Is God a film fanatic?

People keep on asking me what other people are talking about when they talk about ‘African cinema”.

‘Cinema is cinema,” they keep on snarling at me, as if I had any say in the matter. ‘Bioscope is bioscope, and a movie is either a movie or it isn’t. I job-i-job,” they usually conclude, just for good measure.

No matter what one thinks of the type of people who ask these kinds of questions, one is obliged to acknowledge the basic point. Why should African cinema have a special place in the genre? Why should it even be regarded as a special sub-genre within the weird sub-genre that film already is in the world of the arts? In short, why can’t we simply see African films as films, and judge them, praise them or trash them by the same standards that we would judge, praise or trash other people’s films?

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Fespaco, the oldest African film festival on the globe, is not a bad place to start out in search of answers to these kinds of questions. Fespaco just had its 18th edition the other week in the Burkina Faso capital of Ouagadougou. It is a biennial event that always takes place in that same unlikely spot — a dusty, sprawling town on the edge of the formidable Sahara desert, which seems to offer no hope of life, let alone cultural enlightenment. Let alone groundbreaking explorations in the genre of film, the medium that has been described as ‘the seventh art”.

But Fespaco, in many ways, is an event that has given Ouagadougou much of its reason for existing in the modern age. Ouagadougou was probably, some time long ago, a reasonably inviting oasis on the caravanserai trail that led from Egypt, Morocco, and the Persian and Arabian gulfs towards the gold, salt, and silver trading empires of sub-Saharan Africa. Like Timbuktu, it probably held more promise than the passing trader or scholar would have thought possible at first glance. This is, after all, a harsh and challenging environment.

But, as with its sister city of Timbuktu, a long stretch away to the west in neighbouring Mali, nestling in the same sweltering aridness of the edges of the Sahara, Ouagadougou was a place that held, and continues to hold, a soul as ancient and vital as the source of life itself.

Like Timbuktu, it is a place of precarious survival, of death and enchantment, a place of philosophy.

Which goes some way to explaining why the biennial festival called Fespaco continues to draw hundreds of foreign film fundis, as well as thousands of film-hungry citizens of Burkina Faso and the West African sub-region as a whole, towards its fragrant, and sometimes flagrant, delights.

Which brings us back to the question: what is film about? And why here? And is there a particular way in which film can be manipulated to reflect the African experience? And, finally, is there such a thing as ‘African cinema”, a concept that challenges many of those who wonder how it is that a small, Sahellian county like Burkina Faso should squander so many of its precious resources on the obscure, somewhat elitist pursuit of filmmaking, and on this two-yearly jamboree of movie exhibitionism, in a town that bears the unlikely name of Ouagadougou, a place, furthermore, that barely has any water to drink?

And yet, every two years, Africa’s filmmakers, and the filmmakers of the African diaspora, come to expose their wares at the great dust-, fly- and camel-infested marketplace that is Ouagadougou.

It is something of a pilgrimage, spurred by the need to express the very meaning of Africa itself.

But what is the meaning of Africa? Well, this year, as every other year, a lot of African filmmakers left Ouagadougou highly disgruntled that their view of the spirit of Africa had not won the day. That is the nature of the game.

It goes with the territory that Fespaco is not simply a marketplace: it is competitive, like any other film festival. Some will get the gongs, most won’t.

This year’s overall winner was Mauritanian-born Abderrahmanne Sissako’s Heremakano, a lengthy, languid piece, graced with beautiful images and winding, poetic moments, that caught the jury’s attention for its polish — but also, perhaps (as many of its detractors said), because it fell into that indefinable category of what an African film should be: filled with enigmatic suggestion, but not making any hard or controversial points.

At the other end of the scale there was Akin Omotoso’s God Is African, a film that, in its ultimate form, before an audience of Ouagadougou film fanatics and the inevitable hyper-critical, international festival-going crowd of experts, turned out to be something of a revelation.

As one veteran festival-goer said, ‘God Is African is rough, but it’s hard”. By which he meant that it is a film that does not necessarily have any of the finesse of those African films that take years to make because the filmmaker is still waiting for funding from the European Union or some Swedish foundation. You just go ahead and make the damn film, man.

The proof is always in the pudding. If the audience sticks with it (and the film has its structural faults, to say the least) it ultimately tells you an urgent tale about the Africa we are living in, now, today.

Where Heremakano represents the formal end of the scale, God Is African takes us into the uncertain world of kwaito, hip hop, post-colonial paranoia, and the art of guerrilla filmmaking — which goes its own way to tell this bizarre continent like it is — rather than the way international funders would necessarily like to hear it.

True or false? African or non-African? The final decision will rest with the audiences.

Will either film get an audience, outside of the festival circuit? Who knows? But I would hope that it’s not just African audiences but the audiences of the world who will ultimately help us to decide what truly represents the African reality — and what doesn’t.