African Giants (Kamara, 2024)
Fantastic. I truly enjoyed African Giants and would recommend it to anyone with at least one sibling or anyone who might come from a place where a different emphasis is placed on familial ties and relationships. By emphasis, I mean that the family members and their ideals take precedence over any of those outside the family, and single gains are familial gains in terms of money or wealth. Touching on cultural divides within the African and Black American population from an older generation’s standpoint, and covering generational changes within a culture in the sense of romantic relationships and careers, African Giants is a broad movie that I believe any generation would benefit from watching.
African Giants is centered on two brothers of African descent. Alhaji is Sheku’s older brother. The timeline follows the span of a Thursday to a Sunday when Sheku is visiting Alhaji at his apartment in LA. Throughout their time together, they share memories of what it was like growing up in America as African boys. Sheku admits to Alhaji he was ashamed to be African until he was nineteen. The bullying they experienced because of their ancestry isn’t something Sheku can forget; he feels as though both he and Alhaji internalized a lot of their emotions during that time, and now they’re just expected to be okay with America’s sudden acceptance of the African culture, while Alhaji just wants to embrace the recent popularity rise in Afrobeats and other similar music and artists. They tend to disagree with how they were brought up but they both understand and recognize that their upbringing wasn’t a small sacrifice for their parents.
Throughout the film, the brothers recount many of the words their parents told them growing up. Alhaji was told by their mother, “[b]e careful how you behave. Your little brother is watching you, you are his hero. You have to be an example because he’s following after you.” Sheku was told by their father, “[y]our brother is your best friend. People will come and go but you only have one brother.” Sheku was also told by their mother that each generation is “an investment, an improvement on the last.” The emphasis on generational improvement and brotherhood weighs heavy on these two brothers as they disagree and learn to come to an understanding of each other and their past.
Lastly, African Giants touches on the contempt older generations, especially African generations, hold for how “simple” modern work is in areas such as America compared to Africa. Many individuals in older generations often believe that jobs outside of doctors, lawyers, surgeons, specialists, or any other high-paying positions aren’t considered hard-working jobs. This kind of attitude has been seen in many other cultures as well.
I believe that African Giants is an important film that more people need to see. It’s powerful as it demonstrates the bond between siblings and the ideals they had forced upon them from an older generation. However, African Giants also shows that seeing eye to eye with siblings won’t always be the case, but even when it isn’t, there will always be a special bond, especially when and where there is love, effort, and care applied to nurture the relationship.
