Med Hondo died on Saturday, March 2, 2019, in Paris. He was 82 years old. In his later years, Med Hondo was primarily famous in France for being the go-to actor to dub characters played by Hollywood stars Morgan Freeman, Sidney Poitier and Eddie Murphy into French. But Hondo, originally from Mauritania, was more than just a voice actor. He was also one of the pioneers of African film. Hondo’s breakthrough film Soleil O, which follows a Mauritanian dealing with racial trauma in France, premiered at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival. His most important contribution, however, was a 1979 article “What is the cinema for us?”

In the article, Hondo unleashed a sharp critique of a global cinema structure in which citizens of Africa and the Arab world consume Euro/American films with no promise of representation in return:

Throughout the world when people use the term cinema, they all refer more or less consciously to a single cinema, which for more than half a century has been created, produced, industrialized, programmed and then shown on the world’s screens: Euro-American cinema.

Hondo’s message was manifesto-like, calling for a cinema in which African and Arab filmmakers hold stakes in the Euro-American-dominated global cinema. “The images this cinema offers systematically exclude the African and the Arab,” Hondo explains, “seeking to maintain the division of the African and Arab peoples—their weakness, submission, servitude, their ignorance of each other and of their own history.” He viewed the relationship as one between “the dominating and the dominated, between masters and slaves.”

For Hondo, to describe the solution in simple numbers would be a shortcoming. “Even a few dozen more film-makers producing films would only achieve a ratio of one to ten thousand.” To be competitive, Hondo envisioned an “everyday creative dynamic” rooted in “a spirit of creative and stimulating competition among African and Arab film-makers.” African and Arab film industries had to first control their own markets and meet the needs of local audiences before promoting their work abroad. Otherwise, African and Arab films would continue to wind up in “dead-end art cinemas.”