Personally introducing his Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation at the African Diaspora Film Festival, Charles Burnett briefly noted -- and enlarged upon at the post-showing Q&A -- the difficulty of such an undertaking in a nation of two million with no cinema infrastructure and a total of two multiplexes. The determination to use locals, or finally a Pan-African cast, presented additional problems.

With Afrikaans, German and tribal tongues spoken and the director and crew from overseas, there were language barriers despite the republic’s official English. Largest of all lay the challenge of giving coherence to chronology-hopping fifty-two years of totally unfamiliar happenings, with “ninety percent of screentime [of 161 minutes] based on real events.”

These questions are not resolved. The result reads like a standard success story, introduces two hundred characters with speaking parts who are not developed before they mostly disappear, and is so confusing that when Burnett apologized in mid-screening for reels shipped and shown out of order, few had noticed. This is attributable in part to the revered director’s stepping outside his habitual small but incisively probed milieu of the working-class African-American family. It also reflects the dangerous waters of commissioned works, for the government in Windhoek had solicited and “totally funded” a screen celebration of its independence strung along the “more than just biopic” career of Sam Nujoma (Joel Haikali as a young man; Carl Lumbly as the mature co-founder of the South West African People’s Organization, envoy without portfolio at the United Nations, and first national president). If the project had not been thus financed, with rights to it even now contested within Namibian politics, the filmmaker could have tightened and snipped distractions insisted upon by whatever interests.

A more informative and watchable history of the former German League of Nations mandate South West Africa’s march to nationhood, self-serving Western maneuvering, and Fidel’s enormous contribution to victory, is the final section of Egyptian Jihan el Tahri’s Cuba: An African Odyssey, featured in the ADFF’s Summer Film Series but not among the current eighty-six offerings.

Namibia hardly touches on Havana’s involvement and only hints through letters read aloud at Liberia and Ethiopia’s efforts at the Hague to have South Africa withdraw from its already-terminated mandate. Pretoria is the film’s major villain, enforcing apartheid oppression through troops and police employing black goons for the dirty work. Stagey scenes of Prime Minister B.J. Vorster and his military commanders, and of Nujoma delivering set speeches and debating Western diplomats before the General Assembly, are slow and extra-dramatic.

Using Kodak software to achieve a “not exactly sepia tone, for a certain look as you go,” the film opens on the parched landscape in which, at a family kraal in 1938, Nujoma senior tells the son of their royal blood and the hero grandfather who with a spear felled a Portuguese soldier. “I will make our ancestors proud, and drive out the Europeans,” responds the young man.

Along this predictable cinematic path are too many dangling introductions, such as those of a dapper Frantz Fanon abroad or tribal chiefs good or venal at home. Unfinished, too, is Nujoma’s courtship of Theopoldine, marriage and a baby daughter. Larger is the Protestant minister (Danny Glover), pacifist but appalled, who unofficially adopts a baby orphaned in factional bloodshed who grows to be a bomb-planting terrorist-freedom fighter (Chrisjan Appollus); but this potential indicator of sectarian division within the movement is left flat, as well.

Sam goes to live with Aunt Julia (Thembie Matu) in Walvis Bay, is underpaid for menial work in white Ludwig General Store, radicalized into proscribed politics, and, broad-chested and sporting a full beard later dazzling white, driven into exile. Poetic license, the director confessed, is taken in expanding his participation in a decisive battle, though his part seems no more than donning a uniform and speechifying into the lens. At least on his 1990 return to assume leadership, he merely smiles at the airport, kisses the ground, and waves to adoring followers that include Glover’s man of God.

In spite of renown among peers if not the wider public, independent Burnett has to “just beat the bushes, that’s my job,” for backers. African-Americans are estimated to buy one-third of domestic movie tickets, but African-American Burnett’s search for financing is difficult. Complicating his co-writing the present script was his admitted crash-course “superficial understanding” of an unalterable history “that’s not even my history.” Confusing actors’ unfamiliar names and who was to play whom, once having to coax a white airport passenger into the part of a United Nations Frenchman, the filmmaker does not attain the control so evident in his miniature-gem other works.