Walter Rodney, a great historian of European colonization and under-development of Africa, once wrote: “Europeans did not build railways so that Africans might visit their friends”. Rodney’s insight kept coming to mind when watching Lucio Arisci’s THE YELLOW QUEEN (2021, 87 min). From Cologne to Mali’s capital, Bamako – 7200 km on board a yellow bus, on the routes of an unexpected ‘underground’ and semi-clandestine solidarity trade – Arisci shows us an episode in the working life of Christian Koulibaly, whose trade is exporting second-hand buses from Europe to the West-Africa. Arisci’s idiosyncratic, anarchic road movie challenges us to (re)discover Africa and its contradictions, but also broaden the horizons of Western’ viewers towards a broader and more sustainable vision of the ‘consumer society’. The film is presented by German photojournalist Andreas Hagemeyer, who accompanied protagonist Christian Koulibaly on his journey from Europe to Africa, passing through the world’s largest desert.