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.

"Art is political"

"Art is political. Without art there are no free men."

Sembene Ousmane is considered the "father" of African cinema. His La Noire de… (Black Girl) released in 1966 is said to be the first feature film by a Sub-Saharan African director. His Mandabi (1968) was the first film made in a local language, Wolof, rather than in French in his home country, Senegal. He is credited with influencing subsequent generations of filmmakers with his film style and his portrayal of an African identity that asserts the dignity of people.

Sembene Ousmane wrote several novels and short stories before turning to film. His movies and books are renowned for their depictions of ordinary people, their social commentary and their challenge to authority – whether French colonial rule, traditional authority or post-independence government.

He worked as a fisherman, mechanic and bricklayer and served in the French army in World War II, and was also a dockworker and trade union activist. Many of his books draw from these experiences, like his Le docker noir (The Black Docker, 1956). At age 40 he began making films in order to reach more people.

Sembene Ousmane's pioneering work is remarkable, but also noteworthy is the fact that for a long time I hadn’t heard of it. Maybe it was because much of his work is in French and I grew up in an English-speaking environment, but it also raises questions for me. How is it that someone who reached out to and moved so many people, like the filmmakers who subsequently took up his challenge to make indigenous films, or the Kenyan I know and admire who named one of his children after Sembene Ousmane, is not a household name around the world? How is it that my wonderful local library with its over 2 million books and other materials appears to have only one of his works, his last film before his death in 2007, Moolaade?

The library did help me track down a copy of Sembene Ousmane’s 1960 novel God’s Bits of Wood (Les bouts de bois de Dieu). It’s a fictionalised and vivid account of the strikes that took place on the Dakar-Niger railroad line in 1947-48, in which Sembene was involved. Sembene’s characters are complex and sensitively portrayed – the railway workers and their families as well as the railway bosses. The novel is striking also in that it has several significant characters, and dozens of additional characters -- men, women and children -- rather than a single main character. As his African Film Library biography states, "the novel has no true hero except the community itself, which bands together in the face of hardship and oppression to assert their rights." Reading God's Bits of Woods helps understand the enduring appeal of Sembene Ousmane.

(Tribute to Sembene Ousmane by Thiago da Costa)

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.