascist visual and sonic records of conspiratorial exchanges planning aerial bombardments and reconnaissance footage of gas-dispersing aircraft that illuminate the ordinary operations of imperial cruelty. The film’s most harrowing revelation resides in Italy’s compulsive inscription of its own atrocities in military records that euphemistically describe “Christmas presents” of incendiary ordnance dropped on Ethiopian cities during sacred holidays. This obscene lexicon is inseparable from the broader campaign of the Ethiopian “Christmas Offensive” of December 1935 to January 1936, during which Italian forces conducted sustained aerial bombardment and deployed mustard gas against Ethiopian positions and adjacent regions, including the areas surrounding Abbi Addi, the Tekeze River crossings, Axum, Adwa, and the approaches to Mekele. This grotesque fusion of ritual and violence epitomizes the fascist enmeshment of faith, militarism, and spectacle. Through this archival poiesis, Gerima indicts historical perpetrators while interrogating the ontological violence embedded in the notion of custodianship itself by raising urgent questions about who commands the images that determine historical visibility and what forms of advocacy Afrakans (i.e. Africans) must act to repossess them from Eurocentric repositories.

   Despite extensive survivor testimony, documentary evidence, and the enduring generational memory of these genocidal campaigns, the Italian state has never fully acknowledged nor formally accepted responsibility for its deployment of poison gas in Abyssinia and continues to respond with persistent denial and minimization.

At the film’s core is the exposition of mustard gas as a crime against humanity; its blistering legacy materializes in a pivotal sequence featuring Gerima’s father, whose scarred hands of boils embody the war’s protracted temporality. Unable to confront the camera, his refusal of eye contact enacts a profound ethical standoff between survivor testimony and the scopic regime of documentary realism, echoing Frantz Fanon’s phenomenology of colonial violence. Gerima’s lens, far from voyeuristic, functions as a prosthesis for collective mourning, foregrounding the demographic devastation of gas warfare, its affliction of hundreds of thousands of civilians and combatants, and its entanglement with fascist imperial design. It lays bare Mussolini’s project to subjugate Abyssinia as the strategic fulcrum of Italian domination in the Horn of Africa, intended to secure access to Asian trade corridors and consolidate hegemony over the Red Sea littoral.

Gerima’s formal strategies deploy a dialectical montage that subverts the imperial perception, intercutting Abyssinian oral histories with appropriated fascist reels to forge a binocular historiography. The power of the lens emerges as a leitmotif of Italian cameras, once instruments of domination, are refunctioned to testify against their wielders, while Gerima’s framing insists on perspective as praxis, which cultivates Abyssinnians as architects of Adwa’s enduring legacy. This is a Brechtian alienation effect, denaturalizing Eurocentric narratives and positing film as a decolonial weapon in the struggle for archival repatriation and epistemic justice.

Gerima’s documentary connects 1930s imperialism to contemporary necropolitics, framing Abyssinia’s defiance as resistance to renewed extractive ambitions at Africa’s strategic chokepoints. By highlighting fascist desires for control, it recasts poison gas as biopolitical strategy, anticipating postwar human rights rhetoric while exposing its selective deployment. His cinematic philosophy compels confrontation with film, media, and education as tools of ideological conditioning. Visual culture, he demonstrates, manufactures consent, reshapes memory, and normalizes subjugation, transforming aesthetic pleasure into a technology of erasure when stripped of ethical accountability.

In an era of neocolonial archive-hoarding, “Black Lions – Roman Wolves Part II” issues an urgent manifesto: access to the past is the precondition for sovereignty in the present.

Gerima’s practice insists that cinema is never neutral. It either affirms existing hierarchies or contests them. His films remind audiences that the moving image, like the colonial classroom, can function as a site of intervention or indoctrination. In the colonial context, education was weaponized to estrange Afrakan subjects from their ancestral epistemologies, teaching them to view themselves through the gaze of empire. Gerima reclaims cinema as a counter-pedagogical space that refuses submission to inherited narratives and reactivates suppressed histories as instruments of liberation. The urgency of his critique resonates powerfully in the age of social media, where algorithmic curation has become a new architecture of propaganda. Images circulate divorced from history, transforming serious inquiry into spectacle and replacing critical consciousness with the immediacy of consumption. For young audiences whose sense of the world is shaped within these digital enclosures, the danger lies in mistaking repetition for truth. The same mechanisms that once disseminated colonial myths through textbooks and newsreels now operate invisibly through feeds and trends, reconfiguring history in real time.

Gerima’s films counter digital saturation by insisting that decolonization starts in the mind, demanding vigilance against narratives that tame thought and evade accountability. His praxis reactivates memory as resistance by critically interrogating archives, challenging historical authorship, and sustaining independent spaces that preserve truths suppressed by dominant institutions. In this way, he addresses human consciousness amid perceptual capture by subtler controls than brute force.