Robert Kirby
CHANNELVISION
Craig Matthews’s excellent documentary Of Ochre andWater:Himba Chronicles from the Land of Kaoko, was about the threat to the cultural, religious and social traditions, the very substance, of Namibia’s Himba people by the proposed construction of a vast dam on the Kunene river. Ergo, hydroelectricity for Windhoek.
Matthews says that his involvement with the Himba has spanned 15 years, latterly leading to the making of this film. There are not many thousands of the Himba, living a nomadic cattleherding existence along the banks of the river. One of their fundamental objections to the construction of the dam is that its waters would engulf their ancestral graves. So far no one in the Windhoek government has even agreed to talk about the moving of the graves, let alone done much more than make some obligatory murmurs about the rights of others.
More effective because it sidestepped the melodramatic, the speculative quietness of the documentary was compelling. Much comment was in the vernacular and the subtitles had their usual distilling capacity, making the grievances forwarded by the elders of the Himba that much more trenchant and uncluttered. It took a typically arrogant city politician to put such bucolic reasonings to waste. He simply didn’t give a blind shit about things like venerated burial sites or, for that matter, any other quaint rituals of tribal life. The dam was going up whether the Himba people liked it or not.
What is not often achieved in documentaries of this kind is a lack of feelgood patronisation and the avoidance of politically correct posturing. Of Ochre andWaters daintily sidestepped the pitfalls, slipping into the mawkish only once or twice, as in, “When I met the Himbas my life was changed forever.” Cringe, cringe.
This was another of some excellent documentaries commissioned by e.tv. Its broadcast followed some relentless hype by the station in which the film was hailed as being a masterwork. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but certainly as a documentary of depth and sensitivity it had signal worth and both Matthews and codirector Joelle Chesselet deserve great kudos for making it.
What struck me as contradictory was that, on the one hand, e.tv went right over the top in selling the film, and then deliberately sabotaged the broadcast of the work. It did this first by slapping its garish station logo on one corner. This logo obliterated parts of the subtitles. The flow of the film was frequently interrupted for commercials. No “bumpers”, just ads, cut in crudely, without warning. The transmission exercise was conducted with bewildering insensitivity.
Surely there are times when commercial exigencies should take second place. And surely Of Ochre andWaters was one of these. In many instances truly beautiful photography was despoiled by the gaudy red “e”. It was like having a fine wine served up in polystyrene cups. But then that’s e.tv, a television service that, in far too much of its output, is dedicated to the advancement of vulgarian codes.
Quite the most darkly comic item of last week’s television was a minute or so in some news bulletin of Frene Ginwala declaiming, in her usual pompous tones, about the traditions and ethics of the democratic institution of Parliament. Parliament was not something to be messed with, said Frene, puffing herself so that she looked a bit like a gigantic pink pond amphibian. Referring to recent runins she’s had with the PanAfricanist Congress’s Patricia de Lille, Frene brandished the meaty ramparts of her arms and uttered dire threats to those who might dare to disparage the dignity and authority of Parliament, as embodied, of course, in Frene herself, feisty defender of the local version of this hallowed British colonialist institution.
The recent signal exception is one Tony Yengeni, who’s been giving the rigid finger to the same hallowed British colonialist institution over the last two or three weeks, while a fastidiously dispassionate Frene Ginwala has managed somehow to gaze steadfastly in the opposite direction, as indeed she did for more than a year while Penuell Maduna demonstrated that if you are a member of the ANC you operate in a rare stratum, where Frene’s consequential parliamentary rules and traditions seldom read the same.
It’s a place where the application of political discipline is a decidedly moveable feast, a mutation of the popular social reflex known as Not in My Back Yard, or Nimby. It’s now become Nimsby, or Not in Madam Speaker’s Back Yard. Some do what they like among those hallowed bricks.