Touki Bouki and Beyoncé and Jay-Z
Touki Bouki and Beyoncé and Jay-Z

The defining image for the BeyoncĂ© and Jay-Z's fall tour broke my mind-heart into a thousand pieces. I did not expect it. The skull of an ox fixed on the handle of a motorbike. It was like someone reading your inner most thoughts. How in the world did they know what you were dreaming? That image is from an almost unknown Senegalese film called Touki Bouki. Maybe a thousand souls in a world of seven billion humans know about it. Maybe even less. It was made in 1973, and was one of only two feature films made by the genius director Djibril Diop Mambéty. His second film, HyĂšnes, which was completed in 1992, I rate as the greatest African film ever made, and is in my list of the top five films of all time. (It's also the cornerstone of my essays into the anthropology of human morality published by e-flux.)


But there is more to think about. Does this image represent the continuation of a neo-pan-Africanism launched by Black Panther? The video promoting the concert is scored by a classic work of Jamaican lovers rock, Marcia Aitken's "I'm Still In Love With You." And so we have black America, black Africa, and the black Caribbean in the mainstream mix. Are we experiencing a revival of a global blackness?