Sujet 2 - Partie 2 · Bac Anglais, monde contemporain Métropole remplacement 2021

Document A

Inside Queen Sono, Netflix's First African Original Series

When we think of the spy genre, the icons that come to mind first are often the white,

male masters of espionage, the James Bonds and Jason Bournes. But the new Netflix

series Queen Sono, out Feb. 28, offers its own take on the genre in the platform's first

fully produced African original series.

5 Assuming various aliases, lead character Queen (Pearl Thusi, best known for her roles

in U.S. television series Quantico and the Netflix film Catching Feelings) is a spy

searching for the truth behind her mother's assassination while undertaking a

dangerous assignment requiring her to traverse the African continent. In developing

the narrative, creator Kagiso Lediga sought to blend the history of South Africa with its

10 present-day politics, all set against the backdrop of a femicide crisis and increasing

violence against women. “I thought, how cool would it be to have a woman that

embodies something different, the idea that women can fight back,” he tells TIME.

The series was shot in 37 different locations with an all-African cast and crew, following

Queen on missions in Kenya's hub of Nairobi to an elite bar in Zimbabwe's capital,

15 Harare, as well as her base in Johannesburg. A variety of languages are interspersed

with English throughout the six episodes, including Afrikaans, isiXhosa and Swahili.

Lediga wanted to counter the way in which perceptions of Africa tend to get flattened

by those unfamiliar with its multifaceted reality, and to offer an alternative to

perceptions that focus on the hardships faced by people on the continent. “It's not just

20 about flies on babies suffering from malnutrition,” he says. “There's a vastness of

cultures. It's the second biggest continent, with some 1.3 billion people, and I'm hoping

people will get to appreciate that.” [...]

The legacy of apartheid is also depicted through the disparities in South Africa's living

standards; the country has one of the highest inequality rates in the world owing to the

25 legacy of apartheid. [...] “It's important to show the contemporariness of the African

narrative,” Lediga says. “Telling a story like this makes it urgent, makes it present.”

www.time.com, 3 March 2020

Document B

I'm a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to

call “the danger of the single story.” I grew up on a university campus in eastern

Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four

is probably close to the truth. So I was an early reader, and what I read were British

5 and American children's books.

I was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories

in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote

exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed,

they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how

10 lovely it was that the sun had come out. (Laughter) Now, this despite the fact that I

lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow, we ate

mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.

My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer, because the characters in the British

books I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was.

15 (Laughter) And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste

ginger beer. But that is another story.

What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the

face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which

characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had

20 to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally

identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren't many

of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books.

But because of writers like Chinua Achebe 1 and Camara Laye 2, I went through a mental

shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color

25 of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I

started to write about things I recognized.

Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination.

They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did

not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African

30 writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are.

Chimamanda NGOZI ADICHIE, extract from a speech at TEDGlobal, 2009

1 a Nigerian author

2 a Guinean author

Document C

[Paapa Essiedu is a British actor whose family came from Ghana. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2012. He is the first black actor to star as Hamlet with the RSC.]

Partie 2 [4 pts]

Traduisez en français le passage suivant du document B (l. 24-30):

I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized.

Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are.