Defending human rights

Today, December 10, is Human Rights Day. This year’s theme is human rights defenders who are working to end discrimination and human rights violations.

Not coincidentally, today's post is about two human rights defenders: Jestina Mukoko and Beatrice Mtetwa.

Jestina Mukoko is a Zimbabwean human rights activist. A former broadcaster with the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation, she’s the Director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP), which monitors human rights abuses.

In 2008, during Zimbabwe's election period, Mukoko was abducted from her home by government security forces and held for 21 days before appearing before a court. She was tortured, beaten and charged with attempting to recruit people to overthrow the government. Local and international pressure helped secure her release.

Jestina Mukoko’s efforts to appeal her arrest and to bring those responsible for the violation of her human rights to justice, and her continuing work with ZPP, have led to international as well as local recognition. She received the 2009 Laureate of the City of Weimar Human Rights prize and the 2009 National Association of Non-Governmental Organisations (NANGO) peace award, as well as a 2010 International Women of Courage Award from the U.S. State Department. This past year she was the 2010 Oak Fellow at the Oak Institute for the Study of International Human Rights at Colby College in the U.S. She’s returning to Zimbabwe prior to the elections scheduled for 2011.
　
Beatrice Mtetwa is a Zimbabwean media and human rights lawyer. She’s defended activists, opposition politicians, and Zimbabwean and foreign journalists who have been wrongly arrested or harassed.

For this, she’s been harassed and intimidated herself. She was arrested in 2003, beaten during custody, and released without charge; she was attacked again in 2007.

I heard Beatrice Mtetwa speak at Ottawa’s Carleton University, where she’s also been an Honorary Visiting Adjunct Professor in the Institute of African Studies. In 2009 she participated in a panel at Carleton on the road to democracy and human rights in Zimbabwe. She also gave the convocation address, which includes an interesting account of how she became a lawyer "by mistake".

Mtetwa received an International Press Freedom Award in 2005 from the Committee to Protect Journalists, as well as the Ludovic-Trarieux International Human Rights Prize in 2009 and an International Human Rights Award from the American Bar Association Section of Litigation in 2010.

Both Jestina Mukoko and Beatrice Mtetwa defend human rights despite enormous challenges and personal risk.

You can find more stories of human rights defenders around the world at http://www.un.org/en/events/humanrightsday/2010/index.shtml.

The literature of Africa

Yesterday’s post featured the creative non-fiction and social and political commentary of Nigerian writer Pius Adesanmi.

Pius Adesanmi

I wanted to write a second post about Pius Adesanmi because he’s also doing some interesting work as an academic.

Adesanmi is an Associate Professor at Carleton University’s Department of English Language and Literature in Ottawa, Canada. He teaches and researches the literatures and cultures of Africa and the Black Diaspora (i.e. people of African origin living outside Africa). Adesanmi’s work encompasses both anglophone and francophone African literary traditions. He did his PhD in French Studies with a focus on African women’s fiction at the University of British Columbia, Canada, after obtaining a B.A. at the University of Ilorin, Nigeria and an M.A. in French at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.

Adesanmi specialises in contemporary African and Black Diaspora knowledge production in an era of globalisation. His earlier focus on literature has expanded to include the production of culture (such as language, food and aesthetics) in the Black Diaspora. For example, he's examining how dance forms such as soukous from Kinshasa evolve as they come in contact with hip-hop, Acadian and other forms in North America.

Pius Adesanmi, who is cross-appointed with Carleton University's Institute of African Studies, is also the Director and founder of the Project on New African Literatures (PONAL).  PONAL is an online resource featuring literature produced by African writers in the last 20 years, which according to Adesanmi "probably have been the best years for African literary production."

PONAL aims to make this literature more widely known. Adesanmi explains that in North America, people tend to be aware of African authors who win international prizes, and students of African literature study "classical" texts such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. But North Americans aren’t aware or don’t have access to most of the literature that’s being created on the continent, particularly what's been written since the 1980s. "The continent is almost one of the most advanced hubs now of global – especially anglophone -- production in world literature. And 90 percent of these works are not known here."

PONAL will feature "third generation" writers from Africa as well as offer an online audio library, a photo gallery and a quarterly literary news magazine, Gboungboun. Through PONAL, people will be able to find new writers, reflect on critical directions in literature, or get recommendations for syllabi. Adesanmi also intends to build a collection of books of creative writing and poetry published by smaller presses in Africa that otherwise wouldn’t be available in this part of the world.

PONAL is one more of Pius Adesanmi's ways of making seldom-heard stories about Africa, as told by Africans, more visible and more recognised.

Earth from Apollo 17 / Photo courtesy NASA

Africa paradise

Scene from Africa paradis
Photo courtesy http://www.africaparadis.com/

One of the themes of this blog is people who are challenging common perceptions of "Africa".

Filmmaker Sylvestre Amoussou did just that, in his 2006 feature film Africa paradis ("Africa Paradise").

Africa paradis turns our view of the world on its head. In the film, Africa of the future is a world economic power, prosperous and united. Europe, on the other hand, has gone through economic and political crisis and Europeans are clamouring to immigrate to the "United States of Africa." The film centres on the story of an unemployed French couple whose immigration applications are unsuccessful and so they enter Africa illegally to find work. The film depicts their experiences as illegal immigrants and the politics of racism and tolerance.

Scene from Africa paradis
Photo courtesy http://www.africaparadis.com/

The tone of Africa paradis is often humourous, but Amoussou has a serious point to make. Observing prejudice in Europe made him want to encourage tolerance, as well as challenge African leaders to take responsibility for the continent's future. He has said that he wanted to portray Africa differently, and to encourage people to have pride in themselves.

Amoussou initially had trouble obtaining support for the film, so he made a short version to show what it would look like. He also found distributing the film a challenge, because it didn’t fit what distributors thought would sell. Yet it has been popular.

Amoussou was born in Benin. He trained as an economist, then became an actor. Living in France, he decided he wanted to tell stories that appealed to him, so began to make his own films. He made several short films before making Africa paradis, his first feature film. His film Un pas en avant, les dessous de la corruption about humanitarian aid, democracy and corruption was released in 2009. He continues to act and produce as well.

The trailer for Africa paradis (in French) is available at the Africa paradis website and on Youtube. It's worth a look.

I learned about Africa paradis and Sylvestre Amoussou through Aboubakar Sanogo, a film studies professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. Sanogo showed the trailer for Africa paradis during a conference at Carleton’s Institute of African Studies. Sanogo used it as an example of how African film can contribute to envisioning Africa’s future, by presenting alternatives that are something other than crisis, underdevelopment or poverty. In Africa paradis, Amoussou suggests one alternative vision that might not be so unrealistic.

Reimagining Africa through film

Gaston Kaboré is an acclaimed West African filmmaker who tells stories – stories that reappropriate and reaffirm Africans’ histories and aspirations.

I had the privilege of hearing Gaston Kaboré speak in Ottawa last year, and saw his short film entitled 2000 Generations of Africans. (I have to admit that I’ve blogged about Kaboré’s work before, in a guest post at Alette Willis’ wonderful site ReStorying the Earth; but I can’t help writing about him again here.)

Gaston Kaboré didn’t set out to be a filmmaker. He was studying history, examining 19th century European drawings for his graduate research. The way they depicted Africans was starkly different from his understanding of his own history. To Kaboré, the images were clichés used to justify colonialism, rather than representations of his own people’s perspective.

He realised then that “we needed as Africans to have our own statement about our history. It looks like we do not exist at all, because other people are telling our story. And as someone said, as long as the story of the sheep is told by the lion, there is a problem.”

Kaboré’s interest in the construction of Africa through images led him to film school to learn “the language of cinema.” His first feature film was Wend Kuuni (1982). In it he combined the cinematic language he had learned with the oral storytelling approaches of his people. He wanted, he said, to create a film that people in his country could identify with. (He was so successful in this that some filmgoers thought Wend Kuuni was a traditional story adapted for film.)

Wend Kuuni and its sequel, Buud Yam (1997), are stories about rural life, but they are also metaphors for Africa. In Wend Kuuni, the main character regains his voice after years of being mute, an intentional parallel to Africa coming out of colonisation.

2000 Generations of Africans (2009) is a short but powerful tribute to Africa as the source of humanity and the heart of the future. In it, African hands, dreams and aspirations shape Africa’s destiny.

Gaston Kaboré is acknowledged as a key figure in Burkinabé and African cinema. He served as the director of his country’s National Film Centre and as head of the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers. He’s won numerous awards in Africa and internationally for his films. In 2003 he established a school for filmmakers, Imagine, in Ouagadougou, to give an opportunity to both emerging and established filmmakers to develop their art.

Gaston Kaboré was in Ottawa as part of the launch of Carleton University’s Institute of African Studies.