Welcome II the Terrordome: The Future Is Furious

As the gates to the Terrordome open, a voice can be heard saying, “If you don’t know your past, you don’t know your future.” The line furthers the idea that this story is about what it means to exist in a transitional zone, caught between history and the future, between imprisonment and freedom. The Black people living in the Terrordome are not in chains, but they are not liberated either. They are confined to a site that is rife with decay and poverty, “a dirty, rancid, stinking shithole,” as the voice-over says. A police car makes its way through the Terrordome, and onlookers jeer and shout from the sides of the streets. It’s clear that, in this dystopian reality, the police force still functions as an extension of white supremacy—constantly surveilling, constantly dominating.

Early on, hip-hop is introduced as a key component of the film, which takes its name from a 1990 Public Enemy song. You can hear the New York group’s influence in the style of rapping that features throughout the film. It’s in the cadence, the punchy beats, the sociopolitical lyrics. Many of the songs on its soundtrack were produced by the British MC Black Radical MKII, a.k.a. Felix Joseph, who also plays the character named Black Rad. Onwurah has said that she used hip-hop in the film for its ability to be blunt and hard-hitting while still being listenable and providing some form of relief. It’s true. The music helps to carry context and thoughts that would otherwise be too wordy for dialogue or voice-over. The lyrics are directly linked to and provide commentary on the plotlines, giving the film a musical theater–like quality. There are lines about how every man has a price, how it’s better to sell drugs than to take them, how you should keep an automatic gun in the small of your back, how you should keep your dick hard, and how if a man’s from hell, you should send him back. Is it on the nose? Yes. But it prepares you for some of the brutal scenes you’re about to witness.

Onwurah saw Welcome II the Terrordome as a hip-hop film in the tradition of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), which itself makes good use of another Public Enemy song, “Fight the Power.” There are nods to Do the Right Thing throughout: a central character is called Spike; music and DJ culture bring people together. Movies such as the cult-classic comedy House Party (1990) and the seminal hood drama Boyz n the Hood (1991) had also featured hip-hop soundtracks that caught on with audiences. But Onwurah’s use of the music was as much about continuing the kind of oral storytelling that can be traced back to West African griot traditions as it was about harnessing the popularity of the genre.

The actors from the Igbo-landing scene take on new roles in the film’s present day, perhaps as a gesture to the belief among members of the African diaspora that we are spiritually tethered to our ancestors. The main narrative starts as a familiar ghetto tale of a gang leader living a double life. Rad shares a tender kiss with his wife, Anjela, as he leaves their apartment to sell drugs to sustain the family. But we see from the get-go that his two lives are not wholly separate, when Anjela’s sister uses drugs in the flat straight after Anjela puts the kids to bed. The scene then cuts to a pregnant white woman called Jodie, in another Terrordome room with Anjela’s brother, Spike, who cuts the white powder he plans to sell to “white trash” alongside Rad as part of the Blue Gang. Spike and Jodie argue about his disdain for white people, but he eventually comforts her, telling her she is “one of us” because she is pregnant with his Black child. When they climb into bed to make love, the purple-blue lighting enhances this most erotic moment of the film. Here, interracial love is beautified, though perhaps in juxtaposition with the destruction it will later catalyze.

Violence and brutality are not undercurrents of Welcome II the Terrordome; they are at its core. In films depicting gang violence, there are frequently scenes of torture and suffering, but here, watching a man scream and beg for his life as he is chained up, covered in gasoline, and set on fire by the opposing Red Gang is true horror. The grit and immediacy of such scenes, shot on very little money, make them terrifying in ways a bigger budget might have rendered overpolished.

Because of an opportunity to expand the gang’s drug-dealing operation to the white world outside the Terrordome, there is tension in the air. Rad tells Spike that he questions Jodie’s loyalty, implying that her whiteness means she is likely to betray them. Even though she rejects this idea, her presence in the Terrordome does exactly that. After her abusive white ex-boyfriend sees her hanging out with the Black folks, the night takes a sudden turn. Rad raps about Spike’s love of white girls and how he didn’t think “that who he sleeping with could have such an effect on my wife and my kids.” The lyrics let us know exactly what the takeaway is: sleeping with the enemy means they all will pay the cost. The eeriness that follows peaks when Hector, Anjela and Rad’s young son, sneaks out of the house to attend the Blue Gang’s party, unbeknownst to his mother, who is busy dancing. In what feels like foreshadowing, the camera zooms in on a shattered photograph of Jodie’s face.

Writing in Cinema Journal in 1999, Anne Ciecko noted that it was “unclear where the film stands on race mixing because of its sympathy for the plight of the white character Jodie.” Onwurah was born in Nigeria in 1966 to a Nigerian father and a white British mother, and raised in Newcastle, England. Her first film, Coffee Coloured Children, released in 1988, is an autobiographical work exploring the internalized anti-Blackness experienced by two mixed-race children. The filmmaker appears to have a personal investment in exploring the dynamics of intimate relations between Black men and white women, but it seems to be less about positioning them as either holy or evil than as unsustainable while the fight for Black liberation is ongoing. There’s a naivety in Jodie and Spike’s belief that love can conquer all, a myth that is quickly exploded when Jodie’s ex crashes the Blue Gang’s party (which before this offered a brief moment of joy) and repeatedly punches Jodie in the stomach, causing her to suffer a miscarriage.

The boy Hector, who was hiding when Jodie’s ex and his white mob arrived, jumps out of the dark, shouting for them to stop. But his choice to defend Jodie ultimately leads to his own tragic end. He is menacingly chased through a building before bursting through a door and falling to his death. The bird’s-eye view of his body, blood pooling behind his head, is deeply harrowing. When Anjela, looking for her missing son, eventually finds his corpse, her scream is bodily, visceral. It’s a sound only a grieving mother could make.

In Hector, you can’t help but see every Black boy killed at the hands of racism. You see Emmett Till lynched in Mississippi in 1955. You see Stephen Lawrence stabbed by a group of white thugs in southeast London in 1993. You see Trayvon Martin shot by George Zimmerman in Florida in 2012. The death of Hector Pieterson, a South African schoolboy who was shot and killed during the Soweto uprising and massacre in 1976, was a direct inspiration for this section of Welcome II the Terrordome. Later in the film, Rad carries Hector’s body during a memorial ceremony in a way that mirrors Pieterson’s lifeless body being carried, as seen in a widely circulated photograph taken by Sam Nzima. Onwurah has said that connecting the diasporas in this way was an intentional choice.

However, Welcome II the Terrordome does not end with tragedy alone. It doesn’t end with the heavy heart of a woman forced to make peace with her son’s untimely death, as so many Black mothers have had to do in the real world. When Anjela sees the white gang responsible for her son’s demise, she points a gun and shoots them down. Calmly. No hesitation. It’s almost as if there’s a spirit gently guiding her hand. She goes on to shoot the police too. The actor Suzette Llewellyn, who plays Anjela, does a brilliant job of embodying her sense of detachment. Viewers get to live out their revenge fantasies vicariously through her, which is effective not least because of how different revenge is from hate. Revenge is about retribution, which implies the pursuit of justice. Hate is unfocused, undefinable, messy. Hate is what the police who harass the inhabitants of the Terrordome feel. Hate is what Jodie’s ex feels as he smears her face with her own blood. Anjela’s “killing spree” is a rare scene of a Black woman leaning into her anger. Her rage isn’t hysterical or easy to dismiss as a shock tactic. It is pointed and confident. It’s a foreseeable part of the trajectory of a life lived under such subjugation, even if it ends with her own hanging.

Welcome II the Terrordome puts forward the questions of whether forgiveness is a necessary part of freedom and whether empathy is progressive or holds us back. When Anjela’s sister begs her grandmother to help her look after the beaten-up Jodie, the older woman has no interest. “Enough is enough,” she says. For her, Jodie symbolizes distraction. She is a figment of Babylon.

Echoing throughout the film are the radical words and ideologies of revolutionary and Black nationalist leader Malcolm X, most notably a line from a 1963 speech: “We’re nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us. But we are not nonviolent with anyone who is violent with us.” Thus, the film ends with fire, riots, and the Blue Gang hijacking a mainstream television station to broadcast a Black-liberation manifesto. “The mother is rising,” Rad concludes.

Welcome II the Terrordome’s final images depict the drowned enslaved people from the begin­ning emerging from the water. This is intercut with a scene of Anjela in the middle of the street in daylight. Both she and one of the enslaved men break free from their chains, implying that there is hope after resistance. If Welcome II the Terrordome was ahead of its time when it was first released, it can finally rest in the here and now.