A Ganja Guide to [] for the African Immigrant
My journey to the Netherlands opened with film and with film so it must end. The International Film Festival Rotterdam has staged a formidable programme around film from Africa. And boy, aren’t some of those films enchanting. At least those that showed at the Where is Africa? opening last night, really were. Even as I remain disaffected by the dearth of big themes and political consciousness in the newer films from Africa in the programme, I feel that last night was a celebration of beautiful film, ‘African’ or else.
Niger’s Moustapha Alassane’s Bon Voyage Sim is a 1966 animation without dialogue. In it a cartoon frog is used to parody the vicissitudes in the life of an African big man.
Par la Nuit / of the Night, is a brilliant collaboration between a writer, a filmmaker and a musician which made me think: if God is art then I have just kissed her. What Madagascar’s Cesar Paes, Jean-Luc Raharimanana and Tao Ravao Par la Nuit is, is a beautiful, soothing artwork with violent undercurrents. It is about falling into and making love to a prostitute and a celebration of oral and anal sex as it is about Identity in a place like that Madagascar of multitudes of rich yet blurry heritages. It is a show that is as sensual as it is political. A show where wooing is driving a car through a winding country road on a rainy night. Sexual intercourse is that car on increasingly busy surburbs. And that orgasm is the car tumbling into a frenzy of fast moving traffic and exploding neon. Understated erotica. A quiet storm set in that Africa of soft tones that characterises many Africa based films by film makers from the continent.
You might know your film history well enough to know that Humphrey Bogart earned his only Oscar aboard The African Queen but did you know that there was silent film shot in Africa? And if you have been as misinformed as I to imagine that Italian filmmaking in Africa begins (and hopefully ends) with Mondo Cane’s poverty snuff, Africa Addio (1966) then you haven’t seen Attilio Gatti’s Siliva the Zulu.
Siliva the Zulu, as the festival catalogue rightfully puts it, is a landmark in the annals of colonial African cinema. “In 1927, Italian director and explorer Attilio Gatti, known for his wildlife compendiums, travelled to Zululand along with anthropologist Lidio Cipriani in order to create a film that would weave genuine anthropological elements into a fantasy of witchcraft and betrayal He further developed his script with ‘love, hate, intrigue and adventure’ words which were part of the original title). Gatti took a Western romantic theme of ‘boy meets girl, boy loses girl’ and stirred it together with ideas of the tribal (sic) as he observed it, choosing his actors from among the local Zulu tribe members.” But they do not wear permanently knit brows; guitar-ribbed malnutrition. These are people, who love and hate; milk their cows and exchange tokens of love. And what the text of the narrator translates is not savagery. When the Zulu girl gives a necklace to a Zulu boy the text crawls with an excited: “Yes!” “Necklace means “Yes” with very, very many kisses.”
Later on in the evening a fellow traveller asked me, “What if the European had accepted and reciprocated the warmth with which they were received in Africa?” I was engaging her on my project on How Ideas Travel that is, at this festival, focused on the curatorial gaze on African art. Who, really, determines what is African art? Who determines what African art travels? And I cannot help but ponder a while on what the festival catalogue has to sum up as the true worth of this 1928 silent movie shot in Africa: “As a result, Siliva the Zulu stands virtually alone as a not necessarily authentic record of Zulu life and culture at that time, but certainly the only images we have of a people and their willing collaboration.”
Silivia the Zulu is staged to the enchanting rhythms of Uganda’s, Percussion Discussion Afrika which adds its own lyric; a rhyme and reason, to the director’s, unusually nuanced and soft sheened, portrayal of Africans and their way of life. A film from Africa with a death rate lower than that of any Western capital. A film from Africa where the only lion is alluded to and depicted as a cartoon character. That from a director who made his name filming wildlife epics and therefore must have had myriad shots of lions to use in the film. But he did not as though to say: they don’t live like animals, just close to nature. The only animals in the film are cows, I thought to myself as the show came was brought to a rapturous applause of a closing by the audience. The thought was not let to settle long enough before a white girl jumped on staged, kissed one of the drummers and hugged all the other players who seemed to know her very well. My mind drifted away from the beautiful films I had seen and the phrase “willing collaboration’, played to the enchanting rhythms of Uganda’s, Percussion Discussion Afrika, became an ear-worm that I couldn’t shake off the rest of the evening. It was a lot like the moment a white lady enters Ishmael Bia’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007) and you know right away that her sensibility; her Africa, is in that book.
It was a bad taste in my mouth that sent me wondering into the post show schmooze where the next ‘big African filmaker’ is made with only one question: how come African filmmakers debut at film festivals before making their first film? How come there are celebrated African writers who do not have a book. How come I can get in and out of all these places masquerading as a ‘big African writer’ yet no one has ever really read my work? How come there are no films from Rwanda before the genocide? How come you do not hear of an African freelance correspondent arrive, on his own steam, to report on these festivals?
Being here with no other obligations but the one to myself that I must write, has allowed me to see the festival in a different light. In a space where you do not have to play that game of whispered: stupid mzungus, they think that all Africa is the same, while standing there and representing that assumed homogeneity: African Writer; African Filmmaker, African Contemporary Musician & co. It has made me think deeply about the role of the curator, precisely, the curator as gatekeeper. And of how for the individual ideas (rather than those of preselected representations), from that geographical space called Africa can travel only if the curatorial middleman is vanquished. But because I believe in social control, I hesitate to say vanquished but more like change the place he sits. So, for instance, instead of the pecking order of African art being determined in festivals it could be done on, say, the most important medium for ideas of our generation, the internet.
In the end, I have become of a mind to write a book on Twitter. A book whose working title will be A Ganja Guide to [] for the African Immigrant. The Ganja part is as a tribute to the tourists imagination of the Netherlands as well as to give the book the feeling that it has been conjured up as one big hallucination. The [] part of the title to me speaks to a thesis I am working on, as I muse on how ideas travel, about how spatial distance, temporal distance, social distance hinder the travel of an idea from Geo-political Africa to the Geo-political West. The immigrant part, on the other hand, is best framed by the question: what does a person from Africa arrive in Europe as? Does the Africa move from a Third World State to a Third Class state? Does Africa only export its kind as illegal migrant labour and that when its kind travel as artists and intellectuals, they are beholden to the pulse string of the academy, the festival, the grant maker? Is it that Africa travels, freely, as an idea but an idea from Africa never travels on its own?
If this book can work, then an idea will have travelled. An idea will have skipped the middleman and opened up the mind of one wannabe literary artiste for a collaborative study of how ideas travel. You dear reader must take on the responsibility of ‘curating’ my book by retweeting it. If I can make it go, that is if it can get enough curators (and critics), then I mean to begin to write it- live- at 9.00am, Rotterdam time.
For those who love slogans, here is one for you: Support an African Idea. Retweet.
In the meantime, I will be the psychedelic charm of an African idea floatingaround the Rotterdamse Schouwburg before, during and after the screening of Where is Africa: Concert 2- The Racist Zulu Cycle.
Join the Making of A Ganja Guide to [] for the African Immigrant by sharing my tweets at @Matathia
*Curious minds read the fine print: This is an experiment in how ideas travel. No African’s ideas will be revised in the creation of these Tweets. Image ‘African Writer to Adopt White Baby! © 2009, Njoroge Matathia
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by MATATHIA: Who decides what ‘African’ art travels? http://ow.ly/13pt6 A public experiment in how ideas travel…
I can only give a subjective view on the topic, i believe what u require is objectivity…
Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, and Craig Hatkoff founded the Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) in the wake of September 11 to educate, entertain, and inspire filmmakers and film lovers. The institute hosts programs that draw on the power of film to promote understanding, tolerance, and global awareness. TFI also supports the cultural and economic revitalization of New York City and Lower Manhattan through arts-based initiatives.s
“ideas traveling” is a pretty western concept .. hard to judge non-western cultures through the lens of that …