Owen 'Alik Shahadah is a master of the Documentary format. A new generation of progressive Pan-African Scholars with a distinctive aesthetic. Alik Shahadah is a multi-award winning recipient including the rare UNESCO award for film.
He defines his mission as "demolishing the race-based privileges, which are byproducts of mental and physical slavery." He is focused on economic empowerment and sees cultural ownership and agency as central to the mission of his generation. His business approach is rooted in efficiency and resource management; "in defining success, we must define failure. In defining a destination means defining a route, in defining a product means defining a process." He is best known for authoring works, which deal with African history, social justice, economic issues, education and world peace.
He produces work that articulates a multidimensional African world perspective. Testimony to this is 500 Years Later and his new production Motherland. As a scholar and writer, he is one of the founders of the African Holocaust Society. He says that progressive African history maintains African people as agents of their history and the dominant voice in African history. However, this history must conform to the African cultural paradigm while at the same time meeting the highest threshold of good scholarship. He is author of arabslavetrade.com, a leading website on the Arab slave trade in Africa. He advocates the commuting of linguistic terms such as "Black people", "Black African", "Sub-Saharan Africa" due to their nature of creating a disservice and detracting African people from their historical value and geo-political reality.