Source: The Associated Press | February 27, 2001
Film Focuses on Africans' Hand in Slavery
By BRAHIMA OUADRAEGO, Associated Press
Source: The Associated Press | February 27, 2001
Film Focuses on Africans' Hand in Slavery
By BRAHIMA OUADRAEGO, Associated Press
Marauders overrunning African villages, torching their huts, capturing their inhabitants for sale. Chained men and women, wild-eyed and desperate, their freedom sold for rum, guns and gold.
The slaves in Ivory Coast director Roger Gnoan M'bala's film "Adanggaman," are African.
But so are the slavers. And that, in Gnoan M'bala's eyes, is what makes his film long overdue.
"There is no taboo in cinema. It's up to us to talk about slavery, open the wounds of what we've always hidden and stop being puerile when we put responsibility on others," Gnoan M'bala said Monday, after the African debut of "Adanggaman" at the all-Africa, biannual Fespaco film festival in Burkina Faso. It has also been shown at film festivals in Venice, Italy and Toronto.
"In our oral tradition, slavery is left out purposefully because Africans are ashamed when we confront slavery. Let's wake up and look at ourselves through our own image," Gnoan M'bala said.
Producers tout "Adanggaman" as the first African film to look at African involvement in the slave trade with the West.
Set in the 17th-century in West Africa's Gulf of Guinea, the film shows the African king Adanggaman selling his subjects to Dutch slave-masters in exchange for spirits and guns.
Gnoan M'bala calls it a "fiction" with "historical facts."
Historians concur with the theme of extensive African involvement in capturing and transporting Africans for sale to European buyers, as well as the film's depiction of the existence of slavery within African tribes.
The film won the jury grand prize at a film festival in Amiens, France, in November.
Shown in Europe and North America, the film stirred controversy. Some black viewers at the Toronto film festival challenged its accuracy; some white viewers at the Venice Film Festival were shocked.
On the faces of the standing-room-only crowd at its premiere in Africa, however, there seemed only sadness.
"It is simply true," said Da Bourdia Leon of Burkina Faso's Ministry of Culture and Art. "We need this kind of film to show our children this part of our history, that it happened among us in our own society."
"Although I feel sad, I think it is good that this kind of thing is being told today," Leon said.
Gnoan M'bala, a veteran filmmaker and winner of the Fespaco festival's 1993 grand prize for "The Name of Christ," filmed much of "Adanggaman" in the wilds of an Ivory Coast park.
Crews talked of having to interrupt filming when the roar of mating hippos became too loud.
Gnoan M'Bala filmed the movie in five African languages, including Gouro, More and Senoufou, producing it with French subtitles. Distributors in six countries have bought the film to show it commercially after the Fespaco film festival, M'Bala said. It wasn't clear when the film might be shown in the United States.
For now, the movie bears the burden of being African films' sole statement on slavery. Gnoan M'Bala hopes there will be many more.
"Look at World War II, which lasted only six years and the number of films on it. For slavery that lasted four centuries we need several more films," he said.