DIKENGA - The Time That Returns
In Quibdó, where the river never stops, the ninth Quibdó Africa Film Festival asks us to look at cinema the way the ancient Bakongo looked at time: as a circle, not a line.
At half past five in the afternoon, on the riverfront in Quibdó, the sun begins to sink behind the Atrato. The champas, long wooden canoes, come back loaded with plantains. A boy skips stones across the brown water, and someone turns up the chirimía on a speaker. Nobody says goodbye to the sun. Nobody on this bank believes the sun is dying. It will come back tomorrow, as it came back yesterday, as it will when we are gone. The certainty is so ordinary that it seems banal, yet it holds a complete philosophy. The Bakongo drew it on the ground centuries ago: a circle, a cross, four suns. They called it Dikenga.
The Kongo cosmogram fits in the palm of a hand and holds the universe. Its horizontal line, Kalunga, is the water that separates the world of the living from the world of the ancestors. Above it, the sun is born in Kala, reaches its full strength in Tukula and sets in Luvemba. Below the water, in the darkness of Musoni, it prepares to return. Nothing ends. Everything crosses to the other side.
That drawing crossed the Atlantic in the memory of men and women who were stripped of everything except what they carried inside. It reappeared in the chalk signatures of Cuban Palo Monte, in the drums of the cabildos, and in the Kikongo words still heard today in San Basilio de Palenque. For those who travelled in the holds of the ships, Kalunga stopped being a metaphor: it was the sea itself. And still, the circle survived the crossing. That, too, is a kind of cinema: an image projected across time that finds, on the other side, a screen.
For centuries we were taught another time. A time in a straight line, marching toward something called progress and leaving behind, like rubble, the peoples it declared to have no history. Hegel wrote that Africa was no historical part of the world. On that line, our dead were only the past and our future was a copy. The Dikenga answers with an older and more exact geometry: what sinks does not disappear. It transforms. It returns.
That is why this edition is called DIKENGA. That is why it asks a single question, which is also a debt: what do we do with what has been handed down to us?
Cinema knows the answer, even if it sometimes forgets it. A film begins in darkness. It is born when the lights go down, reaches its fullness in the eyes of the person watching and ends when the lights come back on. But it does not die. It stays in the viewer's body, in the conversation on the way out, in a gesture someone repeats years later without knowing where it came from. And one day, someone watches it again. The film returns.
From 13 to 18 September 2027, Quibdó will travel that circle. Forty-nine films from Africa and its diasporas. Nine heritage works, forgotten, censored or restored, returning to the screen the way the sun returns. Imaginaries born in the darkness of Musoni. New voices appearing in Kala. African cinemas at the fullness of Tukula. Colombian memories crossing Luvemba. And at the centre, Kalunga: the water, the crossing, the other shore.
Frantz Fanon wrote that each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it. Fanon also knew something the Dikenga says without words: the mission never starts from zero. It comes from someone. It is inherited the way a name is inherited, or a recipe, or a way of walking. Édouard Glissant claimed for us the right to opacity. The cosmogram adds that the darkness of Musoni is full: it is gestation.
We do not come to Quibdó to commemorate. We come to hand down. To ask ourselves which images of us we want to leave to those not yet born. To decide what we will do with the images left to us by those who have already crossed the water.
The sun sets over the Atrato. Nobody says goodbye.
The circle continues.
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