Review of Bigger Than Africa, directed by Toyin Ibrahim Adekeye

As a graduate student, one of the courses I’ve been blessed to take after all this time is a course called The Traveler, which is taught by a professor who specializes in Caribbean literature.

The course is about forced migration and traveling, and the literature/narratives that have a tendency to shape the way we see the world. So we’re reading the works of people like Mungo Park, Equiano. Mary Prince, and so many more who may or may not have been slaves themselves during their lifetimes.

I bring this up because while I have been really interested into diving deeper into the African diaspora and these forced narratives of travel, I have been especially inspired by the class to go deeper beyond the course material. I was scrolling through Netflix when I saw Bigger than Africa was a documentary on Netflix, and the synopsis drew me right in. At that time, it was something I really wanted to watch, so I put my priorities to the side and watched this first.

Let’s get into the review then!

An exploration of the slave trade and the communities that grew out of it.

So this is a documentary that has its strengths on tracking the impacts of the slave trade through its diaspora. One of the core communities that traces its roots are those of Yoruba descent, and I found it fascinating that there were such prominent Yoruba-based cultures and traditions located not only in places like Brazil, but Cuba as well. I think a lot of people tend to lose focus that the slave trade truly was such a ripple effect and that when slaves were shipped to one location, not all of them would stay there.

In one of the narratives I was reading, they described about how a lot of the enslaved people packed together wouldn’t even speak the same language. They had to find ways to communicate because of these language barriers, and even when they were sent out onto the fields and the plantations, they had to work with people from completely different cultures.

The Yoruba example in this documentary was really interesting to me because it shows how people were dispersed across the Western hemisphere, and those learning about the slave trade might make an assumption about how everyone from one place was taken to the same place abroad. That’s not the case at all.

While I only mentioned two countries before, there were four other examples shown in the documentary of places in which Yoruba culture is prominent.

I think this is a documentary that’s really good if you have the understanding of the slave trade and have waded through some of the history and academic literature on the subject, as those who might not know much or went to a school that didn’t have a good education on this might think that the Yoruba were the only community that these descendants are exemplifying.

The slave trade took people from all over Africa, which means there’s such a unique blend of cultures.

Obeah and voodoo are two examples of a mixing of the old world brought into the new one, and while the documentary doesn’t tread into this territory much, you need to have this knowledge to know that it isn’t just the Yoruba for other cultures and communities located across the colonized world.

The documentary obviously doesn’t need us to explain this, as it focuses on one subject (and if it were to go off topic of that one subject it would feel less focused I think), but coming into it with this knowledge is pretty helpful.

Overall Thoughts

All in all, I really liked this documentary. Sure, it has its flaws at time, but I felt like it was a visual example of some topics I have been studying. I don’t do this kind of work as my area of research focus, but I want to learn more.

How we challenge the preconceived notions we were raised with is through this kind of listening and reading, which makes me grateful to have access to this kind of content so easily.

It truly is a privilege to get access to documentaries on Netflix, to afford the subscription and have the chance to sit down and watch it. But it’s the least I can do: most would skip over this documentary I feel like upon seeing its subject matter, which is sad.

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