The Bad Guys and the Good Guys is a series of ten monochromatic silkscreen prints that trace a narrative about the influence of the Cold War in Africa. The title of the work and the printed subtitles on the screen prints were appropriated from the documentary Cold War Stories, produced in 1997 by the CNN’s founder Ted Turner. In one of the chapters of the documentary, prominent political and military figures from the United States and the former Soviet Union – and also from countries such as Cuba and South Africa – provide testimony about their involvement in the long civil war in Angola. The perverse attempt to omit the secret and sinister intrusion of the international community in the Angolan civil war often boils down its causes to a mere tribal conflict. Kia Henda uses elements from the oral tradition (a mask of Tchokwe origin, an ethnic group in eastern Angola) to create a symbiosis with a supposedly extraterrestrial being who becomes a kind of an alien narrator of this tragic chapter of modern African history.
