africa

Bamako: A Different take on Africa

By John Burl Smith

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Movies are powerful propaganda tools.  They create visual images and psychological stereotypes that take on a life of their own.  Africa and Africans are classic examples.  Through "Tarzan" and other fictional portrayals, the world was sold a false image of the "dark continent" that lingers on today.  That image has become the filter through which the world views Africa, consequently justifying its exploitation by Eurocentric socioeconomic and political policies.

 

With Tarzan still playing in their heads, film-makers exploit the agony of Africa in high-profile documentaries and fictional features, like God Grew Tired of Us, Blood Diamond, Catch a Fire and The Constant Gardener.  These films feed into the image of a continent where salvages run amok, everybody and everything is corrupt, all leaders are gangster warlords, and the hopeless outcome of trying to help such wretched souls.

 

Rising above propagandizing, Abderrahmane Sissako, a Malian movie director, trained in Russia, has sought to use subtlety to tell Africa's story through his latest movie Bamako.  Looking at the continent, like a cop on the beat, he goes after the big bosses, rather than the neighborhood thugs that work for them.   Sissako points the guilty finger at Washington, London, Paris, Brussels and institutions like the World Bank and IMF, the culprits behind Africa and her people's misery. 

 

Reducing the international pea and shell game down to the hustle it is, Sissako returns to  the house of his late father in Bamako, the capital of Mali, where he puts the World Bank on trial for its role in the rape of Africa.  Now occupied by a young singer named Melé (Aïssa Maïga); her husband, Chaka (Tiécoura Traoré); and their young daughter, the house serves as a backdrop for a courtroom drama.  A table becomes the bar of justice, set in a picturesque courtyard surrounded by the day to day procession of life.   Unfolding over several days, the courtyard represents the heart and soul of Africa, ravaged and embattled after decades of World Bank policies, which are sucking the continent dry with privatization and the rape of its natural resources, while burying many African nations under mountains of debt. 

 

Bamako's central question is – has the ostensible good intentions of the West, in particular the World Bank and similar institutions, contributed to the impoverishment and demoralization of the continent?  Sissako uses real judges, lawyers, and activists plus ordinary people as participants in the mock hearing where Africa -- the Plaintiff -- is presented like a young innocent girl assaulted by the World Bank -- a proxy for the Western world.  The prosecution's premise is that as a result of the bank's actions -- 50 million African children will die in the next five years; 3 million Africans will die of malaria in the next 12 months; and Africa's debt --which stood at $220 billion in 2003 -- has brought the continent to her knees.

 

One eloquent witness after another testifies that Africa's countries are poorer than they were 20 years ago, with life expectancy declining, infant mortality rising and literacy rates dropping.  Ordinary Africans through their patient, angry speeches lament the cruel consequences of debt servicing and privatization, emigration, loss of control over infrastructure and natural resources, rampant political corruption and a precipitously declining standard of living.  Sissako  declared, "If we take into account the total capital flow and wealth transfer, African countries have more than repaid their debts to rich countries." 

 

Bamako is a trumpeting wake-up call for the world to recognize that the continent's socioeconomic and political problems are inextricably linked to its colonial past and the debt heaped upon it by the West.  Sissako uses this project as a  delicate provocation to move the discussion of Africa away from terms dictated by Washington, London, Paris and Brussels to needs voiced by Africans, not the wealthy African elite, which Sissako believes through complicity with the World Bank, bears responsibility for their nations' ills.

 

The courtyard scene, as life goes on around it, dramatizes the fact that these are not Hollywood caricatures.  Their daily existence remains largely in the background as witnesses pour into this space to give evidence on behalf of ‘Africa,' while everyday life goes on around the edges. People work, read, chat or doze.  Women dye fabric and nurse babies; a bedridden young man suffers without access to medical care; a wedding procession passes through, a counterpoint to Melé and her despairing, unemployed husband Chaka's disintegrating marriage.  While these people's destinies are linked to the themes being argued in the trial, these real live characters serve to remind viewers that this chasm of inequality was created by the neo-colonial policies of the World Bank, similar institutions and the governments that support them.

 

Bamako is a must see by anyone desiring to make sense of what they read and view about Africa

 

 

Abderrahmane Sissako: In His Words

 

If I try to explain the decision I made one day to become a filmmaker, I must go back to that period in my life where I felt at a loss, having gone to Nouakchott to be with my mother. I had lost my bearings. Bambara — my language gone; no more Malian childhood friends. So, I became more observant, more aware of what surrounded me; I developed a keener sense of the importance of gestures and body language. And I wanted to tell that story. I am aware that one can be totally destitute, and yet it is in that state of destitution that one finds human dignity -- fundamental values........ 

 

Someone leaves because someone else has to stay. The one who leaves is not better or worse than those he leaves behind. So, that the one who leaves comes back to share what he has found. I come back and help my younger brothers and sisters, as my elder brothers have helped me. And that always brings me back to my roots and basic education.

 

When I go to Europe, I learn things that are enriching, that add to my life, but I never forget where I come from. I must not sever those links because I only exist through them. I must stay close to what I am and what I know best. So, that is why I seek to do a cinema where narration is not placid. Cinema for me is not a show, but a quest. I look for what I have in me. Something hidden gets uncovered with my characters.

 

So, my story is also the story of many other people. A feeling which is very hard to express is the sense of rejection, it is beyond racism — this disregard for other people. It's a very strong and typical trait of Western culture.  I am often asked whether Russians are really racist. Europeans prefer to think that it is others who are the racists. But my point was not to talk about racism, it was more about rejection, about the disregard for others that paradoxically one finds in societies where you also find the most beautiful books, the most beautiful paintings, the best music, societies who have the monopoly over everything that is valued today. And yet this does not create universality. Those who are profoundly universal are from societies where knowledge is not a matter of quantifying data, where knowledge belongs with the oral tradition, with things immaterial and imperceptible. This open-mindedness was paradoxically given to me by my culture and not by those cultures  which despised me precisely for my tolerance.