Memory, History and Culture in Ouagadougou

Burkina Faso Mon 30-03-2009

Memory, History and Culture in Ouagadougou
By Judy Kibinge

The mere sound of the name of Burkina Faso’s capital is enough to conjure up all kinds of weird and wonderful images, whether you hear it in Nairobi, Lusaka or New York… This spectacularly-named city, in the heart of Burkina Faso or Country of Upright Men, is many things.

To begin with, it is as hot as hell, 40 degrees in February, but should you mention this to Burkinabes, they look at you and laugh – the real heat kicks in, they say, in March: this is cool. The streets are dust-choked, but more so the skies. During this season, the Harmattan wind crosses the desert filling the high skies with a perpetually grayish-blue haze, and you stare at the milky white sun with bare eyes wide open.

On the streets, everyone from businessmen to Tuaregs complete with indigo blue robes. Hawkers fill the streets persistently offering their wares – music, phone cards, jewellery and art everywhere. Impossible not to marvel at are the scooters and bikes: there are thousands.

The most elegantly dressed women you could ever hope to see sit upon them in elaborately tailored west African outfits or simple and chic western daywear, some with two or more children perched on behind them, and zip across the city like beautiful earthbound bees.Occasionally, the bikes crash into each other.

Strangely, there are no helmets worn by anyone, but in this gentle and courteous city, which is safer than most in the world, this does not seem to worry anyone. But more than all these things that the city is known for, Ouagadougou amply deserves its reputation as the undisputed film capital of Africa. The country is possessed, simply possessed, by the silver screen in the month of February every two years.

Arguably the most important festival in the world for African film, it is here that so many professional networks, friendships and deals are made, here that the world comes to see what new things to expect from the continent’s filmmakers and which established and emerging filmmakers might have something interesting to say.

FESPACO was created in 1969 and, though just five countries participated initially, it grew rapidly. At the heart of its expansion was a refreshing idealism that film could inform a new post-colonial identity for Burkina. Not only was it born of a stand-off shortly after independence when French distributors attempted to raise the prices, and the government nationalized the industry in response: what makes it such an inspiration is that forty years on, they have managed to keep the flames burning.

After a period of closure, the National Film School (which produced great filmmakers like Gaston Kabore, this year’s main judge) is open again. The government assists filmmakers with film cameras and crew. FESPACO became a government institution in 1972, and here, after 40 years after its inception, was I, with my film Killer Necklace in competition.

FESPACO is a conundrum. On the one hand, this poor country puts on an event of pomp and flair that far more prosperous nations would not even dare compete with. But this is marred by the behind-the-scenes chaos that has been known to drive many a filmmaker to tears.

When I was first invited in 2003, the organizer, for reasons still beyond me, had asked me to pay for my flight to Accra, where I would find a ticket to Ouaga waiting for me. I did so, only to find no such readymade passage on my arrival. Two days and a bus ride across Ghana, a taxi to the border from a desert town, and a minibus ride through Burkina Faso, I arrived at the hotel they had booked me into only to be told it was full. I followed my predecessors’ suit, bursting into tears.

And here I was, six years on, having once again bought my own ticket after receiving an invalid one from the organizers, and now they were refusing to pay for it. I was not alone – throngs of filmmakers from across Europe, America and Africa crowded the FESPACO building daily, banging on closed doors, manned by guards as the occupants shouted “fermez la porte!’ being unused to angry crowds, and with a system so beaurocratized by their French history, they knew no other way to cope.

So by the time the festival opened, two exhausted days of war with officials later, I had almost forgotten why I was here. Until the festivities began.All the indignation and anger I felt simply melted away, and a wave of willful forgetfulness washed over me, as I sat in the nearly three quarters full National 4th August Stadium.

I was like a wife who had been hammered black and blue by her abusive husband and then turned to gaze at him with pure adulation moments later. No other festival in the world holds its opening and closing ceremony in a football stadium with a 35,000 person capacity. No other festival puts on a show the way Burkina Faso does.

There are 10 foot tall marionettes that dance, sway and shake their booties. There is a haunting orchestra of wooden-xylaphonists. A troop of muscled men, who race onto the track pulling barrels on wheels resembling stallions pulling race chariots, do a dazzling dance part ballet, part traditional and part jazz, banging on the drums like horse hooves on the ground. I look around, and most like me are so enthralled by the spectacle they can hardly speak.

And then, after an hour, the fireworks begin. They go on and on and on. By my estimation there is a good 20,000 to 23,000 Burkinabes in the stadium, and most of them get on their feet and dance as the closing song, which feels like a national anthem, with a chorus about Burkina Faso, plays. It’s like nothing I have ever seen. Well, the only thing that has ever resembled it was the last opening ceremony, here in this stadium in 2003…

The city bends over backwards for the festival. Throughout the ten days, the whole city is on alert. Getting my official pass, I realized I needed a photograph. I asked a policeman at the gates of the FESPACO offices, and to my surprise, he ordered a subordinate officer to take me into the city on the back of his motorbike, wait for me and bring me back! “For yur securitee,” he said in a heavy French accent.

I read in a festival magazine later that 1,000 plain clothes policemen had been dispensed amongst the public to ensure safety of festivalgoers from the growing number of pickpockets over the last few years. Ouagadougou is more than a Film Festival city.

It lives for its festivals, with an arts and crafts festival, SIAO, on alternate years with FESPACO, a huge hip hop festival in the same year as FESPACO, a massive masks festival and another for puppets. It is a place that all African artists can go to have their belief in the future of art – and Africa – renewed.

But, realistically, Burkina Faso’s contribution to cinema is shrinking. This year, of the 18 feature films in competition, only 2 are from Burkina Faso, one of which – despite winning the Audience Award – is not very well shot and feels more like a Nigerian Nollywood film than a competitor for the Yenengen.

There are, I believe, 11 cinemas in Ouagadougou. That is quite a fair number for such a small town but once there were a whopping great 55! The Neerwaya, perhaps the furthest from the city center, is the largest, followed by tCineBUrkina with its cozy brick-paved bar, and then nightspot open air Oubri, where festivalgoers are able to watch films till midnight under the dust-obscured stars…

Everywhere you go, you meet ordinary Burkinabes who love cinema, and should you be able to grapple with the complication of trying to break Anglophone-Francophone communication barriers, you soon discover a brotherhood that you are part of, a love of African film unrivalled in the world.

Some other African countries are very understanding of the relevance and importance of film and this was very much reflected in their presence. The South African Minister of Culture was present with a large and rather convoy of the country’s filmmakers, broadcasters and more who took the brazen opportunity to push rudely past queues shouting “Let the Minister through!” as they all tumbled in with him.

SABC sponsored the opening dinner, and many of the South African films like Michael Raeburn’s dark and disturbing film Triomph (about poor white Afrikaaner families in the last days of Apartheid) and Jerusalem (Rufth Zimmerman’s masterpiece about a township boy’s rise to be the godfather of crime in Johannesburg) played to a fully packed theatres, thanks in part to great institutional support at the festival for individual South African filmmakers.

North Africa heavily supports its filmmakers by building on a strong and vibrant local industry and has been able to make their countries one of the most profitable film destinations in the world. Khaled Binaisa, who sat on the Africalia Jury, charmed the crowd at the closing ceremony with the youthful, joyful exuberance he showed when he bounded down the stairs to collect his prize for Sektou (They are Silent) as the Festival’s best short film.

He jumped up and down on the stage with an unfettered joy that had the whole crowd clapping. Talking to him later, he told me that once he won, the Minister of Culture in Algeria had extended his stay for a night and facilitated a celebration for the Algerian winners. It is no wonder that with this kind of attitude, of all the films in competition, over half were from north Africa and five from Morocco alone.

At our last night in Ouagadougou, I sat with a table of new and old friends from all over the continent in a restaurant called L’eau vive or Water of Life. Our money changer, Ousmane, whom I had met walking down the street earlier in the day, had brought his pretty wife. Appie had brought a Burkinabe filmmaker recently returned from New York whom she had met just an hour before at SHowniz, a sprawling pavement bar on Avenue Kwame Nkrumah.

The nuns, who run this particular mission, served us bottles of beer and glasses of cold wine with our meals, clearing ashtrays and laying down plates heaped with avocado salads, duck and chicken in a calm and smiling way. They had all arrived, I discovered, speaking different languages and learned French to communicate with each other. Then, at a quarter to ten, as they did every evening, they strategically positioned themselves around the courtyard and sang two versions of Ave Maria in sweet high voices, as diners awash with peace and wine and nostalgia nearly fell over silent in the moment.

Four nuns from my home country Kenya – Christine, Mary, Valencia, and the cruelly named Conceptor - described why, although they were homesick, they thought Ouagadougou was so wonderful. “Here,” they said, “people are very friendly. It’s very safe. People don’t steal from you or each other. Murder and violence are very rare. You can leave your things outside, or leave the door open and nothing can happen. No one will take from here what is not theirs. It’s a good city.”

I felt guilty leaving them with a copy of my film Killer Necklace, which deceptively parades itself as a love story but is really the typical Nairobi tale of why a nice young man with prospects is forced by a tough city of unscrupulous citizens to become a thief. I hoped they would watch it and do their nightly Ave Marias not just for Kenya but for a continent so rapidly forgetting the beauty of its own arts, choosing commercialism and capital over craft, beauty and culture every single time.

This can be used, like Burkina did four decades ago, to forge a new pot-colonial identity. Africa is in transition. But we are not sure where we are transiting to.

In Ouagadougou, despite the dust, despite the chaos of the organization of the festival, there is a sense that in merely naming themselves The Country of Upright Men, they began to believe it and still do, much in the same way that a belief in Nairoberry has turned Nairobi, my home city into just that - an increasingly violent, callous, unfriendly metropolis. So-called more-developed countries like my own present merely an illusion of progress through our copy-cat skyscrapers, cinema chains selling popcorn and hotdogs (instead of, say, beer and peanuts), our traffic jams and our soap operas.

In contrast, you get the feeling that here, in Ouagadougou, this city of gardens and 10 foot tall puppets, and endless greetings with strangers, is a people that believes in itself. That despite its dust-filled streets, endless encounters with poverty, there is more here. Something more authentic, more developed. And cinema is, I think, helping them look in the mirror with frequency and craft themselves into what they hoped they would become so long ago when Upper Volta was renamed The Country of Upright Men.

POSTSCRIPT
The festival was opened by and closed by President Blaise Compaoré, who considers films and filmmakers important enough to escort the overall winner of the event to greet the judges. This year it was Hail Gerima’s sister and co-producer of the absent filmmaker’s winning film who was congratulated by the jury as the President Compaoré patiently stood at a respectful distance to escort her back to her seat. Watching an African filmmaker honored like this in Africa and knowing that this tradition had been going strong for 40 years was humbling and inspiring.

Gaston Kabore, the president of the Feature Film Jury, said that Teza had won because it was "a masterpiece at all levels of creativity". According to Kaboré, Teza simultaneously addressed "times gone by, moments etched in memory, history and the culture of the continent," while also showing "how Africans can master their present and their future and leave behind the trauma and dilemmas they have experienced.

"It is my hope that events like FESPACO are achieving what Teza did – addressing times gone by - memory, history and culture - whilst also showing us how to master our present and futures leaving past traumas behind.

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