Protagonist Bernard Malo is a newly-graduated teacher who is appointed to a village in the middle of the jungle. Malo is full of new ideas which are revolutionary in the village. He is a protagonist of object lessons and takes his pupils out of the school house and into their surroundings. To the dismay of the headmaster, Malo talks to his pupils about politics and sexuality. The conflicts mount when he organises a number of villages into an agricultural cooperative.Sango Malo is an unpretentious film, but by no means naive, made with intelligence and humour. Bassek Ba Kobhio obviously wanted to make a film with a social message; his intentions are primarily social and not artistic. The conflict between the young teacher and the leadership of the traditional village community are archetypal for the problems within Cameroon society. The film-maker, who is also a writer and had earlier used the story in a novel, himself wrote the sparkling dialogue for the film.While only half the population of Cameroon can speak and understand French, Sango Malo is almost entirely shot in the language. The reason is that Cameroon, with 11 million inhabitants, has more than 200 different languages. In order to illustrate this problem, in a number of scenes Bassek Ba Kobhio had one actor speak his own language; this is enough to ensure than no less than ten languages are spoken in the film.
