Amandla! is an impassioned chronicle of the role of music as a mean of protest and survival through more than 40 years of struggle against racial oppression. “The apartheid government took everything away from people, but it couldn't stop them from singing”, says director Lee Hirsch. In the songs there could even be found a rare ability of South Africa's people to find humour and creativity in impossible conditions, in abject poverty - and in battle.

Part indictment, part redemption tale, the film offers startling insight into the role of the Black Panther Party in a social revolution, and the New York Police Department and the FBI's devious targeting of one of the organization's most fervent leaders -Dhoruba Bin Wahad (born Richard Moore). Emerging from the Bronx ghettos and a life of petty crime, Dhoruba dived headfirst into the Black Power movement, serving breakfast to school children with one hand while wielding a gun with the other.

Following Nigeria's independence in 1960, the British left the country but multinationals began to proliferate thought the land, specially after the discovery of the region's largest oil well. Agriculture, which had previously given the country a degree of economic equilibrium, was hurt by the agreement between Nigeria's new leaders and foreign investors, which resulted in the expansion of the oil fiends and the destruction of agricultural land. The documentary reflects this situation through the musician and political activist Fela Kuti and his son Fema Kuti. Music is depicted as the awakening of a conscience, as a celebration of life and African roots, and as an indictment of a government that acts as a franchise of western multinationals.