Norman, born in Baltimore in 1933, had left the U.S. in the early 1960s to study German, theater, and medicine in Göttingen. In 1966 he moved to Berlin to join the newly founded German Film and Television Academy (DFFB). By 1969, he had made the films
Riffi (1966),
Blues People (1968),
Cultural Nationalism (1969) and the graduation film
Strange Fruit (1969).
Norman shot
On Africa together with Joey Gibbs after graduating from the school. The filmmaker about his film: "The starting point is the relationship between Europe's prosperity and Africa's poverty; Europe's destruction of societies and cultures, and the simultaneous use of Christianity and racial theories as justification for a massive exploitation of the colonized."
On Africa was first shown at the Festival in Mannheim in 1970 and then broadcast on television by WDR in 1972.
The script is accompanied by images from the film, and followed by five short commentaries by Sónia Vaz Borges, Madeleine Bernstorff, Marie-Hélène Gutberlet,
Tom Holert, and Volker Pantenburg.
Wilbert Reuben "Skip" Norman (1933-2015) was a Black American filmmaker, cinematographer, photographer, and scholar. Moved to Germany in the 1960s, he worked with a group of filmmakers and activists interested in the revolutionary potential of the art form, including Gerd Conradt,
Harun Farocki, Holger Meins, and Helke Sander. Norman produced a remarkable but little-seen body of documentary, experimental, and essay films in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and a number of films about his experience as a Black man in both Germany and his home country.
