by Dennis Leroy Kangalee

Ngozi Onwurah’s 1995 Welcome II the Terrordome is a groundbreaking and provocative exploration of systemic oppression and racial injustice, told through the lens of Afrofuturism and dystopian drama. As the first British feature directed by a Black woman to receive a theatrical release, it boldly charts new territory in both form and content.

Set in a near-future world where Black people are confined to an overpopulated and oppressive slum called the Terrordome, the film juxtaposes this bleak future with the historical horrors of the Transatlantic slave trade. This connection between past and present lays bare the enduring legacy of racial violence and exploitation.

When the murder of a young Black boy sparks unrest within the Terrordome, long-simmering tensions explode into a full-scale rebellion. Onwurah combines gritty realism with symbolic imagery, creating a raw, visceral portrait of resistance in the face of dehumanization.

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An African man held as a slave to a white Man witnesses his Black “American” brother being branded - literally - right in front of him. His insides recoil. His entire body revolts. Another Black man warns his tribe of what is to come, but he says it in broken English – even his ability to mourn or cry is now warped.  But although he “spoke a foreign tongue…his message was clear,” Onwurah’s opening voice over tells us. The “New wave” Black slave continues his chilling revelation:

“We must leave before it is too late. What we just had witnessed was not the cruel burning of an old man's flesh - it was the permanent branding of a human soul. And it would be our turn next. As children, our mothers told us that when you died you returned to the beginning and lived in the land of the spirits until it was time for the earth to give birth to you again. Evil warriors had brought us here and now we have to find a way back…

According to African mythology, as we sank beneath the sea our spirits were carried back to the land of our ancestors. Most people nowadays think we drowned, but on that day long ago we proved everybody wrong for as we sank deeper into the bowels of earth, our bodies were carried into the abyss, no man land, a place where neither our spirits are free or bodies dead…the terrordome.”

In the spring of 1803, May to be exact, the Igbo people from Africa in Dunbar Creek of St. Simons Island in Georgia, revolted on the slave ship they were captives of, and rebelled instead of allowing themselves to continue to be held in bondage.  At least ten of these Black people drowned in the creek rather than be enslaved.

Regardless of what you may think of Ngozi Onwurah’s film or Black ‘radical’ protest art, or cinema specifically that doesn’t flinch to bear witness to both our humanity and the phantasmagoric depths one will go to preserve it – the film is a testament to the past and future casualties of sadism, hatred, and full-blown depravity. The movie is less a film than it is a mighty emblem of where we are, how we got here and where we are continually going. To look around us now in 2024, one marvels at the strength and dignity it requires to commit mass suicide in the face of extinction.

Ngozi Onwurah immediately kicks off the film with an arresting opening, a great voice (text written by her) and what follows is a dark carnival ride into the heart of darkness, the sick corners of man, and the contorted psychology of both the oppressor and the oppressed.

Suzette Llewellyn, Saffron Burrrows, and Felix Joseph deliver performances that flicker, fold and fill up the edges of the screen with dry British humor, nasty wit, uncomfortable looks, and nervy declarations that also give way to very tense actions, some which will still manage to shock audiences.  When such films like Terrorodome - films that feature Black people in various modes of actual de-colonization or revolt - are actually digested and taken in for what they are – we will be able to get somewhere.  Films of this nature only shock still because the majority of film viewers are all too uneasy about seeing actual liberation on screen.  We are titillated by real sex on screen, some of us even continue to gawk like teenage boys at the most ridiculous displays of nudity and fake sexual passion on screen – and yet virtually no one knows how to handle the uncomfortability of seeing people revolt.  Especially if those people are rebelling against white supremacy.

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When Public Enemy released their 1990 masterpiece Welcome to the Terrordome, it was almost instantly recognized as their magnum opus.  If “Fight The Power” (popularized in Spike Lee’s 1989 Do the Right Thing) and “911 is a Joke” were penultimate protest songs, “Terrordome” was a haunting swan song – jam packed with images and sounds that were part of the world around us: the nightmare of racism, the terror of slavery, the horror of genocide and ethnic cleansing…PE’s sonic peak and lyrical majesty climaxes with Fear of a Black Planet.  And somewhere, across the Atlantic, a young Black African-British filmmaker in working-class Newcastle housing projects found within her all the ammunition necessary to compete with PE’s blistering aural collage and, like all true revolutionary artists, made a marvelous work of art that was unbalanced, furious, bizarre, poetic and intensely honest, personal…and unfortunately forever (?) relevant.

The movie, Welcome II the Terrordome, may be the first great cinematic yelp of the 1990s. It was to the filmmaker herself a sort of shriek within that - like Munch’s painting The Scream - emitted itself, outward - to us.  Once again, we were introduced to a living filmmaker in real time…and the door didn’t close on her, it slammed.  In fact, some shut the door so hard, the hinges fell and the entire dwelling came crashing down.

That Onwurah was so mis-treated by the British establishment for making a movie about racism that did not carry a prescription for unity or a better future or a lesson for “all people,” or make white people feel good about feeling bad about the holocausts they create - should not shock us.  I often feel critics and artists alike dropped the ball on the great Black moviemakers but in some alternate universe there is a beautiful coffee book on singular Black films and their creators and within that book is a hefty chapter on an artist who is no less brave than Gil Scott Heron or Bill T. Jones, no less insightful than Toni Morrison and certainly no less talented than directors like Spike Lee or Ava DuVernay.

What Onwurah has that many of her contemporaries or movie directing parallel figures in Hollyweird lack is enormous empathy and an incredible desire to stretch the imagination. By stretching, flexing, even pulling at the imagination one can plumb their own depths and, if necessary, an entire people’s catastrophes or traumas can be punctured and transmitted.  Bob Marley did this, Mahalia Jackson too. When filmmakers do it however it’s because they are using what Amiri Baraka called “the white man’s magic” – motion pictures. The result of this act is often dangerous. It can result in exorcisms, marginalization, criminalization, homelessness, death. Or worse, erasure.

I had not had the privilege of seeing any of Onwurah’s work, least of all her masterwork, Welcome II the Terrordome until the Luminal family introduced me to it.  And it was acknowledging a relative you always hoped had existed.

Onwurah stands alone in many ways and is peerless to a degree if we a,ssess and consider her as we consider American protest artists like Chuck D or The Last Poets.  Or the Black Arts Movement’s core members (all male, unfortunately - except if we consider Sonia Sanchez). Although representing the new wave of revolutionary fervor and the early end of Generation X’s brief love affair with “conscious rap,” Onwurah necessitates a place in film/drama seldom considered or acknowledged.  While the 1990’s gave way to my own birth as an artist and inspired a few interesting experiments in theater and film by the close of the decade, I, like Onwurah, was sealed off and marginalized.  There are several reasons for this. And I do not bring myself up here for wishes of bouquets or considerations, but only because courage is something so few artists possess and if you must make a ‘political’ statement or ‘protest’ something in your work, it must come from the belly, the gut. 

Onwurah made her 1995 feature film Welcome II the Terrordome the way Nina Simone sings Mississippi Goddam.

The movie is a feverish blur of yesterday, today and tomorrow spilling over into each other; it’s a cubist painting on steroids because the film’s different states and perceptions recede and spill over onto and into each other; destroying visions, becoming something else. Not exactly surreal or dystopic, something beyond that.  Each previous moment is tainted with dread of the future.  The movie stylistically conforms to this as well, it is sumptuously virtuosic because it handles so much and infers a lot of different energies and moods with an ease and flair, but never once does it forsake an emotional truth or political honesty for a Hollywood fib or a cliché. A film as urgent as it is uncompromising. Onwurah’s audacious storytelling merges personal and collective histories, creating a narrative that bridges centuries of systemic racism. The film’s stark, low-budget aesthetic amplifies its raw power, immersing viewers in the harsh realities of life in the Terrordome while heightening its allegorical resonance.

While its intensity and narrative leaps might feel overwhelming, these elements reflect Onwurah’s commitment to a nontraditional, unapologetically Black cinematic voice. The film is both a lament and a call to arms, compelling in its portrayal of despair yet unyielding in its insistence on the possibility of revolution.

The movie’s narrative thrust is the least important aspect of the movie - what is the narrative of your life? Of anyone living in a terrordome? The notion of logic and narrative is insulting and demeaning to anyone living in a catastrophe.

Again, one of the great struggles filmmakers and dramatists have is that of “plot” or “narrative.”  Stories, storytelling are about feelings, lessons, moods, images, motifs, themes…that cannot be reduced to plot. 

The messiness and funkiness of the movie’s linearity is incredible – women who care about their children, inter-racial relationships, drug dealers who casually accept their fate, drive-bys, “something in the air” droll bizarre jokes about Michael Jackson all cascade into the frame in the first 20 minutes of the film.  They are not anecdotes, more like tiny fables playing out in mini operas on screen.

It is easy to see why in the mid-1990s critics avoided the movie (film critics more than any other, except maybe classical music writers, have more disdain for filmmakers who make them think or confound them than the average audience member) and the unapologetic fervor of the movie often offends the white establishment and critically effete.

Today, Terrordome’s vision seems prophetic, particularly in how it anticipates the intertwined crises of racial violence, police brutality, and economic inequality. The film also serves as a pioneering example of Afrofuturism, linking historical trauma to speculative futures to interrogate the cyclical nature of oppression.

But let’s back up and just look at Welcome II the Terrordome now in 2024 for what it is and allow ourselves to be humbled and proud by this lo-fi majestic movie, muddy sound mix, warts, fingerprints, jagged edges, and all. It’s a film that demands to be revisited, reappraised, and reckoned with. If you have not seen it, do yourself a favor and buy a copy or watch it on Criterion.

And after you’ve watched it, watch it again - alone and slowly.  It has enough in it to compete with just about anything.