A Few Thoughts on Soul Boy, the Film
After a quick chat with the Director of the Goethe Institut in Nairobi, last Friday, I am under the impression that Soul Boy will be screening here sooner rather than later. The Goethe Institut was one of the supporters of the film.
In the meantime, I put out two different reviews of Kenyan filmmaker Hawa Essumans new film Soul Boy. A short one was in the Standard, Saturday, 13th Feb 2010, pg 21. Excerpt:
What if your father lost his soul and only you could save him? That is the predicament fourteen year old Abila wakes up to in the recently released Kenyan film Soul Boy.
Kuliendaje? Abila asks his father one morning. When Abila goes to wake up his father so they can get to work at their kiosk in Kibera, his father looks sickly and unable to get out of bed. It is a familiar scene and even Abila’s mother dismisses it as a hangover, but Abila’s concern for his father blinds him to that fact.
Wamenichukua. Nimepotea, Abila’s father tells him sending the boy on a dramatic search for his father’s soul. A search that, following a tip from one of his father’s friends, leads Abila into the lair of that nyawawa who his father had convinced him was a myth.
Abila quickly learns that Nyawawa exists: she is a woman named Akinyi who lives on the border of South Kibera and has one cow’s foot. Shiko, Abila’s puppy-love interest, has seen Nyawawa, “Mungu moja,” and is willing to show him where she lives.
“I am here to help my father,” Abila confronts Nyawawa, in Kiswahili, “he was seen with you last night.”
“Baba ni mwoga sana lakini kijana wake ni shujaa,” Nyawawa laughs while dismissing Abila as a mere boy. “Only a man like your father can save him,” Nyawawa tells Abila. As Abila remains persistent, Nyawawa gives him seven tasks that he must complete before the next morning in order to save his father’s soul. For the love of his father, Abila must now face his father’s darkness, his fears and his failures.
The other interview is at KenyaImagine:
Still. Lots of good things are coming out of that Africa, we hear, these days. Yet, over a century of branding and re-branding Africa has only changed the euphemisms for the wretched condition of the African: noble savage; childlike native; poor African. Africa has not earned a soul, only the West has learned new tropes for framing all manner of misery coming out of Africa. Kibera is one such.
“If Kibera were a cultural icon , then it is one that enters the global cultural economy certified Kitsch. And Kibera is a cultural icon, the template for an angst-filled other; a case study in African deprivation. Kibera as pallette; Kibera as theme; Kibera as setting; Kibera as film star, Kibera globalised through (faux) artistic expression. Brand Kibera: proven success in selling everything from soapstone carvings to box office movies and installation art. All fair trade of course. No Africans were violated in the production of these artworks!”
Kibera means Africans smiling through their hunger in as much as Rwanda means Africans butchering each other.
That trope of noble savages- who rarely ate white men- haunting jungles beyond Tarzan’s wildest imaginations has been replaced by hungry, poorly governed and routinely bloodthirsty Africans living Dickensian lives. These Africans live in slums where there are no existential questions beyond: do those mzungus care about us? Slums preyed upon by despotic ruling classes and often, The Constant Gardener quickly reminds us, with the evil connivance of the West.
Slums, in an Africa where the artist’s impression of can never leave without the benevolence of a Westerner. In the end, this kind of art travels not because of its and the artist’s own merit but because it is ‘made in/ by an Africa(n).’ Unfortunately, this image of the slum dwelling African with genocidal tendencies, persists through that rare moment when a film such as Soul Boy- a film with universal themes and a local flavour- is presented to the world.
“You could say that the location is the real protagonist of this film,” the festival catalogue reads. “All African cities have enormous and often depressing slums, but the Kibera district in Nairobi can hardly be called a district at all. It is a muddy ocean of slums in which more than one million people live and battle for survival.”
What must we, the anointed tellers of authentic African stories, do to shift the curator’s gaze from locations: despondent places and their symbolisation to characters: real living people with vicissitudes and multiple existential dilemmas? These, to me, are the questions raised by Soul Boy. A well scripted and professionally filmed work Soul Boy quenchs the thirst for a kind of Africa while remaining a peculiarly Kenyan story.
Kibera’s poverty is archetypal but by privileging Abila’s love for his father and Shiko, Soul Boy seems to understate the decrepit and shift the human condition; the lived experience, to the foreground. “The human condition is about survival,”Essuman tells me, but art has to go beyond survival. Art is not art if it is all about survival.”
Soul Boy is not a film about surviving in Kibera, it is a story, revolving around the lives of two young people who happen to live in Kibera.
As a local film with universal themes Soul Boy has earned its wings and while it remains on the world stage the question of whether it or some River Road creation is the greatest Kenyan film of our time must remain the pursuit of critics and not audiences. As Essuman puts it, “the film is what it is because of where we shot it and who we worked with. It is not about the great Kenyan film.” It reminds one of a similar argument: between Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Meja Mwangi, who is the greater Kenyan writer. In truth, they both have their peculiarly Kenyan charm but only those with ‘big’ themes travel. While Kibera as a theme propels Soul Boy to international screens, one can only hope that audiences don’t miss the story for the setting.
Read the rest of this review here
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