At the beginning of the 1960s, in Salisbury (now Harare), in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), the government of Ian Smith hanged three black revolutionaries who had nevertheless been pardoned by the Queen of England. René Vautier, with ZAPU (Zimbabwe African Party for Unity), denounces this killing. Expelled by the Rhodesian police (informed by the French secret services), the filmmaker shoots a film in Algeria in the form of an indictment against colonial savagery. The film was first banned in France, then authorized in 1965.

Djibril Diop Mambéty followed and filmed the shooting of Yaaba, Idrissa Ouédraogo's second feature film. A documentary full of humorous anecdotes regarding the dangers of shooting in Burkina Faso.

1970 film by Djibril Diop Mambéty

1994 film by Djibril Diop Mambéty

The satirical documentary Contras' City (which stands for Contrast City) was shot on 16mm in 1968. It is one of the earliest African comic movie and an urban planning analysis of the “two Dakars”. It is considered the first African comedy. It is a satire on Dakar - a city in which styles and cultures are blended in a cosmopolitan small area. Mambety manipulates the classic documentary apparatus with the object of exploring social conflicts of the capital city. Djibril Diop Mambéty's earliest film, a short entitled Contras City (1968), highlighted the contrasts of cosmopolitanism and unrestrained ostentation in Dakar's baroque architecture against the modest, everyday lives of the Senegalese. Mambéty's recurrent theme of hybridity--the blending of elements from precolonial Africa and the colonial West in a neocolonial African context—is already evident in Contras City, which is considered Africa's first comedy film.

A young girl with a physical disability arrives in Dakar and challenges the convention of boys selling newspapers on the street.

1992 film by Djibril Diop Mambéty