Cinemism

Profile: Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda

Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda’s oeuvre suggests a marriage between the razor-sharp, political allegory of Ousmane Sembène and the surreal, lyrical poetry of Djibril Diop Mambety. Bakupa-Kanyinda’s native Democratic Republic of Congo is a ways from the home of these Senegalese masters, but ideas have no nation.

Sembène began his career in the late 1950’s as a writer fictionalizing the plights of the common worker. This preoccupation carried over into his film work, which also grew to encompass the effects of colonialism on issues of wealth disparity, the subjugation of women, and the disappearance of traditional values. His films influenced the generation of Francophone filmmakers to follow and led the way for international recognition. Mambety came to prominence in the 70’s when African films were finally being seen in festivals around the world and European co-productions became de rigueur to ensure timely distribution. Mambety shattered visual boundaries, in direct opposition to the social realist, didactic style which had dominated African cinema under Sembène. Mambety’s trance-like images reinterpreted the modus operandi for African film, and many of his innovations are employed by modern African and European filmmakers today. Bakupa-Kanyinda is a descendent of these two lineages. His obsessions speak to the post-colonial moment and the dictators who’ve been allowed to hijack the spirit of independence which buoyed Africa in the 60’s. However, his message is delivered with non-linear storytelling, trenchant metaphors, and dissonant editing.

Narrative structure, pace, and access modulate the spectator’s identification with the protagonists and subjects Bakupa-Kanyinda explores. In the documentary Thomas Sankara (1991) we are given insight into the Burkinabé folk hero through photographs, family recollections, and his own words in video and audio footage. In the short documentary Ten Thousand Years of Cinema (1991), we see and hear directors Djibril Diop Mambety, Moussa Absa Sene, Idrissa Ouedraogo, and Mansour Sora Wade, amongst others, talk about their relationship to film. Afro@Digital (2003) tackles the man/machine divide and probes the future of technology in Africa. In Bakupa–Kanyinda’s fiction films, including The Draughtsmen’s Clash (1996) and Juju Factory (2006), the camera is turned into a translation device—the characters and story are a condensation of the director’s ideology.

In his first documentary, Ten Thousand Years of Cinema, Bakupa–Kanyinda uses a mixture of techniques to suggest psychological intensity in the filmmakers’ words and to foreground the artistic medium they are talking about. The documentary was filmed during the biannual FESPACO Film Festival in Ouagadougou. The narrative begins with the Baobab tree, which becomes an inveterate theme in Bakupa–Kanyinda’s later work. The trees are believed to live for thousands of years and show up often in African folklore and history. Over the opening images, on the soundtrack, we hear the words of Djibril Diop Mambety, an elder statesman at this point in his life. Mambety’s words serve as bookends for the images. He confidently refers to the “ten thousand years of cinema,” subverting our notions of film history.

I have a contract for ten thousand years…
That’s right, ten thousand years with the cinema
It’s in these ten thousand years that the next stage [the sequel] will come into being [will film itself]
From now until the end, there will be lunar eclipses, solar eclipses, there will be hurricanes, there will be peace
Beauty too ¹

This time reference is very ambiguous. Has the ten thousand years already past or is Mambety referring to the future of the medium? Is he connecting the history of oral storytellers in Africa to the new mechanical apparatus or is this a prophesy?

Bakupa-Kanyinda’s strong Pan-African sentiment is revealed through his use of an ethnically diverse set of artists. The filmmakers are often introduced with stills that then morph into moving images, with close-ups of hands, eyes, and mouths crowding the mise-en-scéne. There are also frequent shifts in color, from normal to yellow-tinted, to washed-out. Superimpositions and double exposures are also conscripted for cinematic effect. Bakupa-Kanyinda is exploiting the power of the medium itself to abstract and anatomize his subjects. This film is self-reflexive—we become hyper-aware of its rhythms, moods, and perspective as though it were a living entity. When the Baobab returns to conclude the journey we innately understand its relation to this euphoric medium.

Thomas Sankara opens with a zoom into a map of Africa orienting the viewer with the schizophrenic locale of the documentary about to unfold—Upper Volta. A voice-over relates a fable-like tale of a powerful Baobab tree which sits at the “foot of what remains of a country of dignified, free men…” The map is then transformed into one of Burkina Faso. We are aligned with a very particular political struggle in this seemingly simple act. The power of naming is inherently bound up with the move from colonialism to independence in Africa. The connotations of strength associated with the tree align Sankara to the freedom movement. We hear Sankara’s voice as photographs of him begin to populate the frame in succession. He quotes the oft-used maxim, “I think there are three ways of being: ‘As perceived by others. As you perceive yourself. And the truth which lies between these two views.’” The raison d’etre of the film is to explore these various inroads to the Sankara myth through interviews with family and friends, film/video footage, writings, and photographs. The spectator’s intellectual investment with this material is crucial in Bakupa-Kanyinda’s recreation of the man.

We are introduced to Sankara’s parents, Joseph and Marguerite, as though they were mortal simulacra of the Greek gods Cronus and Rhea. The laudatory camera lingers on their serene poses and weathered faces. However, as we witnessed in his prior documentary, Bakupa-Kanyinda often divests the person on screen of their voice, foregrounding the lines on the face. He utilizes the interview as voice-over narration for more photographs or as floating signifier. We also hear people’s voices before we are introduced to them or listen to un-synced interviews. These techniques force the viewer to pay attention, for nothing on screen is predictable.

In this solemn biography the fastidious editing operates on the level of distantiation. The complicated use of narration retards our association with any individual in the film besides Sankara. Sankara is the only person in the documentary allowed an unhindered connection to the audience— he is the only one not dissected by the camera. Fragmented close-ups of eyes, mouths, and ears dominate the frame otherwise. But we are allowed to see Sankara in his entirety, as though he is the amalgamation of all those disparate features. The remembrances of family and friends function in a syncretic manner to re-animate the hero.

There is a striking moment when Bakupa-Kanyinda slowly zooms out from a painting of Thomas, and then pans over photos of Che Guevara and Kwame Nkrumah, clearly aligning these three revolutionaries who suffered for their ideals. He replicates this effect again later with a tribute poster containing photos of Sankara next to Maurice Bishop and Samora Machel. The director also explicitly contrasts Sankara to a leader like Mobutu Sese Seko, from his homeland of DR Congo, who enriched himself while in office. There is a very specific moral hierarchy operating just beneath the images. No one in the film has anything untoward to say about Sankara. His drive to vaccinate children, provide meals for the poor, reverse gender discrimination, build infrastructure, and eradicate illiteracy are all lionized. Through fortitude and charisma, Sankara was able to invalidate the colonial mind-set and foster independence not just on paper, but in structures and in spirits. Multiple images of the Baobab tree superimposed over Sankara’s grave end the film. His legacy will continue to live on like the roots of that mighty tree. His life still provides a bulwark against Afro-pessimism.

Afro@Digital was produced several years after the earlier documentaries. This is most evident in Bakupa-Kanyinda’s more relaxed narration and liberated visual style. The first shot is of a barcode, a pure representation of the digital age as it relates to commodity. This barcode will reappear over and over again as an almost ghostly presence. Following, there is a voice-over by the director introducing the premise—to discover new technologies “on a continent where people sleep and wake up to the terrorism of poverty…” This immediately aligns the documentary to an American ideology, and by extension the Western world’s obsession with terrorism. This preoccupation flourishes in stark neglect of other global problems—diminishing natural resources being of high order. There are several well developed threads in the narrative which present a complicated treatise on the purpose and value of technology in Africa and by Africans abroad. The most salient critiques come from fellow filmmakers including Georges Kamanayo, John Akomfrah, and Ola Balogun. They are all introduced to us early in the film and serve as our de facto guides through varied interpolations of the modern African aesthetic.

Ola Balogun, in particular, questions the uses of technology in a chronically underdeveloped part of the world. He asks, “…what kind of technology is best suited to us?” Balogun speaks of two African societies: the elite and the poverty-stricken. The elite are much more technologically savvy in terms of the internet, travel abroad, digital television, and other modern contrivances. Conversely, the poor live in remote villages with no electricity or running water, much less all the digital peccadilloes. How can the internet, cell phones, and computer software help this Africa advance? What does Africa have to say to the rest of the world? The director offers one answer when he intersperses images of websites about Patrice Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah and spends considerable screen time documenting his visit to Robben Island, Nelson Mandela’s infamous prison during apartheid. As we saw in Ten Thousand Years of Cinema and Thomas Sankara, Bakupa-Kanyinda is very much a Pan-Africanist. Even though he is from the Democratic Republic of Congo, it is obvious through his visual choices that he wants to familiarize the spectator with the whole of Africa. The questions he seeks to answer have ramifications for the whole continent and the diaspora at large. Visionary African leaders from the past still have wisdom to offer us as we look over this new digital precipice. How can we make zeroes and ones revolutionary?

The director uses several visual tropes to ensure our identification with the abstraction of digitality. We repeatedly see a staged shot of a young African boy looking at a globe of the world. The director also intercuts still images of websites throughout the film, accentuating our most popular bond to the digital sphere. There are also further self-reflexive episodes of the director traveling by foot, car, bus, and plane. In contrast to the cyber themes swirling around him, Bakupa-Kanyinda is reducing distances not through a cell phone per se, but through travel and inter-personal contact. The decision to include this footage signals an ambivalence to technology. In fact, throughout the documentary, the director offers contradictory reactions to the digital future. It is clear that even though we have infinite choices, there are certainly traps we should avoid. The development of Africa, the eradication of poverty, and the reclamation of cultural memory should be the highest priorities.

Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda uses many of the same visual motifs in his fiction films as he does in documentary. The major difference is that he is able to construct his characters precisely in fiction to advance an idea, without any unwanted static. As a result, the epistemic force of these films is undeniable. They submerge us in a Manichean struggle which produces an unshakable allegiance to the protagonists. In The Draughtsmen’s Clash the two combatants are the President-for-Life and Alangwa Nzembo Libanga Ya. Bakupa-Kanyinda proceeds to complicate our affective response towards both men through concise editing, subjective close-ups, and voice-over narration. The film commences with a quote from Aimé Césaire’s Notebook on a Return to a Native Land.

At the end of the dawn,
these countries without stelae,
these roads without memory,
these winds without tablet.

Who cares?
We’d tell, sing, shout.
Full voice, loud voice,
you’d be our good, our compass.

A Martinican poet, teacher, and politician, Césaire was an icon to the Pan-African movement and a tireless proponent of human rights. The prologue establishes the director’s ideological point of view, as we have already witnessed in his documentary work. As a result, when the President is introduced with a Mobutu-like image (recognizable by the leopard-skin toque) on a flag, the audience identifies the supposed villain of the story right away. The supporting soundtrack of a radio address by the President in which he proclaims his disdain for human rights and the multi-party system reconfirms our inkling.

Surprisingly, the peasant Alangwa is not quite what we expect after first impressions. He is summoned to play chess with the insomnia-ridden leader, as he has been heralded the best in his village. He enters the house meekly—an innocent victim brought in to satiate a dictator’s whims. Bakupa-Kanyinda shoots Alangwa from above, so he appears even smaller than he is, like an ant trapped in a decadent prison. The story places him on the naïf end of the Manichean divide.

Alangwa’s transformation after his prerequisite food, drink, and smoke harks back to the prologue. He gets up and lifts his arms to the sky and blurts out some staccato, almost musical, gibberish. Césaire trumpets the power of the black spirit, the black voice, to light a way towards the future. It is a weapon in a hostile world and can sooth the pain of loss for a kidnapped history. This citizen is a literalization of that dictum. In fact, he can’t stop using his voice to mock, chastise, and provoke the President. It is doubtful that Césaire could have imagined this application of his ideas. He envisioned enlightened, sonorous compositions and eloquent homilies, not doggerel. Our empathy for Alangwa is irrevocably stretched thin and our expectations are completely upturned. Suddenly he is linked to the soldier’s rowdy retorts which started the story, slyly implying some class similarities. The soldiers could very well harbor the same vituperative thoughts about the government and probably dare to speak them aloud in the privacy of their homes. The ferocity of dictators creates an equal force amongst the people. If this energy can be harnessed like it was during the 60’s, men of integrity can reverse the logic of poverty. Alangwa sings “Sooner or later…Change must come…” as he is driven away from the compound.

The lead actor, President-for-Life, in The Draughtsmen’s Clash, Dieudonné Kabongo Bashila, reappears in Juju Factory as an immediately sympathetic character type. Kongo Congo is the beleaguered author trying to maintain his pride under commercial pressure. Bakupa-Kanyinda wastes no time plunging us into the psyche of the author. The first scenes we see are part of Kongo’s recurring nightmare. In this dream, the director lays out the thematic territory the narrative will follow. We are introduced to the intricate language of Kongo’s manuscript, the concern for his partner Béatrice’s welfare, the pastoral beauty of Africa, the specter of Patrice Lumumba, the aggressive censure from his publisher, and Kongo’s mounting anger all in the scant seconds that introduce the story. The director adds personal texture and political relevance to these flashes as the film unfolds. Kongo too is trying to express his Césaireian voice.

Kongo lives in Matonge Village, a neighborhood in Brussels with a sizable Congolese immigrant population. Bakupa-Kanyinda has spent time in this community as well, and early in the film he makes a cameo as a fellow writer rejected by the publisher, Joseph Désiré, to establish Kongo as his stand-in. Joseph is introduced to us without any ambiguity—he shares the same birth name as the infamous Mobutu. In our first encounter outside the nightmare, we see him coolly ignore Béatrice as she picks up trash at the publishing office, but quickly say hello to his fellow colleagues. Even though they are both immigrants from the DR Congo, she is below his class and not worthy of recognition in his eyes. However, we already know Béatrice, even in our brief encounter, to be a vibrant, intelligent woman. His characterization has no basis except for prejudice. Joseph is Kongo’s ideological opposite.

The struggle between these two figures is analogous to the tale in a young writer’s empty book. This character, who appears briefly, is part of an oral tradition which teaches long-held values to succeeding generations. Joseph is the hunter, Karamoko, and Kongo is the lion in the ancient tale. Kongo must act as the lion’s griot in the modern world, for the descendants of Karamoko have lied about his courage in battle against the noble animal. Kongo must tell the story of those mythical lions, transformed by his novel into real African slaves. Joseph lies to himself about the puissance of Kongo’s tome, despite the fact that he is not immune to the racism that plagues the immigrant.

Joseph insists he is not Congolese, even though he was born there. Isn’t he the epitome of the exiled African? Exiled from history, culture, and a stable identity? He exists in a tortured liminal space and doesn’t even realize it until too late. The narrative does not privilege his psychological stance at all. It is ridiculed by everyone around him including his wife and his colleagues. He does not know who Frantz Fanon is, nor does he understand the deep necessity of Kongo’s words for the African diaspora. Joseph can’t fathom that the book is meant for him and other lost souls who would pray to King Leopold for salvation.

Lumumba is the ideological backbone of the book and the film. It is his sacrifice which inspires the Kongos of the world and looks back at men like Joseph/Mobutu with shame. Joseph cares nothing for history’s lessons, only for his future profit. Kongo sees no future without salvaging our promise of freedom from the past and fighting to maintain it daily. After he finally rejects Joseph’s manipulations and reclaims his book, Kongo decides to write for himself and rename the manuscript “Juju Factory”. The new title reaffirms the book’s essential Africaness and blesses the words with the spirit of the ancestors. In the end, as opposed to Joseph’s comeuppance, Kongo’s unwavering veracity brings rewards of fame and fortune.

All of Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda’s films, regardless of the specific subject matter, focus on the empowerment of the African diaspora. He persistently deconstructs motivation and links it to the psychological chasm that has been opened up by the displacement of African sovereignty. At the same time, he posits all the multifarious opportunities that we have in this new globalized society to claim visibility, whether through film, political representation, digital technology, literature, or even subversive behavior. The director’s world view is elucidated if we approach all his narratives as one continuous search for expression. The African diaspora is ideally placed to negotiate the balance between history and modernity.

1 Translation provided generously by Jamie Berthe.

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