upright people’
With its biennial film festival the little country of Burkina Faso plays a big role in African film-making. John Matshikiza found the `reel’ heart of Africa in Ouagadougou
Give a dog a bad name and he’ll be a bad dog. Give a dog a good name, and he might just turn into a good dog. And on top of that, he’ll be your friend for life.
In 1983, Thomas Sankara, a young captain in the army of the former French colony of Upper Volta, seized power in a military coup. This minor ripple was probably the first most people had heard of tiny, landlocked Upper Volta, a place of no importance in the world.
Its population was made up of some 60 ethnic groups speaking 60 different languages, and practising a variety of religions, including Islam and Christianity. It clung to the edge of the Sahara desert, surrounded by more famous countries like Ghana, the Cte d’Ivoire, Mali and Guinea. It produced practically nothing, and was probably only there out of some long-forgotten missionary whim, later confirmed by colonial invasion.
As the new head of state, Sankara found himself sitting round the conference table with all the big shots of African politics. He soon discovered that African tradition makes it very difficult for a young man to make his voice heard among the grey-beards. They probably looked at him with even more disdain because his country was so insignificant.
But then Sankara had a brilliant idea. He decided to change his country’s name from Upper Volta, which means nothing, to Burkina Faso, which means “the land of upright people”.
At a stroke, the grey-beards who had been dictating the terms of African morality (while many of them skimmed the cream off the post- colonial pot) found themselves in the company of a whippersnapper who came from a country where people were dignified and solemn, incorruptible and just, by the mere fact of their birth.
Sankara had given his dog a good name.
They say that it is almost impossible to be a prophet in your own country. Giving his country dignity at the stroke of a pen was such a good idea that Sankara had to be crucified for it – he was overthrown in a palace coup just four years after he came to power.
But with that single feat of turning paupers into princes, he had achieved immortality for himself and for his country.
That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is to accept the received wisdom which says that the people of Burkina Faso always were of uprightness and integrity, and that Sankara was merely articulating for the world what was already a fact.
It’s a hard argument to counter, given the history of Fespaco (Festival Pan-africaine du Cinema a Ouagadougou), the biennial festival of African films held in the Burkina Faso capital of Ouagadougou.
The first Fespaco was held in 1969, when Sankara was probably still in fairly short pants.
At that time, the concept of African film hardly existed. There were film-makers in many African countries, some of whom, like Sembene Ousmane of Senegal, had achieved some kind of international recognition. But there was hardly an African film movement. If African cineasts ever met together, it was under the umbrella of some greater Pan African movement, be it of writers or of nascent political leaders. And outside Dakar, the main focus for African artistic endeavour, including film, was Paris.
Into this fixed and formal arrangement stepped a small group of film-makers from the then Upper Volta, who offered their tiny, dusty and almost inaccessible capital of Ouagadougou as a permanent venue for meetings of African film-makers. “My home is your home,” they said. “Bring your water. We will help you turn it into wine.”
And so it came to be.
(Ouagadougou, loosely translated, means “Welcome into my home”.)
Ouagadougou today is proud to call itself the Capital of African Cinema (or the Cinema Capital of Africa, depending on how you choose to translate it.) And it is no idle boast. Ouagadougou, 30 years down the line, is a name inextricably entwined with the making and exhibiting of films made in Africa, or about Africa and its relationship with the rest of the world.
Morning in Ouagadougou. By 9am the heat is already discombobulating. The city is alive with the roar and blue haze of petrol fumes churned out by a million mopeds. Astride them, elegant women in sunglasses, with painted fingers and toes, robed in rich fabric, oblivious to their own beauty. Light- skinned Tuaregs from deep in the desert, and blue-black men with painful-looking ethnic scars – African sculptures come to life – all race about their business on these noisy little machines.
Bicycles weave in-between the mopeds, and pedestrians weave among the bicycles, trying to hail taxis. Tiny donkeys drag huge loads on low- slung carts, whipped on by small boys. All is ordered chaos.
The film festival has turned Ouagadougou into a metropolis. The citizens are proud of their achievement, but not boastful. They carry themselves with confidence and respect. They are upright people.
To get to the August 4th Stadium, where the opening ceremony for this 16th Fespaco is to take place, you travel down streets that are named for the heroes of the African revolution.
The first long boulevard we travel down is named after Nelson Mandela. Intersecting roads throw up the memory of Agostino Neto, Kwame Nkrumah, and Marien Ngouabi, among others. Ho Chi Minh and Maurice Bishop are there as well. (You’re right, I’d forgotten who Maurice Bishop was too, for a moment.)
Then you do a circuit round the Place des Cineastes – “Movie-Makers’ Square”. Where in the world would you find a downtown square that commemorates film-makers as heroes alongside the early stars of the African renaissance? But, yup, that’s what Ouagadougou is all about.
The stadium can seat 40 000 people. By the time we arrive, almost every seat is full. Every woman, man and child in Burkina, it seems, is alive to the importance of African cinema.
Before the pompous speeches, the warm-up act. Alpha Blondy marches into the stadium with his entourage, and the crowd rises in a roar of appreciative sound.
I hadn’t realised until this moment that Alpha Blondy and his special blend of Franco- African reggae was such an important icon on the continent. But the crowd never sits down, singing along to each song word for word, as the terraces rock.
Here is proof that music and its associated arts are the conscience of Africa, the voice of the people in the face of its many faceless emperors.
“Hey, Mr President,” Blondy sings, “Pull the devil by the tail/Kick corruption out of the door!” and the crowd goes wild, as if he is merely articulating what is in their minds.
“I say, I insist, and I say it again/Africa’s enemy is the Af-ri-cain!”
Strong stuff, articulated with all the licence of the irresponsible artist. The crowd loves it.
Blondy has set the tone for this festival of film for the African continent. The most important role for film, as for the other art forms, is to be the voice of the voiceless.
“Oh, here comes another African film-maker,” comments Congolese film director Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda, as we sit around the informal settlement of open-air cafs surrounding the festival headquarters.
“Let me tell you before he sits down what the theme of his film is. It goes like this: Fall, a likely lad from Senegal, goes to Paris to seek his fortune. Fall finds Paris hard going, and is bitterly disappointed. Fall returns to his native village. End of story. Okay, it might be Mokhtar from Mauritania or Christina from Kinshasa, but, really, all you young film- makers can only think of one film. Why don’t you start talking about other things?”
Balufu is talking with a twinkle in his eye, for the appreciation of this circle of casually eavesdropping cinemophiles. The young filmmaker who is the butt of his joke laughs along with the rest of us. We all recognise the over-used genre. But of course there is much more to African cinema than this.
His own film, being shown here, is a documentary called Ten Thousand Years of Cinema. It is made up of interviews with African film-makers talking about African film, and takes its title from the words of Djibril Diop Mambety.
While other interviewees go off in esoteric detail about what African film should be about, Mambety, the sinning saint of African film, commented that it would take him all of 10 000 years to really convey what he wanted to convey on film.
Film is, after all, such a powerful but elusive tool. In the hands of a fool it can jar the ear, the eye and the mind. In the hands of a visionary, or even of a skilled artisan, it can carry you towards the sublime.
Mambety had no illusions about the awesome power of cinema: “I have a 10 000-year contract with the cinema,” he said. A 10 000- year escapade falling in the territory between romance and lies, a storytelling obligation that is as old as humanity.
Mambety’s spirit is sorely missed at this reunion. He died last year, shortly after completing his final film, La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil (The Little Girl who Sells the Sun).
The film is shown at a special screening to commemorate the passing of two great supporters of Fespaco: Mambety and the French/Guinean/American David Achkar. This is appropriately billed as “a solemn event, and a family gathering”. We are remembering two valued members of the family of African cineasts.
David Achkar died young. He was 38 years old when he was struck down with a fatal heart attack.
Until that moment, his life, as presented in a documentary made for the occasion by one of his closest friends, was one long quest in search of the spirit of his father. Achkar was a Hamlet cast adrift on the shores of three continents: Africa, America and Europe.
His father was a Guinean who served his country and its president, Ahmed Sekou Toure, as a diplomat at the United Nations in the early 1960s. In 1968 he was recalled to Conakry, imprisoned, and savagely tortured, accused of being a traitor. His family had no further information about him until Sekou Toure died in 1985. At that time, they were finally informed that he had been executed by firing squad in 1971.
His son spent the rest of his short life trying to paint, in film, the painful landscape of his father’s missing years in the African gulag. A brave and poignant exercise and an unfinished African story.
Mambety’s valedictory film, on the other hand, is his masterpiece. In its brief span it distils the themes of his two major films, Touki Bouki and Hyenas. It is much simpler than both, more disciplined, and as a result, more powerful.
And yet, rather than diminishing the importance of the earlier works, this tale of the little crippled girl who takes on the malevolent world of Dakar street traders somehow seems to throw new light on Mambety’s other films. His final message is softer, more hopeful, but no less acute.
The absent spirit of Mambety dominated Fespaco 1999 for me. Mambety was a prophet and an angel. He was both disconcerting and direct, simple and profound, haughty in appearance but humble in his interactions. After every screening I wanted to find him to hear his comments, to hear from him a brief encapsulating phrase. But Mambety is gone. Only the work remains.
The festival continues, with its organised chaos.
Organised in the sense that a lot of people from all over the world know that this is an event that is going to come off every two years, punctually. So they show up in their droves. Backpackers from Europe, Japanese journalists, Italian television crews, American Peace Corps volunteers, Rasta- wannabes from across urban West Africa, on the lookout for easy pickings among the gullible white girls from Europe and America, all breathe the dust of Ouagadougou in the company of the Burkinabe and their film- making guests.
Everybody is here because of African cinema. All the screenings are packed, even though the full catalogue of films is not available to most people for the first four days.
This is one of those African irritants. No catalogue, no readily accessible information about the relative merits of the hundreds of films on offer, no easy access to the people who made the films, and no starlets to mob.
This is the frustration and the pleasure of this African film festival. It’s not like Hollywood or Cannes, where the glistening surfaces of the stars eclipse the substance of the films. There are no parades of stretch limousines here, no carefully planned impromptu press conferences with topless actresses on the beach, no 30-second pitches for producers in air-conditioned suites, and no bitter side shows about persecuted donkeys from Brigitte Bardot.
Everything is about film, and about African film, at that.
On the edges, if you can find the venues, earnest mini-conferences are going on, focusing on subjects like “Women, Poverty, and Cinema”, “Perspectives and Partnership” and “Production of Sitcom in Africa”. But the most important thing is always African films and their content.
What is impressive is that there are so many films on show here. Of course there are many duds. But for a continent blasted with such poverty, illiteracy and crisis, the quality of most of the offerings is remarkable. The big screen is used to tackle big issues, with no holds barred.
We have Genesis, an adaptation of part of the first book of the Bible, translated to a timeless Malian landscape. Life on Earth, a meditation on the meaning of the millennium in a small African village, was also shot in Mali. Djibril’s The Little Girl who Sells the Sun is from Senegal, and Bitter Sugar, about Napoleon’s betrayal of emancipated slaves, is from Guadeloupe. There is Woubi Cheri, a funny and moving documentary about gays and transvestites in Abidjan, and Pieces d’Identite, the Grand Prize winner from Kinshasa.
Amid these intellectually challenging works, South Africa, the richest country on the continent, came up with Sexy Girls, Chikin Biznis and Fools. Is it a question of “give a dog a silly name .”? To be fair, the last two films did pick up their share of prizes. And The Foreigner, Zola Maseko’s touching drama about South African xenophobia, was also in competition.
But I look forward to the day when South African movies that reflect the true depth of our experience, and hitch our destiny to the wheel of this great continent, are able to rise to the challenge laid down by this extraordinary festival at Ouagadougou.