Browse Titles - 8 results
Faat Kine
Le Silence de la Foret
Le silence de la forêt is a film about the difficulty for even the most well-intentioned person to know and respect another culture. In this case, the problem is so acute that there is even heated debate over what to call that 'other'. The subtitles in the film use the familiar word 'pygmies', a relatively pejora...
Le silence de la forêt is a film about the difficulty for even the most well-intentioned person to know and respect another culture. In this case, the problem is so acute that there is even heated debate over what to call that 'other'. The subtitles in the film use the familiar word 'pygmies', a relatively pejorative European term; the Bantu or villagers' expression for the same group, Babingas, carries similar negative connotations. These highl...
Le silence de la forêt is a film about the difficulty for even the most well-intentioned person to know and respect another culture. In this case, the problem is so acute that there is even heated debate over what to call that 'other'. The subtitles in the film use the familiar word 'pygmies', a relatively pejorative European term; the Bantu or villagers' expression for the same group, Babingas, carries similar negative connotations. These highly specialized, tropical rainforest hunter-gatherers should perhaps be called by their own ethnonym, Aka, MoAka (sing.) and BaAka (pl.)
'Pygmies' were first introduced to a wide Western reading public through the now controversial, romanticized account of Colin Turnbull, The Forest People (1961). This film is based on the similarly sentimental novel Le silence de la forêt by Etienne Goyemide. The film stars Eriq Ebouaney, well-known from playing Lumumba in the film of the same name, and is scored by Manu Dibango, the Cameroonian music legend. The fact that this film is the first to focus on the exploitation and racism between more modern Africans and an autochthonous people, so ironically reminiscent of the attitudes of European colonists towards Africans, makes it even more unusual and fascinating.
The film's hero Gonaba, unlike many Africans educated in Europe, decides to return to his homeland of the Central African Republic, full of ideals for fulfilling the promises of independence. The film fast forwards ten years and we find a wiser but more disillusioned Gonaba who realizes he has accomplished nothing. If anything he has become just another parasitical bureaucrat entitled to his own servant, comfortable house and sexual dalliances. In the novel, he is more critically portrayed although he is patterned after the author, a tireless educational reformer in the Central African Republic who recently died of HIV-AIDS.
Gonaba's dissatisfaction comes to a head at an Independence Day celebration where he scornfully comments there is nothing to celebrate but corruption. He refuses to wear a European suit which he feels just mimics their colonial predecessors. At the festivities there is a dance performed by some BaAka during which one of the guests contemptuously throws food for them to scramble over like dogs. The Prefect later refers to them as animals and calls them tourist attractions.
The next day on a visit to a rural school, Gonaba is again confronted by his ineffectualness. Rather than talk about education he must settle conflicts about the sexual misconduct of teachers with their students. The village chief has an Aka 'slave' named Manga, whom he mistreats, raising Gonaba's indignation once again. He reminds Manga that he is a citizen and that all people are equal as the founder of the Central African Republic, Barthélemy Boganda, preached. (The subtitles refer to Manga as a 'slave' but he might better be called a 'client' of a 'patron'.) In any case, Gonaba 'buys' him from the chief and convinces Manga to take him to his village where Gonaba hopes to meet some people so 'primitive' that they still have their integrity intact. At the same time he can educate them with what he takes for granted as the universal wisdom of the Enlightenment.
Deserted by Manga who knows that the real path to power lies in a military career, Gonaba stumbles into a net trap and arrives at the village unconscious. Restored to health with traditional medicines, his 'civilizing mission' encounters a notable lack of enthusiasm from the BaAka. They can see no point in learning to read and write French; they already have the knowledge they need to be successful rainforest hunter-gatherers. Gonaba further flouts local custom by building his well-ventilated rectangular (not round) house on sacred land - exhibiting, the same disrespect for sacred soil that alienates the hero of Bassek ba Kobhio's earlier film Sango Malo from the villagers he is trying to liberate.
Gonaba does manage to meet, marry, and have a child with a young MoAka, named Kali. Despite unpromising omens, he and the other men of the tribe set out on his initiation ritual, an elephant hunt. A ferocious storm strikes and Kali is fatally wounded when a trees falls on her. Ironically, her last word is the one French expression she has learned, 'bouche', as she asks Gonaba for a final kiss. The villagers condemn Gonaba to death by tying him to a tree for wild beasts to eat; he is helped to escape and the film ends with his return to the city. As the sounds of urban life rise on the soundtrack, he says he will never forget 'le silence de la fôret.'
It would be a mistake to equate the naiveté of the protagonist with the attitude of the two filmmakers. Bassek ba Kobhio's former films, Sango Malo and Le grand Blanc de Lambaréné both center on well-intentioned characters, the teacher Malo and Albert Schweitzer respectively, who are partially thwarted in their missions by their own sense of cultural superiority. This film shows how Gonaba's attraction to Rousseau's concept of the 'noble savage' masks a deeply embedded cultural condescension. There is no noble savage, only different cultures adapted to their own environments with more or less success; modernism might be said to be a culture whose environment is predominantly man (and woman) made.
In the course of the film we are told the Aka creation myth. Rude and disobedient, the Great Spirit exiled the BaAka to the forest. Their playmates, the chimpanzees (the sub-title 'gorilla' is inaccurate), taught them how to make fire; for this transgression the chimpanzees lost their tails. In the ecological system in which the BaAka live, chimpanzees are recognized as occupying an intermediate position between animals and humans. In this interesting variant on the Prometheus legend, alienation from the natural order through the acquisition of culture or technology comes at the very inception of human life. There is no innocence, no escaping culture, not even in the rainforest. Nor is there silence in the forest - just the sounds of animals and the speech of the garrulous BaAka - for those who are prepared to listen for them. In a post-modern world, freedom is not to be free of culture, but to be able to select one's culture and, above all, to reject and change that culture to provide greater freedom and fulfillment. Today, the Biaka are increasingly threatened by roads opening their territory to loggers who destroy the habitat to which their hunter-gatherer culture has so superbly adapted them.
Show more Show less
State of Denial
By the year 2000, an estimated 4.2 million people in South Africa were infected with HIV; if present trends continue by 2010, 7 million will have died of the disease. State of Denial puts a human face behind the numbers by introducing us to a cross-section of South Africans involved with the AIDS epidemic. It sh...
By the year 2000, an estimated 4.2 million people in South Africa were infected with HIV; if present trends continue by 2010, 7 million will have died of the disease. State of Denial puts a human face behind the numbers by introducing us to a cross-section of South Africans involved with the AIDS epidemic. It shows how they must fight not only the disease but the greed of the drug cartels and the incomprehensible inactivity of their own governm...
By the year 2000, an estimated 4.2 million people in South Africa were infected with HIV; if present trends continue by 2010, 7 million will have died of the disease. State of Denial puts a human face behind the numbers by introducing us to a cross-section of South Africans involved with the AIDS epidemic. It shows how they must fight not only the disease but the greed of the drug cartels and the incomprehensible inactivity of their own government in order to get treatment.
The film clearly blames President Thabo Mbeki and his administration for questioning the link between HIV and AIDS. Not only does his position prohibit the use of antiretroviral drugs, but adds to the confusion about how the disease is transmitted and about how to practice 'safe sex'. In 2000 he even arranged a special meeting of advisors and to which he invited 'denialists', i.e. those who dispute that HIV causes AIDS, who used the meeting as a platform for their discredited views. There are those who contend that a reason for Mbeki's stance is that developing a program to make antiretrovirals widely available to the large numbers needing them would drain scarce funds from his plans to fight poverty in post-apartheid South Africa and leave his country beholden to international monetary and pharmaceutical interests. Yet the loss of a generation in its prime due to this disease would hurt the reconstruction of South Africa as much as anything facing the new society.
A remarkably successful movement, however, has grown up around this tragedy. The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) opposed Mbeki's stone-walling and pressured drug companies to cut the cost of antiretroviral drugs and medications treating opportunistic infections. We meet Zackie Achmat, HIV positive leader of the campaign, who refused to take life-saving drugs until they are available through the public health system to every South African who needs them. TAC's activism forced Pfizer to drastically cut the cost of Diflucan which treats thrush, a common opportunistic infection among people with HIV. TAC has also gone to court and, over government objections, won the right of HIV positive pregnant women to use nevirapine to prevent passing on the disease to their children.
Ordinary South Africans are also unobtrusively volunteering to help those with AIDS. Buyile, a retired nurse, runs a home-based healthcare program in the Kutsong township of Carletonville. She travels more than 3 hours by train each day to reach her patients. There is little she can do without the proper drugs, for patients like Elizabeth who dies during the making of the film. We are also introduced to Mary, the mother of two infected children both of whom have been lucky enough to qualify for antiretroviral trials and are doing better. She worries, however, about what will happen to them if she does not get treatment.
Others are speaking out at great personal cost about their HIV status. In 1998, Gugu Dlamini was stoned to death by her neighbors when she announced that she had tested positive. Nonetheless, Lucky Mazibuko writes a weekly column for the mass circulation Sowetan about life with AIDS. We hear from readers how Lucky's column has opened their eyes to the reality of AIDS. The Zola Support Group provides a forum for people with HIV, especially young women, to discuss their own relationships, sexual practices, and the use of condoms.
State of Denial in essence argues that AIDS may well the greatest threat to South Africa since apartheid and, by extension, to the entire continent since colonialism and the slave trade. Neither profits nor politics can be placed before it. It will require the mobilization of the whole community, including the global community, to deal with this catastrophe. State of Denial is a disturbing yet inspiring tool for involving that community in the struggle against AIDS.
Show more Show less
Strange Fruit
Thomas Sankara: The Upright Man
Walter's War
Source: www.imdb.com
Source: www.imdb.com
Witches in Exile
From Tanzania and Zambia to Ivory Coast and Ghana belief in witchcraft continues to terrorize women: the denunciation, brutal beating, the banishment to an unknown village without family or friends. In Northern Ghana alone there are estimated to be more than 5000 'witches' confined to 'witches villages', part sanc...
From Tanzania and Zambia to Ivory Coast and Ghana belief in witchcraft continues to terrorize women: the denunciation, brutal beating, the banishment to an unknown village without family or friends. In Northern Ghana alone there are estimated to be more than 5000 'witches' confined to 'witches villages', part sanctuaries, part prisons. Witches in Exile is the first film to tell their story and the story of the human rights struggle to find a so...
From Tanzania and Zambia to Ivory Coast and Ghana belief in witchcraft continues to terrorize women: the denunciation, brutal beating, the banishment to an unknown village without family or friends. In Northern Ghana alone there are estimated to be more than 5000 'witches' confined to 'witches villages', part sanctuaries, part prisons. Witches in Exile is the first film to tell their story and the story of the human rights struggle to find a solution to a practice deeply embedded in African tradition and gender economics.
Witches in Exile introduces us to four women who have taken refuge in the Kukuo witches' camp and who represent a cross section of the 'witch' population of Northern Ghana today. It leads us on a step-by-step journey on how a woman becomes stigmatized as a 'witch'. 'Witches' are overwhelmingly older women who are no longer of value for bearing children or doing heavy field work. They are characteristically accused of killing family members or causing crop failures, natural misfortunes to which they must attribute supernatural causes. Accusations of witchcraft tend to increase during periods of social upheaval and development such as at the time of Independence or the present period of economic austerity.
Once accused of witchcraft, women are stoned or beaten and then taken to a traditional priest who is believed to have special powers for detecting witches. After the accused woman drinks a concoction, a chicken is killed and the manner of its death throes determines guilt or innocence. Some of the women themselves even come to believe in their own guilt and admit to spirit possession. A condemned woman must remain in the witches' camp; the village chief provides her with a hut where she tries to scrape out an impoverished living for herself, giving a share to the chief. No watchtowers or fences are necessary; if she returns to her home village she knows she could be killed or beaten again. Much of the local population appears to enthusiastically endorse this cruel practice, especially men; one woman, however, dryly observes, "A witch is anyone you don't like." Originating in pre-Christian, pre-Islamic oral tradition, the belief has passed directly into contemporary culture especially through the medium of popular video movies which spread like wildfire across the country.
In Accra and other modernizing regions of Ghana, as well as among the human rights community, there is considerable embarrassment over the persistence of this deep-seated superstition. (Although the depth of this concern is mitigated somewhat by the fact that the Director for Human Rights for the Northern Region admits he still believes in witchcraft.) Several solutions have been suggested such as closing the camps - even turning them into tourist attractions. But when a parliamentary delegation on human rights visited the camps intent on closing them, they found the women themselves adamantly opposed because they knew they would not be accepted by their families and home villages.
Allison Berg's documentary is exceptional among 'exposés' of African traditional practices, like female genital mutilation, in its sensitivity to the larger belief system which underlies witchcraft. Witches in Exile makes clear that one cannot successfully attack a phenomenon like witches' camps in isolation but must see them as part of a wider set of beliefs designed to exclude women, especially older women, who have out-lived their place in Dagboni society. The film untangles the complex intersection of anthropology, political science, and economics which must be addressed in any strategy for liberating women in Africa.
Show more Show less
