Showcase: The Durban International Film Festival, which took place in July.
Fresh from the Durban International Film Festival, Africa’s biggest, some of the globe’s finest creatives are now in Venice or preparing to jet to any of the many upcoming festivals: Rio de Janeiro, Zurich, Hamburg. The Toronto International Film Festival is under way until 14 September.
Venice is showcasing only five films from Africa. Pity, but such numeric insignificance isn’t rare. International fests treat stories from the continent as an extra, confined to the margins. To paraphrase activist and historian Dr Hannah Elsisi, in another context, it’s the tokenisation of talent and stories from Africa, South America and beyond.
Of the almost 300 films that Toronto is showcasing, three are from Brazil and eight from Africa (or co-produced with Africans). The Tolulope Itegboje-directed Bam Bam, Mother’s Love and Stitches, Nollywood’s trio, are the only films from Africa with no overseas partners. If only it was obvious that international stages judged African films on merit, rather than look for, or encourage, (a) time warp or (b) cliche — death, despair and devastation.
To misquote Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — why would Africa have a single, distorted storyline?
Enter The Eyes of Ghana, a tribute to the legacy of Ghanaian cinematographer and filmmaker Chris Tsui Hesse, who turned 93 on 29 August. The film was directed by Ben Proudfoot, a Canadian, and produced by Accra’s Anita Afonu, the nonagenarian’s protege, alongside Nana Adwoa Frimpong and Moses Bwayo.
The library-like Hesse swore by his triplets: a camera, film and faith. His time as a cinematographer of presidents like Kwame Nkrumah made him a portal for history-rich reels. It’s fitting that Barack and Michelle Obama today serve as executive producers of the storyteller’s story.
For Calle Málaga, Moroccan author Maryam Touzami partnered with peers from France, Germany, etc. British-Nigerian artist Akinola Davies melds talent from Britain and Nigeria in My Father’s Shadow, set in 1993, the year Sani Abachi took over as the oil-rich land’s dictator. Two years later, writer and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was sacrificed for profits.
Though universal, Davies’s narrative recalls Ken Wiwa’s In the Shadow of a Saint, a tribute to his martyred activist dad. Saro-Wiwa was, until the end, unwavering in his stance against Shell’s devastation of Nigeria.
Toronto’s deplorable attempt to mute The Road Between Us deflects from messages like filmmaker Sarah Friedland’s about Israel’s 77-year terror-backed occupation. The latest bout of genocide has claimed north of 60 000 lives (children account for a third). Palestine 36 won’t only take cinephiles, financiers and others to the bloody heart of pain but it tackles historical erasure too.
However, with life imitating art, denialist voices blame everybody and everything but the problem. People who lived through Southern Africa’s shameful past know the drill. Anyway, scores of industry players, cinephiles and members of the public gathered in Venice on Saturday for an anti-genocide demonstration.
As for Toronto’s line-up, our part of the globe cracked a single invitation in Laundry, a Swiss-South African collaboration. The film, director Zamo Mkhwanazi’s debut feature, is set in South Africa in the charged Sixties. That was the decade of the Sharpeville Massacre, Rivonia Trial, the redefinition of student politics (from centre-right to left) and, indeed, forced removals. That’s how the laundry business in question, owned by an African family, wound up in an area classified as whites-only, thanks to the Group Areas Act.
Laundry and My Father’s Shadow explore eras when the respective countries suffered at the hands of Vagabonds in Power, to invoke Fela Kuti.
A world-class film on Afrobeats is long overdue. That genre, like amapiano, is the ruler of choice. Ask any DJ in Accra, Berlin, Lusaka or Osaka. Don’t forget London, New York and São Paulo.
Not to give in to the lure of profits, at the expense of authenticity, let creatives tell Africa’s stories for posterity. The obsession with pleasing cash daddies isn’t only unhealthy but also akin to mis-shaping the past. Selectors and adjudicators should also disabuse themselves of cliched notions.
Given the status quo, it was not surprising that of the 12 doccies at the Durban festival only three were from Africa — one from Lesotho and a pair from the host nation. Of Mud and Blood (France), capturing coltan mining in Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Numbi village, was crowned the best doccie. Six decades ago, Chris Tsui Hesse was in Congo filming the mess that would soon typify the Cold War. Six decades before Congo, Namibia suffered a holocaust. Back to the 2020s, Measures of Men (or Der vermessene Mensch from Germany) did its bit to excavate and restore that little-known page of history.
On the opposite end, African triumphs shouldn’t be erased by omission. For one, a film on warrior-matriarch Empress Taytu, a commander in Adwa where Ethiopian and Italian armies first squared up almost 130 years ago, is overdue. Queen Victoria’s men were in 1852 fed humble pie, then praised, by King Moshoeshoe I. The same Basotho they’d set out to crush ended up routing them twice. Lesotho’s map — though disfigured now, a state wholly surrounded by another — is a history-geography lesson.
In Seretse Khama’s story, creatives tend to foreground the prince’s marriage to Ms Ruth Williams of London. There’s more to Khama. There’s more to Botswana than Khama. Botswana is the country that offered succor to activists from across the region. That’s how thousands of freedom fighters, no less Nelson Mandela and Mozambique’s Samora Machel, sojourned to exile, or for military training, via Botswana — the land of gazillion zebras. Exiled student leader Onkgopotse Tiro sought refuge there only to suffer cross-border assassination in 1974. A decade later, Pretoria inflicted the Gaborone Massacre.
People in East Africa say “a person without culture is like a zebra without stripes”. Copy-and-paste projects are stripelessness. If such things didn’t matter, decolonisation would never have been on any agenda nor Europe’s repatriation of looted pieces of heritage or “loans”. On that note, Toronto is to screen Dahomey, tracking the return of Africa’s artefacts, more than a century later. Durban previously screened Legacy: The Decolonised History of South Africa.
The industry’s high-ups ought to broaden the scope than — to please cash daddies — unthinkingly maintaining the caricature.
In the case of Durban’s high office, Andrea Vogel, who’s left her managerial office for a new role as a curator at Cannes, is credited for deepening the Durban film festival’s global reach. Therefore, it’s weird that Durban is thin on African films: from Algeria and Nigeria to Mauritius. Time for cold facts. Anyone who had imagined clubs like the AU, Brics or G20 would foster inclusion were way off the mark. Just one more question, as a taxpayer-funded project, management is yet to quantify the return on investment.
Anyway, the fest isn’t the only site of schizophrenia. A split in the ANC, dragging the party below 50% at the polls, has gifted South Africans with a polygamous regime. Former critics, now part of what they derided as cronyism, happily claim seats in a bloated cabinet and demand special treatment. Openly right-wing parties, and those in the closet, and those who profess to be “for the people”, are united in poor delivery.
But there’s a success story waiting to be told. Look at the ministers’ waistlines. Contrast their waistlines with the living conditions in places like Athlone, Blouberg, Cedarville, De Doorns and informal settlements like Joe Slovo, Kennedy Road and Lehae. Prospects in such areas are bleak.
Still, some voices argue that those stories aren’t worth telling. Why, you wonder. Nobody will bother if the mess is unseen. So many stories are crying out to be told, even in other realms and geographies.
For one, 2024-2025 marks 50 years of Kenneth Kaunda’s peacebuilding role in a Southern Africa. In the 20th century, the region swayed from colonialism to oppressive “adjustments” that in the Seventies reduced Zambia’s existence merely “to pay the IMF”, as Julius E Nyang’oro quoted Kaunda as saying in Beyond Structural Adjustment in Africa. This book, a must-read for any creative journalist, and others, explains how any economy can, at Bretton Woods’ will, flip from rude health to ICU.
Switching to art, the memory of plentiful events as well as personalities and their contributions is receding. Jazz virtuoso Kippies Moeketsi’s centenary was a blur. Meanwhile, Abdullah Ibrahim, turned 90 last year, while Gogo Esther Mahlangu’s birthday is weeks away, and it’s worth asking which creatives, anywhere in Africa, are working on a doccie or feature to share their stories. And nuggets. In the artists’ lifetime. Surely distributors and broadcasters aren’t about to erase excellence by omission and can accommodate more doccies than those on dead, fleeing or imprisoned gangsters.
If film supports tourism, what on TV — broadcast abroad — will bring people to our climes? Years ago, TV used to beam programmes that made people fall in love with SA, here and away. It affirmed the land and its people. That was long before broadcasters and distributors found a new job as full-time Hollywood groupies. Now un-real junk, so-called “reality shows”, abound. Offered little else by way of inspiration, audiences binge on “toxic” Mommy Club, Real Housewives and more trash.
Having produced Malawi’s finest feature films, Shemu Joyah’s finger is on the pulse but the Malawian government is contributing nary a penny to help him retrace the nation’s stripes. Not only have Joyah’s previous films won big but they bolstered Malawi’s talent pool. The Road to Sunrise won many prizes and went on to be submitted as Malawi’s entry for the best foreign language film at the Oscars.
The fact that Africa is teeming with multifaceted real stories seems to count for nothing. First, there’s fiction. Look at Yaa Gyasi. His works, enchanting and lucid, yet profound and taking us to hitherto unthinkable (but thinkable) places, remain untapped by the world of film. It’s hard to imagine that no filmmaker has considered turning her pages to motion a picture.
There’s also non-fiction. Archeologists cite Kalambo. In a hybrid of fiction and archeology, Zakes Mda and other authors bring us to ancient polities: Mapungubwe, Kilwa Kisiwani, Great Zimbabwe, Khami and Sofala. The doccie on Hesse could inspire youngsters to re-visit such stories or produce works on pioneers like Malawian fighter-lawyer couple Orton and Vera Chirwa or Thulani Maseko, a fellow lawyer who — after a long spell behind bars on trumped up charges — was slain in January 2023 for slamming eSwatini’s vagabonds-in-power for their brutality, punctuated by the 2021 massacre.
Don’t forget the legacies of Patrice Lumumba and Dag Hammarskjöld, assassinated in Lubumbashi and “accidentalised” in Ndola, respectively. Both men perished in 1961 on either side of the DRC-Zambia border, some 250km apart.
Concerned parties are half-hearted in making people un-forget 19th-century anti-colonial resistance warriors in South Africa.
While Team Durban International Film Festival tend to treat Africa as an extra, the fest’s 2023 screenings included Bobi Wine: The People’s President (co-directed by a Uganda-born duo). The winners’ rollcall spanned Cameroon’s Le spectre de Boko Haram and Tenzi za Sinema (Tanzania). The latter was directed by Ajabu Ajabu, a Dar-es-Salaam collective of Cece Mlay, Darragh Amelia, Gertrude Malizana and Jesse Gerard Mpango. The latter asserts that there is no paucity of — multifaceted — tales from Africa. Distributors know.
Now, walking down Durban’s beachfront esplanade, with Joyah, I am transported to the tale of Reverend John Chilembwe, a liberation theologian assassinated in 1915, the subject of Joyah’s future project.
It is the end of the day as Joyah and I venture south. The sun, venturing west, shows off, painting the sky tangerine. Aesthetically-pleasing Mother Nature never stops. But, youngsters’ fashion sense, a riot of colours (and with glasses of all sizes), recalls music videos from the USA. The picture’s a metaphor for how some African storytellers tell their stories: copy-and-paste Hollywood tales.
Thankfully, that’s not the end. There remain too many pieces. Authenticity. Inclusion. Success stories of international and intra-continental partnerships abound but so do, on the debit side, untold stories. So do cliches — mis-shaping perceptions of Africa. Governments are too distant to care. Creatives dream of collaborations and co-productions. In this way, different nations will feed off each other’s strengths: talent, location, infrastructure and expertise. Now’s the time.
Shoks Mnisi Mzolo is a roving storyteller with a background in arts and culture and financial journalism. He also works as an independent researcher and is an avid traveller.