What is criticised, here, seems to be an abstract idea of “colonialism” with a clear emphasis on Portuguese colonialism, while the representation of Italians is caricatural, but this does not imply a critical perspective on its cultural heritage.  Portuguese characters are a sort of archetype of lazy, racist, exploiting, ignorant and dishonest people: for this reason, Di Salvio punches Fernando, a Portuguese settler, following a row they had because of his racist statements about black people, while the residents of a whole Angolan village watch the scene and Fernando’s wife implores him to leave. Before that, the same Di Salvo  had fired the guide Durabal as the latter refused to translate to “il nostro primo autentico aborigeno” (our first authentic aboriginal) that they were all brothers and the skins’ colour wasn’t a relevant difference: “Muito prazer. Io, lei, loro, tutti fratelli...hermanos… como se diz... Durabal, glielo dica: Colore pelle no conta nada, está tudo igual.”

If we did or said something wrong, the movie tells us, it was not on purpose: we didn’t know it and, for sure, we can laugh about it. If we didn’t behave properly, it was because we didn’t have the cultural tools to know it or to understand it. We were too focused on our mediocre urban life or too brightened by the “discovery” of a brand-new world that wasn’t the one Di Salvio dreamed of for his whole life, but still was intact and pure. This dynamic is extremely problematic, as it eludes a concrete move or switch from the fascist colonial narration, and it fails in the attempt to  a concrete reflection on the cultural aspects and consequences of Italian colonialism itself.  Again: it is as if Italian colonialism had never existed. Italian racism is just a misunderstanding.  

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In this aspect, the narration happens to converge, in a sense, with the Portuguese official colonial propaganda of lusotropicalism. Both the Portuguese and the Italian propagandas insisted, even if under a slightly different perspective, on the idea that “nationals” who were going to colonise Africa would give a contribution to the territories. When we look at colonial propagandas in Southern Europe, we notice that the idea of cultural superiority was almost implicit, sugaring the pill to the masses and almost going along with the notion that the cultural roots of the settlers made it natural either to mix with local people (Portuguese lusotropicalism), to experience an absence of conflict with the locals (Spanish colonial propaganda) or, still, to be well-received by them because of the inner goodness of the colonisers (Italian propaganda). The idea of citizenship was inextricably associated, in the colonial world, to the one of whiteness (Mbembe, 2013) and many European old colonial powers produced and kept on reproducing – long after political decolonisation – wider ideas of “nation” as and homogenous entity or project (Gilroy, 1993). They tended to erase the presence of black people from these narrations and, doing so, they contributed to their racialisation, through the denial of their crucial role as active agents of history and culture. The core problem with Scola’s film is, in this respect , that while it leads the spectator to think the movie  may challenge colonialism and its cultural consequences actively, a concrete problematisation of this very heritage in the collective imagination through irony, sarcasm of satire is absent. The film fails to include Angolan people, who are not but the object of sequence shots that aim at humanising  them under a Third-Worldist, romantic perspective. Possibly it was enough for the 1960’s, in a territory undergoing a war? To answer this question, we might recall Augusta Conchiglia’s photographic work of 1968 in the Frente Leste (“Eastern Front” of the war) along with the troops of MPLA [1]  as well as Pasolini’s 1961 preface to the Italian edition of the translated anthology Letteratura negra, organised by the anti-colonial militant and Angolan intellectual Mário Pinto de Andrade. These were, for sure, different contexts from the one of the shootings of Riusciranno…?: it would be enlightening to know more about the dynamics of censorship and political pressures experienced by the film crew. Such constraints might have led Scola to focus on the dichotomy between the city and the villages and, in a way, to reproduce the idea of sensuality and sexualization of black women and their bodies. We do find elements counterbalancing the presence of the naked, smiling, available Angolan women.