Andrew Worsdale speaks to Akin Omotoso, who makes movies like Roman Polanski on acid
‘It’s like being cursed! We go to any airport on the globe and we’re stopped … I’m sick of it. Don’t our leaders think about it? I’m sick and tired of it. Don’t they think about how they represent us? To hell with that, I want to be South African … Don’t you see that South Africa is the last African hope and that’s why we’re all trying to get our citizenship?” says Ade, a Nigerian-born, South African resident working as a university radio DJ, in Akin Omotoso’s film God Is African, the 12-minute pilot of which wrapped earlier this week.
Omotoso hopes the pilot will help raise the interest of investors to make a feature film of the story, of which he has already completed the script. The movie starts with a South African mother who takes her young daughter to the library to research the history of their continent. She remembers 1995 when she met the girl’s father, a Nigerian student reading English at Wits University. The couple were in conflict four days before the execution of Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and nine others by dictator General Sani Abacha for protesting against the plundering of their oil-rich land by multinational corporations including Shell, but by the end of the film they are reunited, partly due to the poetry and spirit of Saro-Wiwa.
But not everything is resolved so lightly. This tale about xenophobia, cultural confusion and the quest for a real meaning to the “African renaissance” ends not only in the tragedy of Saro- Wiwa’s and the Ogoni Nine’s deaths, but in the innocent murder of a youngster, who ironically, was a student activist in the Soweto uprising, over the trivial betting on a woman’s nationality.
“God knows why they do it,” says Omotoso as he rehearses his actors. “A tiny thing can blow up out of all proportion. After all, Ken Saro-Wiwa was saying, ‘Listen, you’re taking all the oil from my people, the least you can do is give us some or a portion of the profits.'”
The talented Esmeralda Bihl (of Athol Fugard’s Valley Song fame) who plays Zodwa, the young mother, says: “There are a lot of prejudices about foreigners coming here but South Africans have to realise that we had brothers and sisters in the rest of the continent during the dark old days. Now the problems are over, they are hoping to be welcomed and not to be rejected or hurt, or thought of as criminals on every corner.”
Omotoso concurs: “The film isn’t saying that there aren’t drug dealers, but just like we can say that not all whites are racists the same applies – not all Nigerians are drug dealers or involved in pyramid scheme scams. In fact this film is as much about misinformation as anything else. All the characters come from different points of view. I mean in 1995 things were strange. Nigerians have always had this pride while South Africans never had it, then with Abacha the tables turned. South Africans had become proud with all the changes while Nigerians in a way felt ashamed and fearful … I mean what’s this president- for-life crap? What life?”
In one scene Zodwa is asked by a friend if she knew what was happening during the apartheid years, that South Africa was isolated. She says, “No, I was too busy working in the debating society,” to which he replies: “It seems that now the whole of Africa is looking for a reward for their struggles but we have to get off our asses and work.”
Omotoso says: “The film is not a message movie: it’s about people. It says there are people out there who like to divide nationalities against each other and control you, but you’ve got to learn to control yourself.
“The feeling once you’ve seen the film should be that you’ve seen Africa and that’s not naked African women beating drums, it’s you and me talking to each other,” he adds.
Last Friday night the subterranean caverns of the SABC building and Radio Metro’s old studio were filled with the usual people, paraphernalia and organised chaos that accompany a film shoot instead of the usual loner DJs whiling the evening away behind studio microphones. They were filming a confrontational moment between Ade – the DJ played by Sami Sabidi, presenter of 5fm’s World Chart Show – Femi, the film’s lead character who is a keen supporter of the Free Saro-Wiwa campaign – played by Hakeem Kae-Kazim (probably best known for his role in the Fresca commercials) – and River (played by talented newcomer Gabriella Cirillo), an Italian/Nigerian who brings the notion of being white into the debate about nationality. It’s an explosive scene, a boiling pot of emotions that manages to smack a message home about conflicting notions of identity and political conviction, but it never becomes a litany of didactic messages. These are obviously well-drawn characters whose different takes on socio-political events create discord between each other.
Colin McFarlane – a sound man who most recently worked on Sony Pictures’s $50- million film Hoofbeats and has done sound for movies like The Ghost and the Darkness as well as for huge concerts like Tina Turner, U2 and UB40 – is donating his services, equipment and sound stock to the film at no charge.
“The film is pertinent to right now. It deals with the question that’s on everybody’s lips, where to from now? South Africa cannot be the only salvation for Africa. It implies that South Africa might be the last hope, but it says that there has to be a major change of psyche throughout the whole continent,” McFarlane comments, “but Akin is making it enjoyable so it doesn’t come across as a lecture. It’s almost like a music video with well-drawn characters and a message.”
Everyone else on the film, including cameramen Matthys Mocke and Eran Tahor and all the actors, are also working for free. Fellow film-maker Zola Maseko lent Omotoso his flat to use as production offices for the duration of the shoot. In addition facility houses Magusvision and the Movie Camera Company donated stock, camera and lighting equipment, Kwaito record label Ghetto Ruff are supplying the music for free and even Debonair’s pizza came along for the ride at no cost with the catering for the three-day shoot. The peripheral costs of the production were covered through personal investments by Omotoso, co-producer Shireen Williams and actor Kae-Kazim to make up the minuscule budget.
Omotoso is no stranger to making films on less than a shoestring. As a drama student at the University of Cape Town, he moved to South Africa with his father, Kole (English lecturer at the University of the Western Cape, author of The Season of Migration to the South and star of the Yebo Gogo ads), and family in 1992 when they saw that Nigeria was falling into despotism and anarchy.
During his studies he used the drama department’s video camera to record all the stage productions. Honing his cinematic talents on weekends, he eventually came up with a startling short movie about the trauma of a rape victim called The Kiss of Milk that comes across like a Roman Polanski movie on acid.
The abiding connection between Omotoso’s works is that they deal with issues without being preachy: he’s interested in the characters and their beliefs, how people deal with social and political influences. He has his own production company, Bony Productions, and along with Shireen Williams of Jacked Off Productions and Peace Tlotleng of Peace Productions they hope to make the feature film of God Is African next year, and in the future to team up and make many more movies together.
As Tlotleng says: “All our films will be about some form of mental slavery.” And without doubt they will be uncompromisingly and constructively African.