The open-ended question – with the last digit intentionally left out – fills the final screen of Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s most recent film, Le Président (2013).  The question refers to the political tenure of the president of Cameroon, where the film has been banned at all locations, including at L’Institut Français Cameroun (IFC, The French Institute). The IFC plays an important role in providing a venue for film screenings in Cameroon, particularly since the closing of Yaoundé’s movie theatre, Abbia, in 2009. Around the time of the release of Le Président, another Cameroonian filmmaker, Richard Fouofie Djimili, was abducted and tortured for eleven days, allegedly in response to material in his film, 139… The Last Predators (2013, watch the trailer here). Djimili’s fictional film focuses on a 139-year dictatorship in an unnamed African country. According to Times Live, shortly before the filmmaker’s abduction, a friend of Djimili’s received a text message that read, “Tell your friend Richard Fouofie he is digging his own grave. His film is part of a destabilization plot that has already been unmasked. If he wants to play the patriot, he will be decapitated. Victory is near.” Reporters Without Borders has documented other cases of harassment, censoring and imprisoning of Cameroonian artists and journalists. On 6 November 2012, President Paul Biya celebrated 30 years in power and Bekolo has quipped that when Biya was minister in 1962, “Barack Obama was one year old.”  It is in this political context that Bekolo’s film explores a fictional African president’s last days in power.

Bekolo is troubled by and committed to transforming what he has called the “image problem in Africa”: The misrepresentation of African cultures and peoples in international media and film, which continue to present the subcontinent as solely poverty-stricken, HIV/AIDS-ridden, war-riddled, corrupt and failing. Bekolo works to alter this image by addressing the roots of dominant stereotypes. These ‘image problems,’ he argued in a video interview with David Murphy at the Africa In Motion film festival in Scotland in 2012, are founded in ‘reality problems.’ Seen in this light, Le Président is Bekolo’s intervention in the Cameroonian ‘reality problem.’ The film is an invitation to reinvent the present by revisiting the past. It challenges viewers to conceive of a new reality for the country upon the demise of the current president, Paul Biya (1933-), who has been the president since 1982.

In an interview for SlateAfrique, Bekolo explains, “It is the first time that a movie removes a President. Cinema always arrives afterwards, to tell us [about] the Arab Spring for example. Where was cinema before? Cinema must be forward thinking, open new doors and make the revolutions. I do not want to tell people what happened. I want to inspire those who will make it happen.” In this sense, the film is an anticipatory conversation of a coming political moment, one that poses the question: What will come about in the power vacuum of Biya’s eventual absence?

The film is set a few days before the presidential elections, the next of which is scheduled to take place in Cameroon in 2018. When the president mysteriously disappears, TV reporters speculate his absence and political prisoners discuss possibilities for the future. Through a series of intimate conversations including the fictional president’s internal monologues, dreamscapes and quiet life moments, Bekolo explores a president’s awareness of the approaching end of an era. This unadulterated access to the president’s intimate spaces challenges facile representations of the African dictator, namely those representations popularized in western films of a uniformly dangerous, irrational, womanizing, war criminal. So often in western films African presidents are reduced to tropes and are only seen through the gaze of the white hero. The Last King of Scotland, Blood Diamond and Machine Gun Preacher exemplify this tendency. Bekolo’s Le Président is instead an artistic exploration of the inner life of an ageing patriarch, a man who dreams of a rendezvous with his deceased spouse, and speculates upon the violent means of his eventual demise. “Has my chauffeur been hired to assassinate me?” He contemplates as he grapples with the destructive political policies that he has implemented.

What struck me the most about the film, in fact, was Bekolo’s humanizing of the ‘African dictator.’  Cameroon’s president rarely speaks publicly and is seldom seen, other than in the seemingly infinite campaign posters, billboards and fliers on prominent display across the country. With thirty-one years in power, it is little surprise that Jo Wood’ou, the Canal-D reporter in Bekolo’s film (a local news channel that follows the events in the film, based on Cameroon’s TV station, Canal2) comments, “no man votes for the president.” Wood’ou’s comment both naturalizes the president’s lifetime in power and simultaneously hints at the state’s repression of the democratization movement in the 1990s and the history of election rigging. As Wood’ou traces his life stages, he sardonically notes that Cameroon has had the same president throughout each stage.

It is the president’s deceased spouse, Jeanne (most likely inspired by the life of Jeanne-Irène Biya, Paul Biya’s first spouse who died in July 1992), who offers the most genuine and scathing criticism of the president’s lifetime of power. It is before her that he is most shamed. He admits to her, “I don’t know anymore… I got lost along the way.” Indeed, women play central roles in Bekolo’s films, including the protagonist known as ‘Queen of the Hood’ in Quartier Mozart (1992) and the two vampire sex workers, Chouchou and Majolie, of Les Saignantes (2005). In each instance, it is the woman who reveals or fights against the tendency of masculine power to corrupt. Likewise, in Le Président, Jo Wood’ou turns to the women who operate the country’s communications via call boxes (umbrellaed, street-side stands where customers can pay for cigarettes, candies and telephone calls by the minute) for knowledge of the president’s whereabouts after his disappearance. The women who manage the call boxes, Wood’ou declares, are the ‘pulse’ of the country.

Lost before Jeanne, the president contemplates, “I feel like I am advancing towards an ocean or a desert… and I don’t recognize anything.” He gets out of his luxury car in the middle of the dense rainforest and begins to walk. The president returns to his village and seems awed by his surroundings. We see him eating les bâtons de manioc (boiled cassava, rolled into lengths and steamed in banana leaves) beneath an open-air roadside stand. Later, Jeanne laughs at the thought of him eating sandwiches, a food associated with foreignness, particularly the French former colonial power.  Food becomes a symbol for the distance that he has imposed between himself and his village, his people and his country land.

The film begins and ends with footage of benskiners (motorcycle taxi-men, also spelled bend-skin and bendskin) on the crowded roads of Douala, Cameroon’s industrial capital. The striking figure of the young benskiner at the conclusion of the film weaves in and out of traffic with careless ease, stretching, looking backwards and taking his hands off the throttle. This benskiner is striking in his orange-framed sunglasses, signifying the spread of a globalised hip-hop culture where the young people are known colloquially in Cameroon as les yo(s).

The benskiner is a complex symbol of resistance to state power, and adaptation to a lack of road infrastructure and resilience in an economy that would otherwise exclude him. He is a youthful, masculine figure who challenges authority.  Indeed, in Cameroon, the unification of benskiners has created a significant political force in urban and semi-rural areas. This political force has been one reason behind the banning of motorcycles in wealthy and administrative quarters such as Bastos in Yaoundé. The government has repeatedly tried to crack down on benskiners in Douala with sanctions and imposed tax payments but benskiners are notorious for their disrespect of such sanctions and are quick to mobilize collectively. By allocating such a prominent space for the benskiner in the film, Bekolo draws upon this powerful resistance force as an illustration of the fracturing of authoritarian power on-the-ground.

Yet, while the figure of the benskiner features so prominently, he is simultaneously silenced in his anonymity throughout the film. This silencing lends itself to alternate (and less empowering) interpretations of the Bekolo’s focus on the benskiner. Is he meant to illustrate the fatality of young people (particularly young men) in Cameroon, as he speeds in and out of vehicles with no apparent care for his own life? Is the beginning scene, which captures the traffic of a main thoroughfare, meant to show the chaos or misdirection of life and politics in the post-colony? I cannot help but wonder what the benskiner would have said in response to the film’s final question, “When will it end? 1982-201?” had he been asked.

A glimpse of the concerns of the youth comes through during the interaction between a well-known Cameroonian rap, hip-hop artist, Valsero (a.k.a. Le Général) and the film’s president. In the conversation, Valsero addresses the perpetual joblessness of Cameroon’s so-called ‘lost generation’ – those born in the 1980s onwards, as the country’s economy, politics and educational system suffered from the IMF and World Bank-imposed structural adjustment programs. The resulting economic stagnation and withdrawal of the Cameroonian state produced the context in which benskiners flourish. Valsero’s well-known songs Lettre au Président and Ce Pays Tue Les Jeunes voice the frustrations with corrupt political powers and an aging political body that marginalizes the youth, many of the same issues that are central to their conversation in the film. “I am young and I am strong and I am not dead,” Valsero sings at one moment in the film, pointing upward toward the future, toward the ancestors and toward a moment that might harbinger a recognition of the youth’s powerful potential; this in a country where forty per cent of the population is under fourteen years old (U.N Statistics Division, Country Profile for Cameroon 2011). Yet the (re)turn to Valsero – a man in his mid-thirties – as a voice for the youth is itself a powerful reflection of the state of politics in Cameroon, where even alternative voices (I am thinking for example of the long-time opposition leader Ni John Fru Ndi) are hesitant to cede power to younger generations.

Bekolo’s portrayal of the president is forgiving, complex, comprehensive and hopeful. The film provides an important counter narrative to the forecasts of potential political conflict and even genocide for Cameroon’s near future. It is the film’s honesty and lack of condemnation that makes its banning so unfortunate, illustrating the disparities between Cameroon’s real life political climate and the imagined space of the film. We have a sense that the president of the film, so reflective near the end of his political life, might have been grateful for the humanizing depiction offered by Bekolo in Le Président.

Note:  Le Président is banned in Cameroon but can be streamed from BuniTV. Watch the trailer here. 

The post Review of Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s “Le Président” appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Internationally famous for her wide and varied oeuvre, Nobel Laureate in Literature Doris Lessing’s early work is strongly autobiographical. The Grass is Singing is her first novel. Lessing chose the title from the fifth section of T.S. Eliot’s famous poem The Waste Land: which is entitled,  “What the thunder said”:

• If there were rock
• And also water
• And water
• A spring
• A pool among the rock
• If there were the sound of water only
• Not the cicada
• And dry grass singing…

Water in Africa is always a sign of hope, of fertility. Here the dry grass and the singing cicada hint at the weaknesses in the colonial system, which Raeburn’s film explores with restrained subtlety.

Lessing’s novel reflects much of the experiences of her childhood growing up on an isolated farm in Mashonaland, in the former Rhodesia, where her English parents had settled after her father was wounded during World War I. From the outset Lessing’s fiction is critical of the society in which she grew up, the arid, self-satisfied colonial culture which, even as a young woman, she found suffocating. She was deeply questioning too of the dispossession of Africans. Rhodesia had been named after Cecil Rhodes, a mining magnate and politician who, in 1889 had formed the British South Africa Company and had fought and wheedled his way into the lands of the Mashona and the Matabele.Lessing’s novel was understandably attractive to the film director and writer Michael Raeburn who has built his career analysing the social and economic upheavals of post-colonial Africa, particularly of Zimbabwe where he has not always been welcomed. Raeburn shot The Grass is Singing in Zambia, in the National Park where the immense, open landscape, across which the eye is immediately drawn towards the distant mountains, is typical of much of southern Africa. This is not the Hollywood image of the luxury safari, but the Rhodesia of the period shortly after the Second World War when some white farmers were making fortunes in maize and tobacco amid the murmurings against colonial rule blown by winds of change that, at the time, were almost as silent as the surrounding bush.

In the opening frames of the film, the camera focuses on what are obviously African artefacts swinging from a tree in the wind, among them the fetish of a white doll pierced by an assegai (spear). This is a dark film in every sense, a film in which the characters do not speak a great deal and the viewer is always aware of the presence of Africa in the changing seasons: the rain, the wind, and the shifting clouds which form a backdrop to the group of black men at work on the farm. Silence and, at times, the evocative music of Lasse Danberg, Björn Isfällt and Themba Tana, play an important part in creating mood and tension. Raeburn has taken much of what sparse dialogue there is straight from Lessing’s novel. The language of white people in the period, casual remarks about the laziness of kaffirs, comments on the untrustworthiness of the “educated native” and the general stupidity of “blacks” will shock contemporary audiences.

The depressing brick farmhouse where the central drama unfolds is in strong contrast to the brief scenes of family life in the adjoining compound, where the labourers and their families live. The visual impact of this film is strong, from the vivid sequence showing workers fighting a veld fire, a common hazard in Africa, which threatens the crops and the cattle, to the casual shots of buck drifting silently through the bush, oblivious of what might seem to them to be the lunatic activities of humans.

The story line is very simple. Mary Turner (Karen Black), a white farmer’s wife, has been murdered. Nobody seems to know any details and the film moves in flashback to an account of Mary’s life as a vivacious but sexually cold secretary working in a nearby town. One day she overhears friends gossiping about her. They remark that she has reached her thirties and shows no sign of marrying because, someone adds, she “is not like that”. These comments throw Mary into a state of confused introspection so rapidly that the viewer finds her reactions scarcely credible. Mary marries a diffident young farmer, Dick Turner (John Thaw) who has been struggling for some years to turn a profit from his thousand acres of land mortgaged to the government. Dick is honest with Mary. He explains his relative poverty and the primitive conditions in which he lives. However the reality is a shock to his wife who is used to the normal comforts of town life. She finds that his three-roomed house with its corrugated iron roof has no ceilings, so that it turns into an oven in the summer. The curtains are made of grain sacks and there is no mosquito netting on the windows. From her small savings she buys material, makes curtains, and does her best to improve her home. Later she whitewashes the walls herself, an activity almost unthinkable for a white Rhodesian woman.

Mary is afraid of Africans. She thinks of them as savages who stink like animals. From the outset, Mary’s behaviour to one house servant after another is cold, at times even cruel and abusive. She stubbornly refuses to listen to Dick’s attempts to broaden her understanding and change her behaviour. One by one, she either dismisses the men or they ask to leave. Her attitude does not begin to change until her husband, in despair at the constant rows, introduces his best worker, Moses (John Kani) into the household, to be trained as a domestic servant.

John Kani is a celebrated South African actor, playwright and dramatist who has won many awards and who, from his collaboration with Athol Fugard in Sizwe Banzi is Dead (1972) and The Island (1973) onwards, did much for protest theatre during the apartheid years. His performance as Moses is moving and thought-provoking.

Karen Black’s notable career in films from her early success in Easy Rider (1969) and during the succeeding decade when she became almost a cult figure, particularly for her representation of women on the edge of sanity, made her an excellent choice for this role. The entire drama is dependent upon the slow degeneration of this obstinate woman whose irrational anger at black people is part of her cultural inheritance rather than innate viciousness. Mary is driven by fear; a fear fanned by the white colonizer’s horror of miscegenation, a horror expressed by Charlie when he notices the signs of intimacy between Moses and Mary in the scene where he stays for supper.

However, Mary’s first encounter with Moses had been far more amicable. When Dick collapses with a severe bout of malaria, Mary is forced to go down to the lands (fields) to supervise the workers who have taken the opportunity to enjoy some well-earned rest. At first Mary cannot bear the sight of the men whom she treats with the utmost contempt, scarcely able to recognize them as human beings with normal human needs. Karen Black creates a woman in whom fear of Africans paradoxically begins to feed a sense of power in her new role as overseer. Moses, who is a powerfully built man, catches Mary’s attention for the first time when he stops working and helps himself to a mug of water. When she orders him back to work, Moses replies casually that he needs a drink. Mary finds his attitude so provocative that, almost without realizing what she is doing, she lifts the sjambok she carries and slashes him across the face. For a moment Mary fears the man will attack her but, surprisingly, he restrains himself and returns to work. Significantly, Mary does not tell Dick about this incident, an incident which reverberates even more powerfully in the novel than it does in the film where the sjambok looks more like a thin stick than the destructive weapon it is.

Karen Black’s depiction of Mary’s gradual metamorphosis into a deranged woman who meets a tragic end is thoroughly convincing. Apathy creeps over her. She scatters grain among the hens, apparently unaware that they are dying. It becomes difficult to sympathize with this woman because the dignified bearing and restrained responses of John Kani’s Moses to Mary’s vindictive outbursts demand respect.  Black’s Mary, though convincing in her sad decline, is not perhaps as easily understandable as the Mary of the novel where the reader is given a detailed account of her unhappy childhood, an account which does much to explain, for instance, her inability to respond sexually to her husband, a reluctance which is, however, made clear in the film.

The core of the plot is the total reversal of power acted out between the African house servant and the white woman. It is the breakdown of the mistress/servant relationship with its manifold invisible boundaries and the slow development of a human interchange between Moses and Mary. When Dick collapses with another bout of malaria, Moses insists on nursing him so that the ill and exhausted Mary gets some sleep. When Mary stops ordering meals, Moses brings food on a tray and persuades her to eat. His attitude to the sick woman is almost paternal; he even tucks her up at night. Mary drifts zombie-like through the house shadowing Moses on whom she becomes totally dependent. He even combs her tangled hair and helps her to dress.

In the meantime Dick, forced by circumstances to sell his farm to Muller in an arrangement which allows him to stay on as farm manager, is heading for a total breakdown. John Thaw’s creation of Dick as a thoroughly decent, somewhat idealistic man lacking the ruthlessness, or the strength, to manage either his personal life or his land, is a foretaste of Thaw’s later successful career on stage and screen, perhaps most memorably as Inspector Morse in the British television series which established him as a National Treasure.

Eventually, Tony Marston (John Moulder Brown), a young Englishman new to the Colony, arrives to manage the farm so that Dick, now recovered, can take his sick wife on holiday. Unnerved by glimpses of intimacy between Mary and her house servant, Tony confronts the couple. The distraught Mary, who has been clinging to Moses, suddenly flings herself into the arms of the young white man, almost a complete stranger to her. Tony dismisses Moses on the spot. Later on, Moses stabs Mary, who practically offers herself up to his knife, on the veranda.

Significantly, Raeburn then departs from Lessing’s text, inserting a brief exchange between Moses and a black woman, presumably his wife, in their own language, which is not subtitled. We then see Moses engaged in a fleeting encounter with a witchdoctor, also not subtitled. The film then shows the tree with its ominous speared white doll fetish. The final shot is of the impassive face of the handcuffed Moses walking calmly behind Muller’s farm truck into which Mary’s body has been loaded.

Is this a simple revenge tragedy, payback for his slashed face and the numerous indignities he has suffered? I think not. Raeburn’s fetishes swinging from a tree, which frame the entire film, might be taken to imply that Africa will always be primitive and dangerous. Such an interpretation would make nonsense of Lessing’s novel, and of Raeburn’s film. Instead, this deliberate flashback to these ominous African artefacts could be thought to emphasize the latent power of Africa and its people, despite colonial subjugation. Moses kills as a matter of pride because the white woman has refused in the end to acknowledge him as a fellow human being.

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