BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY

IN HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY, THERE WERE CHEIKH ANTA Diop and Joseph Ki-Zerbo; in politics, the likes of Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, and Malcolm X; in critical studies, Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire; and in cinema, Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambety, all battling in their respective ways for a new Africa and a new world. And having passed away in March last year, Mohamed Abid Medoun Hondo, better known as Med Hondo, joins this illustrious pantheon of thinkers, political figures, and artists whose work laid the foundation for the advent of such a world.

Hondo was born in Ain Beni Mathar in Morocco on May 4, 1935. He came from very humble beginnings within the Mauritanian social structure, as a descendant of low-caste freed slaves (haratin). His father’s meager means as a cook for colonial officials made it impossible for him to pay for Hondo’s studies beyond middle school in spite of his precocious brilliance, which was noticed by the French director of his school. The political, class, and caste subjugation he witnessed as a child arguably helped form the bedrock of his longstanding contempt for dominance and his lifelong fight for human dignity. After studying in Morocco in the early ’50s to become a hotel chef, Hondo ended up moving to the metropole in 1956, like many Africans from the French colonies. Landing initially in Marseilles, like his cinematic predecessor Sembène, he found employment as a dockworker, a farmworker, a factory worker, and a cook.

It was also in Marseilles that he began studying the theater, an important influence on his cinema. He continued to act professionally upon moving to Paris, under the guidance of Françoise Rosay, the famous French actress and widow of renowned Franco-Belgian director Jacques Feyder. Hondo studied and performed the European classics, like Molière, Shakespeare, and Racine, but was confronted, like many black actors, with the absence of interesting and complex black characters. So he