People behind the numbers

This post is about four courageous men: Mr. Mkoko, Mr. Sagati, Mr. Ndlagamandla and Mr. Mahaba.

It’s also about the remarkable thing they did that allowed me to find out about them: they all agreed to be featured in Jonathan Smith’s documentary film, They Go to Die.

The four men worked as gold miners in South Africa, and all contracted tuberculosis (TB) and HIV while working. After they were declared unfit to work, the mining hospitals discharged them to their homes in rural South Africa and Swaziland.

The problem? The mining companies sent them home without further treatment or provision for their future care. And they returned to areas with inadequate health care and resources that would help prolong their lives. Sent home to die – hence the film’s title, “They Go to Die” – which actually comes from public health references to the all too common practice of sending miners home when they become too ill to work.

Smith was an epidemiologist from Yale doing research on TB and HIV infections in the South African gold mining industry when he decided to make the film. He wasn’t a filmmaker, but he realised that decades of studies and statistics weren’t making any difference in the outcomes for miners – miners were still becoming infected, and they were still dying, and the industry practice was still continuing.

So Smith asked Mkoko, Sagati, Ndlagamandla and Mahaba if he could tell their stories, and they and their families agreed. They invited Smith to live in their homes and film their daily lives. Not only did they agree to open their homes to him, but they did so when they and their families were going through very difficult times.

By doing so, they’ve allowed Smith to put a human face on a shockingly neglected situation in which unacceptable numbers of miners contract TB and HIV as a result of their work, yet receive no compensation or care. Says Smith, “these men were my friends, and they died of a preventable, curable disease. But they were by no means outliers. In fact, they were representative of tens of thousands of men each year.”

Smith is now working to complete the film. He’s looking for resources and partnerships that can help him finish it – and help prompt industry and government action to prevent and deal with the epidemic. Part of this effort includes crowdsourcing to enable others to support the film, through a Kickstarter page. (If you do nothing else, please check it and the film trailer above out.) It also includes finishing the film in time to screen it at a meeting of mining sector CEOs and decision-makers later this year.

Smith notes that despite the film’s topic, this is not a film about death and disease. Its focus is the men and the relationships that sustain them, and the power of human connections. And it’s not just a film. Smith intends to use it to call for mining companies, unions and governments to be held accountable for mineworkers’ health and health care.

Statistics can be powerful. Studies show us, for example, that mineworkers are infected by TB at 28 times the rate of a WHO-declared emergency. Yet the numbers alone aren't changing the situation. Smith believes that if people understand how individuals have been affected, they’ll respond: “If we turn an epidemic into an emotion, then we motivate change.”

It’s an ambitious and important undertaking. Please check out Smith’s website, and his crowdsourcing site (before October 24, 2011 if you can). You’ll find out more about Mkoko, Sagati, Ndlagamandla and Mahaba and their families. And help lend a voice to people affected by this tragic and preventable situation.

Stories

Sometimes a human story can tell us more than a whole page of statistics about what’s going on in the world.

Tsitsi Dangarembga / Photo courtesy
http://www.cca.ukzn.ac.za/images/tow/TOW2007/bios/Dangarembga.htm

One storyteller is Tsitsi Dangarembga. A novelist and filmmaker, she portrays the lives of people, family relationships and women’s situations in Zimbabwean society with candour and sharpness. Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions (1988) and her films Neria (1993) and Everyone’s Child (1996) have blazed a trail in Zimbabwean literature and cinema.

I had the opportunity to see Everyone’s Child in Harare shortly after it was released. The film tells the difficult story of four children whose parents have died of AIDS, and underlines the value of community support.



Tsitsi Dangarembga continues to make films and her novel The Book of Not came out in 2006. She founded the International Images Film Festival for Women in Harare in 2002. In early 2010 Dangarembga was appointed portfolio Secretary for Education for the Movement for Democratic Change - Mutambara in Zimbabwe.

Statistics? Stories? I could tell you that the UN’s just-released figures on HIV/AIDS say that 22.5 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa are living with HIV, including 2.3 million children under 15 years old. Or that although new infections are declining in many countries, 1.8 million people were newly infected last year, or that 1.3 million people in Africa died of AIDS in 2009.

Or, I could suggest that you listen to their stories.

The Stephen Lewis Foundation has information about the organisations it supports that are working to strengthen communities dealing with HIV/AIDS. (They can tell you the stories better than I can.)

One more story before I go. This one is a real-life story about how one community in Kenya is supporting its members coping with HIV/AIDS. (The video features Francis Muiruri, the Nyeri District Coordinator of the Kenya Network of Women with AIDS, and was written, filmed and edited by a Canadian, the multi-talented Jasmine Osiowy, and narrated by educator extraordinaire Rod Osiowy, for the College of the Rockies in Cranbrook, Canada.)

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.