Book Review: Miroirs et Mirages by Monia Mazigh

Title: Miroirs et mirages

Author: Monia Mazigh

Language: French

Country: Canada

Year: 2011

Genre: Fiction, Novel

Miroirs et mirages is the first novel by Tunisian Canadian Monia Mazigh, who is better known for her work as a human rights activist. Mazigh came to Canada in 1991 to study Finance in Montreal. She subsequently met and married her husband, Syrian-Canadian Maher Arar, started a family, and moved to Ottawa. When her husband was wrongfully rendered to Syria in the hysteria that followed 9/11, she campaigned successfully for his return. She has written a memoir about her struggle, Hope and Despair, which has been translated into English.

Miroirs et mirages is quite a departure from her activism as the scope of the novel is relatively small; it simply follows the sometimes intersecting lives of several women living in Ottawa. But the novel is delightful in its focus on these women’s inner lives, their thoughts, feelings, and reactions to the many challenges they face. There is Emma, a Tunisian, who has fled her emotionally abusive husband and now has to figure out how to rebuild her life with her young daughter in toe. There is Samia, a Palestinian, who enjoys finding new ways to spend the money of her husband, a businessman working in Dubai. There is Samia’s daughter, Lama, a university student, who is trying to figure out just where she fits in her family, her community, and Canada. There is Sally, a second-generation Pakistani Canadian university student, who has taken to wearing the niqab (face veil) much to the chagrin of her dotting parents. There is Louise, a French Canadian university student, who has converted to Islam and hopes to marry the man who introduced her to the faith. Then there is Alice, Louise’s mother, who is appalled by her daughter’s conversion and fears she may be losing the most important person in her life.

The title Miroirs et mirages illustrates the overall theme of the novel as the reader explores how the inner struggles of one character reflect those of another and how several of the characters are struggling with the illusions they have constructed in their attempts to create new identities for themselves.

Personal Reflections

I greatly enjoyed reading the novel for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that it is set in Ottawa. Ottawa is probably one of the most neglected cities in Canadian Literature with few Canadian writers of renown finding it worth writing about-exceptions being Black Canadian writer Andre Alexis and classic Canadian Children’s author Brian Doyle. It was refreshing to read a Canadian novel which describes locations I know and explores the fascinating interactions across culture, language, and religion which are possible in our rather unassuming Nation’s Capital.

Mazigh is a striking new talent in Francophone Canadian fiction who writes with confidence and demonstrates a versatility in the creation and handling of her diverse characters. The reader sometimes only catches glimpses of these women’s worlds yet these glimpses are enough to create powerful impressions of these women’s histories and personalities.

I had the opportunity to attend the launch of Mazigh’s novel in Ottawa at Librairie du centre, a French-Language bookstore on 435 Donald Street . The majority of those in attendance were French Canadians who had read and greatly enjoyed the novel. They asked probing questions about the theme and “message” of the novel. Mazigh asserted that the novel has no “message”; it is not a polemic. Since that event, I have been thinking seriously about the importance of fiction that allows us to “walk in the shoes” of people we may never meet in real life. Fiction, or I should say good fiction, is not polemical, it does not provide easy answers but instead shows how there often are no easy answers and the world is more often full of shades of grey instead of stark Black and White.

At a time when there is so much debate around the presence of Muslim communities in Canada, particularly Quebec, Mazigh’s novel should definitely be welcomed because it simply allows readers to see the diversity and complexity of Muslim women’s lives and experiences. It certainly does not depict an idealized or romanticized view of Muslim women’s lives, as a great deal of the polemical writings by Canadian Muslim women seem to do as a form of resistance to Islamphobia. As Suzanne Giguere writes in her review of the novel in Le Devoir:

À l’heure où les débats autour du voile ne font pas l’unanimité — le voile est perçu par plusieurs intellectuels comme un symbole de l’oppression de la femme, un emblème politique —, Monia Mazigh refuse d’ériger des barrières et tente de créer avec son roman un espace de dialogue. À la fois analyse sociale et peinture intimiste, Miroirs et mirages évoque les questions identitaires auxquelles les femmes immigrantes de religion musulmane sont sans cesse confrontées. Leur situation a souvent été évoquée dans des ouvrages à portée sociologique qui ne prennent bien souvent qu’insuffisamment en compte les données humaines que retranscrivent ces témoignages, ce que permet l’oeuvre romanesque.

The novel points to some quite serious social problems facing Muslim communities in diaspora, some of these problems, like domestic violence, are common to Canadian society as a whole, some, like the conflicts which religious fundamentalism can cause within a family, although perhaps shared by other faith communities, are more particular to Canada’s Muslim communities. By exploring these issues through fiction, Mazigh is able to avoid the many pitfalls we see when these issues are tackled in the form of polemics, which are often defensive and reactionary. She simply presents the reader a situation to reflect on.

Mazigh’s novel isn’t just about Muslim women. My favourite character in the novel is Alice. Alice disapproval of her daughter Louise’s conversion to Islam comes from a variety of experiences and beliefs which are far more complex than simple Islamophobia. The struggles of Quebecois women of Alice’s generation are not well understood outside of Quebec or by newcomers to the province, but it is clear that Mazigh has worked to try to understand women like Alice and this comes through in her writing.

I highly recommend the novel for anyone who enjoys writing about women’s lives. It is currently only available in French but I encourage those of you who are bilingual but have never read French for pleasure to check it out as the French is quite easy to read. The movement to create a Bilingual Canada was aimed at bridging the social and cultural divides between English and French Canadians and facilitating dialogue between these “Two Solitudes“. The fact that many new Canadians like Mazigh are also writing in French should make it even clearer that using the language to explore other people’s worlds through fiction is crucial to building a more socially inclusive and integrated Canada.

Further Reading:

Monia Mazigh’s Blog

Review in French by Le Devoir available online

Audio Interview (2011) in French with Radio Canada International available online

Audio Interview (2011) in French with Radio Canada available online

Short Story Review: Government by Magic Spell by Saida Hagi-Dirie Herzi

Government by Magic Spell is a fascinating short story written by Somali feminist writer Saida Hagi-Dirie Herzi. This short story is not easy to find here in North America. If you have an edition of the Heinemann Book of Contemporary African Short Stories edited by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, published in 1992, then you might be in luck.  This collection brings together 20 short stories written between 1980 to 1991. However, the story is well-known among Kenyan high school students as it is part of a compilation of short stories from North and East Africa which is mandatory reading for English Literature students. This complication also contains Herzi’s other well-known short story, Against the Pleasure Principle, which confronts the practice of female circumcision. I had hoped to find out more online about Saida Hagi-Dirie Herzi, but unfortunately, like so many African authors of her generation, I cannot.

But, thanks to the BBC, more people outside of East Africa, will be familiar with this short story as it was chosen to be read as part of the BBC’s The Human Cradle Series, which featured readings of three contemporary short stories by writers from the Horn of Africa. The other short stories included Saba by Eritrean author Suleiman Addonia. According to the BBC site:

In Sulaiman Addonia’s new short story ‘Saba’, a former cinema employee decides to create a ‘cinema’ of his own inside a refugee camp. Read by Abukar Osman.

The first of three contemporary stories from the Horn of Africa – Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia.

Produced by Emma Harding

About the author: Sulaiman S.M.Y. Addonia was born in Eritrea to an Eritrean mother and an Ethiopian father. He spent his early life in a refugee camp in Sudan following the Om Hajar massacre in 1976, and in his early teens he lived and studied in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He has lived in London since 1990. His first novel, The Consquences of Love (Vintage) was published in 2009.

The second story, The Invisible Map, by Ethiopian writer Maaza Megiste, is described on the site as follows:

In Maaza Mengiste’s new short story, ‘The Invisible Map’, a young Ethiopian woman, hoping for a better life in Europe, finds herself trapped in a Libyan prison. Read by Adjoa Andoh.

The second in our series of contemporary stories from the Horn of Africa – Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia.

Produced by Emma Harding

About the author: Maaza Mengiste was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Her debut novel, the critically acclaimed ‘Beneath the Lion’s Gaze’, has been translated into several languages and was a finalist for a Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. She teaches at NYU and currently lives in New York City.

Government by Magic Spell is the last in the series. It is wonderfully read by British Somali performance poet Yusra Warsama.

It is important to keep in mind that the story was written some time between 1980 to 1991. Described as a “satirical parable of power and corruption”, the story exposes the machinations of Somali clan politics but also holds lessons for anyone concerned about justice and democracy.

The story begins with Halima at the age of 10, who we learn, has been possessed by a jinn, better known to Westerners as Genies.  Halima had been ill for several months, but the local religious healer, or Waadad, soon discovers that the origins of her illness are supernatural. An infant jinn which she had accidentally stepped on one night in front of the bathroom has possessed her. Luckily for Halima, and soon her village, the jinn is benevolent and helpful. The people of the village soon believe that Halima’s jinn can give her the power to foretell the future and heal the sick. Halima is able to acquire a great deal of power and autonomy for a woman because of her family and clan being in awe of her jinn. Halima is able to refuse all the men who proposed marriage to her, including the Waadad. Halima’s jinn is perceived to be the reason for her clan’s worldly success and she is seen as a blessing to her family. For that reason, she is summoned from her village to the country’s capital, Mogadishu, where many of her fellow clan members have gained the most powerful positions in government. As Herzi describes:

It had all started with one of their men who had become very powerful in the government. He had called his relatives and found big government jobs for them. They, in turn, had called relatives of theirs until the government virtually had been taken over by Halima’s people. And that had meant quick riches for everyone concerned. Nor had they been very scrupulous about getting what they wanted. Anything that stood in their way had to be pushed aside or eliminated.

Halima’s fellow clan members want to use her powers in order to consolidate their political power, which they have established over a short 10 years, despite many of them being illiterate, although still taking up government positions. The capital’s water system is consolidated so that Halima can placate the jinn but also cast a spell which cures all of the capital’s residents of their curiosity, so they will no longer ask questions about the current state of their government and the actions of Halima’s clan.

We learn from the story about the belief in the power of jinn within traditional Somali Culture. The story discusses ritual sacrifices made in honour of the jinn, in order to keep them placated and for the entire clan to benefit from the jinn’s benevolence. Based on my own experience, I can vouch that belief in jinn and their ability to possess people is quite commonplace among contemporary Muslims, and still strong amongst members of the Somali diaspora. But it is interesting to conjecture how the role of jinns in traditional Muslim African cultures could be seen as a throwback to earlier pre-Islamic beliefs in ancestor spirits. In the story, we learn that the parents of Halima’s jinn even come to visit her in order to advise her on the proper care of their child. What I find truly compelling about the story is how Halima manipulates people’s fear of her jinn in order to gain power, both over her own life, which as a woman would have ordinarily been quite limited, and then political power within her clan.

At the time of my writing, there are still three more days left to listen to Government by Magic Spell online.

Article: Black History Month: A Challenge to My Fellow Muslims by Chelby Marie Daigle

For me, Black History Month is not only about celebrating the contributions of my fellow Black Canadians, it is about remembering the impact that the enslavement of Black peoples has had on Africa and the world. It’s about building on the strengths of the Black community in Ottawa by working across the socio-economic, religious, ethno-cultural, and linguistic differences of the diversity of individuals who make up our community. It’s about examining how anti-Black racism still exists within Canadian society and recommitting myself to challenging it by trying to understand why it persists and how it affects my life and the lives of my fellow Black Canadians.

This year, I was honoured to be invited to speak about youth engagement through arts and media at the launch of Black History Month at the City of Ottawa and I was humbled to be presented with a Community Builder Award by Black History Ottawa. For me, Black History Month has definitely started out with a bang.

I have been asked by Muslim Link to write a piece commemorating Black History Month. I feel obligated to take this opportunity to admit something: I often find it frustrating to be around Muslims during Black History Month. Why? Because, although there is often a celebration of Black converts to Islam, like Malcolm X, and condemnation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade perpetrated by the West, there is little, if any, examination of the history of slavery in Muslim societies or of the persistence of anti-Black racism within these societies as well as within Muslim communities in Canada. The reality is I have faced more blatant anti-Black racism from my fellow Muslims than I ever did growing up in a predominantly White community.

Anti-Black racism, which includes beliefs that Blacks are inherently less intelligent, more violent, lazier, dirtier, uglier and more sexually promiscuous than other races, is just as prevalent within Muslim societies as it is in the West, if not more so, because there have not been similar movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement, aimed at combatting these prejudices, within Muslim societies.

Unfortunately, although Muslims will often cite the Quran and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, to demonstrate that racism is condemned in Islam, there isn’t really an examination of whether Muslims over the course of their history actually stuck to these beliefs.

It is important for Muslims to look deeper at their particular societies of origin in order to see how the enslavement of Black peoples in these societies has led to the development of anti-Black racism. For example, the fact that in several Arab dialects the word ‘abd, meaning slave, is used to refer to any Black person demonstrates that in these societies the equation of Black people with slaves still persists.

To read the my complete article visit Muslim Link

Further Reading:

Arab Views of Black Africans and Slavery by John Hunwick (academic essay available online)

Religions and the abolition of slavery – a comparative approach by William G. Clarence-Smith (academic essay available online)

Islam and Slavery by William G. Clarence-Smith (academic essay available online)

Islamic Abolitionism in the Western Indian Ocean from c. 1800 by William G. Clarence‐Smith (academic essay available online)

“Slaves of One Master:” Globalization and the African Diaspora in Arabia in the Age of Empire by Matthew S. Hopper (academic essay available online)

Straight, No Chaser: Slavery, Abolition, and the Modern Muslim Mind by Bernard K. Freamon (academic essay available online)

Oxford African American Studies Center: Middle East Page

Race and Slavery in the Middle East Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Empire (American University Press in Cairo) Review by Gamal Nkrumah available online

Slavery and South Asian History (Indiana University Press)

Book Review: Before the Birth of the Moon by V. Y. Mudimbe

Title: Before the Birth of the Moon

Author: V. Y. Mudimbe

Language: English

Translator: Marjolijn de Jager

Country: Democratic Republic of Congo

Year: 1976 (original publication), translation 1989

Genre: Fiction, Novel

Before the Birth of the Moon by Valentin Y. Mudimbe was originally written in French and published in 1976. According to the author, it is set in the mid-sixties during the tumultuous First Republic of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), during the relatively brief reign of President Joseph Kasavubu after the murder of his former Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. During the First Republic, DRC was rife with rebel movements in various provinces. The two central characters of the novel, “The Minister” and Ya, his mistress, are wrapped up in this political turmoil.

“The Minister”, is ambitious and wishes to earn favour with the President, who is never directly named. He is married with children but this doesn’t prevent him from enjoying himself with a few mistresses. One of these mistresses, Ya, he believes he is in love with but we learn that she actually finds him irritating although she appreciates his money. Ya hails from a rural area in a province where her ethnic group is now rebelling against the national government. At the beginning of the novel, Ya has no interest in this as she has come to Kinshasa to enjoy herself. Although she originally left her village in order to avoid a marriage arranged by her father and pursue college studies, she soon left school to enjoy the dazzling city life of bars and nightclubs and found a way to live off men in exchange for sexual favours. In most English descriptions of the novel Ya is described as a prostitute but I do not think this description is correct. She is more a woman who is “kept” but she feels free to pick and choose who gets to keep her. This is why she initially decides to dump “The Minister” early in the novel because she finds him irritating. “The Minister” is heartbroken. Ya isn’t. Her real lover is her female friend who “The Minister” early on perceives as his main rival. One day, men from Ya’s village break into the apartment she shares with her friend and attack her. They bring her news that her father, who was a village chief and rebel leader, has been murdered by the national government. They demand that she get back with “The Minister” and share any intelligence she can get from him with the rebels. Now, the carefree and careless Ya, finds herself in the precarious position of spy.

Ya easily returns to the welcoming arms of “The Minister” who in the interim has seen himself elevated in the government ranks and has become an initiate in a secret society which claims to be following the ancient rites of his ancestors. This involves making a human sacrifice. “The Minister” offers Ya’s friend/lover as his sacrifice, as he sees her as the main obstacle standing in the way of him truly winning Ya’s heart. He is right because in the wake of her friend’s disappearance Ya eventually succumbs to “The Minister”‘s kindness and finds herself falling in love with him, all the while sharing the political intelligence he shares with her in confidence with the rebel leaders. Ya is set up in a posh apartment in the Ngombe commune of Kinshasa, which was originally designed by Europeans for Europeans. “The Minister” lavishes her with gifts while ignoring the financial needs of his own household. This eventually leads to tragedy when his son ends up contracting an infection from his circumcision, which “The Minister’s” wife had wanted to have performed in a hospital, but she is told by “The Minister” that that is too expensive. “The Minister” refuses to see his responsiblity for his son’s death and instead blames his wife, accusing her of witchcraft. But he soon returns to the highlife of the city with Ya, taking her to parties and introducing her to various national and international dignitaries. But it is only a matter of time before Ya’s betrayal will catch up with them both.

Mudimbe’s novel is a fascinating read. Its narrative style changes from chapter to chapter , switching from the third person, to the second person (unusual in a novel) addressing Ya, to Ya’s and “The Minister’s” first person perspective. Both Ya and “The Minister” are two characters who seem to have no real loyalties either to family, religion or ethno-cultural traditions. Ya attended Roman Catholic school and still holds the churches’ officials in reverence but this does not stop her from leading a life of debauchery. She betrays “The Minister” more out of physical fear due to the constant violence of the rebel leaders than out of loyalty to her ethnicity or father. “The Minister” seems more attracted to the wealth and prestige that his government office can give him than to any real concern for his nation. It’s not even clear if he actually believes in the power of this secret society he joins and even though he loves his son, he doesn’t offer the funds to ensure that he is circumcised in a safe and clean environment nor does he follow the traditional mourning practices of his culture. Ya and “The Minister” believe they love each other but Ya betrays the “The Minister” by spying on him and he betrays her by murdering her friend and then lying about it. As with his other novels, Mudimbe explores political realities through the lives of individuals. It appears that at the heart of many of the political problems of the First Republic of DRC, he is showing is the real problem of insincerity. It is hard to know what people really stand for or really believe in. Even one the of rebel leaders who comes to harass information out of Ya, expresses contempt for the ethnic loyalties of his fellow rebels. He’s a communist and that is where his loyalty lies, although he is working with the rebels who are organizing along ethnic lines. Such cross purposes can only end in disaster and chaos.

I highly recommend reading Before the Birth of the Moon and other works by Mudimbe, both out of an interest in fine writing and the DRC.

About the Author:

Valentin Y. Mudimbe was born in 1941 in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is the Norman Ivey White Professor of Literature at Duke University. The following biography comes from his Faculty Page at Duke University:

Newman Ivey White Professor of Literature at Duke University, V.Y. Mudimbe received his Doctorat en Philosophie et Lettres from the Catholic University of Louvain in 1970. In 1997, he became Doctor Honoris Causa at Université Paris VII Diderot, and in 2006, became Doctor Honoris Causa at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Before coming to Duke, he taught at the Universities of Louvain, Paris-Nanterre, Zaire, Stanford, and at Haverford College. Among his publications are three collections of poetry, four novels, as well as books in applied linguistics, philosophy, and social sciences. His most recent publications include: L’Odeur du père (1982), The Invention of Africa (1988), Parables and Fables (1991), The Idea of Africa (1994), and Tales of Faith (1997). He is the editor of The Surreptitious Speech (1992), Nations, Identities, Cultures (1997), Diaspora and Immigration (1999), and editor of a forthcoming encyclopedia on African religions and philosophy. He is also former General Secretary of SAPINA (the Society for African Philosophy in North America) and co-editor with Robert Bates and Jean O’Barr of Africa and the Disciplines (1993).

V.Y. Mudimbe is a Membre Honoraire Correspondant de l’Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre Mer (Belgium); a Member of the Société américaine de philosophie de langue française; as well as of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, and the World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning. He has also served as Chairman of the Board of African Philosophy, and since 2000, as the Chairman of the International African Institute (SOAS, University of London). His interests are in phenomenology and structuralism, with a focus on the practice of everyday language. He regularly teaches on French existentialism, theories of difference, phenomenology, ancient Greek geography, and African themes.

Further Reading:

Review of the novel in The New York Times by R. McNight available online

Early Black European Lives: Joseph Knight (Scotland)

I don’t know when Joseph Knight was born or when he died. I first learned about his story while watch the BBC Documentary Series A History of Scotland. Joseph Knight’s story is also the basis for the novel Joseph Knight by Scottish author James Robertson, a novel with has been ranked as one of the 100 Best Scottish Novels.

Cover of the Novel Joseph Knight

What we know of Joseph Knight’s life has been documented for posterity in the records of his case, (“Joseph Knight, a Negro of Africa v. John Wedderburn of Ballindean“) against his master, John Wedderburn which was heard by the Court of Session in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1778.

Joseph Knight is said to have been taken captive as a slave from Guinea in West Africa when he was about eleven or twelve. He was brought on a slave ship to Jamaica. John Wedderburn was a Scottish plantation owner who had made a fortune in Jamaica after escaping the persecution of Jacobites after the battle of Culloden (He subsequently named his plantation Culloden). Wedderburn took a distinct liking to the young Joseph when he saw him for sale. Wedderburn bought the boy, named him after the captain of the slave ship he had been brought to Jamaica on, Joseph Knight, and kept him as a house slave. This meant that Joseph was not subjected to the back-breaking work in the sugar fields of the plantations which even Wedderburn testified later in court would have probably killed the boy. Wedderburn even had Joseph baptised, which was quite uncommon for slaves at the time, and allowed him to be taught how to read and write by the same schoolmaster who taught Wedderburn’s own children. About nine years after purchasing Joseph, in 1769, Wedderburn decided to leave Jamaica and return to the more appealing climate of his Scottish homeland; he took Joseph Knight with him. Wedderburn settled on his estate called Ballidean. But Joseph was growing up, and although allowed to quarter with Wedderburn’s house servants he was still a slave and was not paid a wage, although he was given pocket-money. Joseph asked to acquire a trade and so Wedderburn paid for him to apprentice with a barber in Dundee. During this time, it is likely that Joseph learned of the case of the fugitive slave James Somersett who had successfully appealed to the court in England to be freed from his master in 1772.

Joseph became involved with a female house servant named Annie who became pregnant. This greatly displeased Wedderburn who dismissed Annie, but allowed her to stay at Ballindean to give birth, paid the doctor’s bills and for the funeral of the baby when it subsequently died. However, Joseph continued his relationship with Annie, who had moved to Dundee, and again fathered a child with her. Joseph wanted to be able to work to support his family and demanded that Wedderburn either give him a cottage on his estate for his family or give him wages so that he could provide for them. Otherwise, he was going to leave. Wedderburn refused these demands so Joseph left. Wedderburn successfully appealed to the Justices in Perthshire to enforce his rights of property against Joseph and Joseph was arrested and returned to Wedderburn. As Maclaurin, Joseph Knight’s lawyer in the case Joseph eventually raised against Wedderburn at the Court of Session in Ediburgh, said, according to the court documents which have been written as dialogue in James Robertson’s novel:

‘It was at this point that Mr Wedderburn applied tae the Justices o the Peace o Perthshire tae prevent his taking aff in this mainner, on the grounds that he had aye treated him kindly and furnished him wi claes, bed, board and pocket money, and that in consequence o haein acquired him legitimately in Jamaica he had the richt tae detain him in perpetuity in his service for life. The justices, all, let it be said, guid freens o Mr Wedderburn’s and some wi their ain interests in the plantations, upheld his petition and the pursuer was arrested and returned tae him.’

Knight could not accept remaining as Wedderburn’s slave. He appealed to the Sheriff of Perth who decided in his favour, as he found the laws of slavery that applied in Jamaica did not apply in Scotland. Wedderburn than appealed to the Court of Session in Edinburgh, Scotland’s Supreme Civil Court at the time, arguing that Joseph Knight owed him lifetime service. The case was considered so important at the time that it was given a full panel of judges, including a central figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, Lord Kames (Henry Home). Knight’s lawyers argued in his favour on several fronts including raising the fear that Wedderburn intended to send Joseph back to Jamaica, where the slavery laws would mean that Joseph could be punished for desertion. According to Maclaurin in Robertson’s novel:

The defender, Mr Wedderburn, has been at pains in aw his written submissions tae the court, tae emphasise his kindness and generosity tae the pursuer. We will leave aside, for the moment, whether these words can ever be applied tae a relationship founded upon ae man’s absolute power ower anither. But we note that he seeks frae the court no jist the richt tae the pursuer’s service in perpetuity, but also the richt tae send or cairry him back tae Jamaica if he should choose it. He insists that he has nae intention o daein that, but, as he acquired him legitimately there, he must be entitled tae return him there. Whit, though, would be the purpose o assertin that richt, were it no tae exercise it? My lords, if Mr Knight behaved in Jamaica as he has done here, that is if he claimed his freedom and acted upon that claim, he would be subjected tae the maist horrific punishments for desertion. Are we tae believe that if he were sent tae that island, it would be for his security and happiness and the guid o his soul?

According to the National Archives of Scotland (NAS):

The records relating to the Knight v Wedderburn case survive among Court of Session records in the NAS (reference CS235/K/2/2). They consist of five bundles of papers, including an extract of process by the Sheriff Depute of Perth (20 May 1774), an extract of process by the Lords of Council and Session (30 May 1774), and memorials for John Wedderburn and Joseph Knight (1775). Of these, the memorials are the most interesting. In their respective memorials each man presents his side of the story and legal arguments concerning the definition of perpetual servitude. Wedderburn blamed Knight’s relationship with another servant, and her subsequent pregnancy, as the cause of a falling out between master and servant and Knight’s desire to leave his service. Knight’s 40-page memorial includes an account of his life (including his baptism and marriage in Scotland), evidence – partly in French – on enslavement of Africans by their chiefs as judicial punishments, and descriptions of the miseries of slavery in the colonies.

The court found in Joseph Knight’s favour. According to judge Lord Kames:

….the dominion assumed over this Negro, under the law of Jamaica, being unjust, could not be supported in this country to any extent: That, therefore, the defender had no right to the Negro’s service for any space of time, nor to send him out of the country against his consent: That the Negro was likewise protected under the act 1701, c.6. from being sent out of the country against his consent.’

According to Lord Auchinleck, the father of another figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, James Boswell, and another judge on the panel who voted in favour of Joseph Knight:

Although in the plantations they have laid hold of the poor blacks, and made slaves of them, yet I do not think that is agreeable to humanity, not to say to our Christian religion. Is a man a slave because he is black? No. He is our brother; and he is a man, although not of our colour; he is in a land of liberty, with his wife and child, let him remain there.

Joseph Knight won his freedom from Wedderburn but we know nothing of his life after this. Was he able to find employment and support his family? What was life like for his children in Scotland being of mixed race? James Robertson, in his 2003 novel Joseph Knight, mixes fact and fiction by having John Wedderburn hire a Dundee private detective to go looking for Joseph Knight 25 years after the court case. In a 2011 interview, Robertson discusses his novel, which won the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Award in 2004:

I first came across a brief mention of the story of Joseph Knight in a book about Dundee in, I think, 2000.

There were gaps in the historical record – not least being a complete absence of information about what happened to Knight after he faced down his master John Wedderburn in court – but this simply meant that fiction came into its own as a means of reconstructing the past. In fact, the cast of real-life characters – Knight and Wedderburn themselves, other planters, slaves and their families, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, and all the eccentric, hard-drinking judges, philosophers, poets and lawyers who made Enlightenment Edinburgh such a vibrant place – was so extraordinary that it was tempting (though not very) to tone them down a bit to make them more credible. As I gathered information, I became fascinated by the profound humanity of some of the people in the story, which was matched only by the hypocrisy of men in Edinburgh coffee houses debating what constituted a civil society while enjoying the products of slave labour thousands of miles away.

Somebody directed me to an aphorism of the Nigerian writer Ben Okri: ‘Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free themselves for future flowerings.’ This gave me the key to what I felt the book was about: Joseph Knight, or his story, came to symbolise a Scotland full of possibilities, past, present and future. I’d always been interested in how different times can speak to one another, how our understanding of ‘then’ can influence our understanding of ‘now’ and vice versa, and here was that same thing happening again.

…Despite good reviews and the reception of both the Scottish Arts Council and Saltire Society Book of the Year awards, and although many readers have told me how much they enjoyed it, of my four novels it has sold the least well. I don’t know why this is, but it makes me all the more grateful that it got the recognition it did back in 2003–04. You can never tell what books will survive their own times – many bestsellers are gone and forgotten a decade after first publication – but I like to think that someone, some day far in the future, may pick up Joseph Knight and find that it opens a door for them into the strange but perhaps not irrelevant world of Enlightenment Edinburgh and Scotland’s deep engagement with slavery and the plantations.

Further Reading:

Slavery, freedom or perpetual servitude? – the Joseph Knight case (The National Archives of Scotland) article available online

Guardian Review (2003) of the novel Joseph Knight by James Robertson by Ali Smith available online

Extract from James Robertson’s novel Joseph Knight available online

Interview (2011) with James Robertson available online

Scotland and the Slave Trade (National Library of Scotland) article available online

Scotland and Abolition by Rev. Dr. Iain Whyte article available online

Film Review: Le silence de la forêt (2003)

Film: Le silence de la forêt (2003)

Director (s): Didier Florent Ouénangaré and Bassek Ba Kobhio

Countries: Central African Republic, Cameroon, Gabon, France

Language (s): Diaka, Sango, and French with English Subtitles

Genre: Drama

Le silence de la forêt (2003), which goes by the title The Forest in English, is the first film to come out of the Central African Republic. It is co-directed by Central African filmmaker Didier Florent Ouénangaré and Cameroonian filmmaker Bassek Ba Kobhio. The film is an adaptation of the 1984 novel of the same name by Central African writer Étienne Goyémidé. The story begins with the return of Gonaba, played by French-Cameroonian actor Eriq Ebouaney best known for his portrayal of Patrice Lumumba in Raoul Peck’s film Lumumba, who has been away studying in France, to his home in the Central African Republic. He is idealistic and hopes to use his education to improve the lives of his countrymen. The film then fast fowards to ten years later and Gonaba is now a civil servant in the Central African Republic’s corrupt bureaucracy. As Michael Dembrow describes him:

Gonaba is now the regional Education Inspector for one of the Central African regions, and his voice-over commentary lets us know just how disappointed and frustrated he is with his inability to fulfill his dreams. The country is poorly run by a corrupt military, police, and education infrastructure. No one cares for the greater good, but only for ways to get ahead, which means somehow lording it over others. The ideals of Barthélemy Boganda (who led the fight for independence) and the trappings of traditional folklore are manipulated and corrupted towards this end.

So Gonaba has failed to “liberate” his countrymen with his education but he soon finds another group of people to “liberate”: The Baaka (Babinga) People, better known as Pygmies. While attending a party at the home of the regional governor (Prefect) Gonaba witnesses the ill-treatment of the Baaka people. As Dembrow writes:

For big shots like the Prefect, they are sub-human, natural resources to be exploited (as “tourist attractions” or as indentured servants) just like any of the country’s abundant natural resources. He sees them dancing (and treated like animals) at the Prefect’s party, then meets one while on a school tour (the man is serving as a virtual slave to the local chief). He decides that he has discovered his true vocation—eschewing the corrupt world of village and city, he will penetrate the forest and teach the Baaka how to read and write (in French), thereby giving them the tools to advocate for themselves and protect themselves from exploitation. It is a noble vision, but it can only lead to failure.

Gonaba goes to live with the Baaka people in what obviously seems to be an attempt to redeem himself. However, his perception of them as “noble savages” who simply need to be enlightened by reason in order to be freed of the superstitions that plague their romantically simple lifestyle soon backfires on Gonaba and ends in tragedy. I really appreciated how the film portrayed the forms of oppression that exist between African peoples, whether it be overt racism and exploitation, as we see with The Prefect, or the more subtle but equally detrimental paternalism of Gonaba. According to the review of the film written for California Newsreel: “The fact that this film is the first to focus on the exploitation and racism between more modern Africans and an autochthonous people, so ironically reminiscent of the attitudes of European colonists towards Africans, makes it even more unusual and fascinating.”

The Baaka, like many of the world’s indigenous peoples, are seeing their way of life destroyed by the increasing deforestation of the regions they call home. The film was actually filmed in a Baaka village and many of the actors were villagers with no theatrical training. In an interview Didier Florent Ouénangaré discusses working with the Baaka:

The initial idea was to draw attention to the Pygmies, an ethnic minority ignored by the politicians, the administration, and the world in general. When you go into the heart of the forest, you realise that deforestation is making it impossible for them to live from hunting, gathering, and nature as they used to. They are at risk of being wiped out like the Native Americans, only they wont even be confined to reserves! Gonaba’s role serves to hold a mirror up to show the Central Africans what they are doing.

It’s not only racist; it’s a human catastrophe too. I have had several opportunities to make documentaries about the Pygmies. Catholic nuns are trying to integrate them into the civil population by sending the youngest members of the Pygmy population to schools, but it doesn’t work because they go about it the wrong way. You can’t take someone who has lived a life firmly rooted in the forest and ask him to live like a Westerner. It isn’t for us to impose what we want. It’s true that Westerners came and imposed the way in which we live today on us, which isn’t only negative, but it’s better to ask people what they want.

I am the first to be fascinated by the Pygmies. Two had already gone on tour in folkloric dance troupes abroad, but the rest had never left their village! I told them that we were going to film a tale and that they needed to think that they were in the tale itself. But when I wanted to marry two actors in the film, they refused for fear of the husband’s reaction… But with some cigarettes, a drink, and a good long discussion, they agreed.

We looked for a site that wasn’t too far from a town, but at the same time was sufficiently far away. We built a village to house the Pygmies, and another for the studio. Everything that you see in the film is a village-studio, built according to the screenplay. They lived in an adjoining village built specially for them.

Trivia: In the 2003, the film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival as part of the non-competitive Directors’ Fortnight. It was the only African film included in that year’s line up. It won the Jury’s Prize at the Namur Festival in Belgium. Eriq Ebouaney actually had to learn the Central African language Sango , which is the primary language of the country, in order to play the role of Gonaba. The film was scored by Cameroonian musician Manu Dibango.

Further Reading:

About the film Le silence de la forêt

Review by California News Reel available online

Review by Michael Dembrow available online

Review in French available online

Review in French by Valerie Ganne available online

Interview with Didier Ouénangaré in English available online

Interview with Bassek ba Kobhio in French available online

About Étienne Goyémidé

Profile in French available online

La dynamique des rapports interculturels chez Étienne Goyémidé by Francoise Ugochukwu (academic essay in French available online)

Goyemide on Slavery: The Liberating Power of The Word by Francoise Ugochukwu (academic essay available online)

About the Pygmies

Pygmies.org is a website dedicated to the hunter-gatherer peoples living in the Central African rainforests, commonly called Pygmies.

Are the men of the African Aka tribe the best fathers in the world? By Joanna Moorehead (article in The Guardian UK available online)

Film Review: Tabataba (1988) by Raymond Rajaonarivelo

Tabataba Film Poster

Film: Tabataba (1988)

Director: Raymond Rajaonarivelo

Country: Madagascar, France

Language (s): Malagasy, French with French Subtitles

Genre: Historical Drama

Tabataba (Rumour) is Malagasy director Raymond Rajaonarivelo’s first feature film, which was selected for the 1988 Cannes Film Festival. After Madagascar won independence in 1960, several Malagasy students were regularly sent to France to study cinematography, Rajaonarivelo among them.

The film follows the fate of a small Malagasy village in Eastern Madagascar as it gets caught up in the revolt for independence from France. French colonial forces brutally repressed this uprising, leaving 30,000 to 90,000 dead depending on your sources, and the subsequent famine led to the deaths of many women, children, and elders as well. Rajaonarivelo was told stories about this time by his father when he was a child and these stories influenced his screenplay for the film.  The horrors of the repression of this revolt were not readily acknowledged by France until recently when, in July 2005, then French President Jacques Chirac, during a visit to Madagascar, stated that the nature of the repression was ”unacceptable” and “born of the excesses of the colonial system”.

Tabataba in Malagasy has many meanings beyond  “rumour”,  including “noise”, “trouble” or “political unrest”. It is probably best understood to mean the chaos that results from the spreading of rumours. As we watch the film, we see that the villagers, inexperienced in political resistance and not well-informed about the realities in other parts of their own country, let alone the world, are reliant on “rumours” as they make decisions about what actions to take during the revolt. We first hear the word used in the film when the village chief tells the villagers to stop making “noise” and listen.

The film opens with a stranger arriving in the village. He is a representative of Mouvement Democratique de la Renovation Malgache (MDRM) , a Malagasy political party established in 1946 in response to the island becoming a French Overseas Territory. MDRM wants full independence for Madagascar. The village’s teacher, Raomby, welcomes the stranger. The villagers are informed that they are now “free” and have the right to vote. He encourages them to vote for the MDRM so that Madagascar can gain its independence. However, some of the villagers do not believe that the French colonial officials will let them have their land back so easily and predict that it will only be able to be won back in battle. Raomby and the party representative believe that violence will not be necessary. One of the villagers who believe that war will be necessary is the young Lehidy, whose father we learn also died resisting the French. It is Lehidy’s little brother Solo who is the central character of the film, although he is unable to participate in any of the major action because he is a child, it is through his eyes that much of the narrative plays out. Bakanga is a village elder who throughout the film sits regally in a Louis XVI chair given to her, she says, by a colonial general. She passes advice to passers-by, including Lehidy, who she discourages from getting into conflict with the French. When it is stated that if the French invade the village, the inhabitants can flee into the forest and hide there, she warns that people will end up starving, which foreshadows later events.

When French colonial officials arrive in the village to run elections, we see an amusing case of miscommunication as the French colonial official must rely on his Malagasy assistant to translate for him. But we viewers can see that the words of the Frenchmen and the replies of the villagers are being mistranslated. We can see the theme of miscommunication, which runs throughout the film, beginning to develop. The French official informs the villagers that they are now allowed to have representatives in the French government as a reward for their colony’s service in World War II. When Raomby sees that MDRM is not on the ballot and asks why, he is informed by the French official that the MDRM has been banned and are considered a seditious party. Raomby refuses to vote and storms off. He is then arrested by the colonial authorities. Lehidy and other villagers who see this as a call to arms, attempt to rescue Raomby from prison but in the shoot out that ensues Raomby is shot and killed accidentally. Lehidy and his comrades flee the village. Lehidy reassures his little brother Solo that he will return with weapons from the Americans.

The villagers learn that the uprising is spreading across the country through various dubious sources, including a number of posters that wash on shore. These messages tell them that their side is winning. Solo is told that his brother Lehidy has become a general. However, when Solo spots a neighbouring village being burned by Senegalese Riflemen, he warns the village and everyone flees into the forest, except Bakanga who remains in her chair in the centre of the village until the Senegalese Riflemen and their French commander arrive and find her dead. They do not pursue the villagers into the forest but instead wait for them to return out of hunger. We watch as Solo and his mother struggle to find food and shelter in the forest. Solo becomes so ill from malnourishment that he begins to have hallucinations about fruits. Eventually, he and his mother return to the village to find that rations are being provided by the French colonial forces.

Solo still holds out hope that Lehidy will return with American weapons, but when the remaining resisters from the village are captured that hope dies. Solo and his mother learn that Lehidy has been killed and that their fellow villagers were trying to lead a revolt with wooden guns!Eventually, the French troops leave the village, but only after burning the teacher, Raomby’s, house down.

The film was cast mostly by the residents of the village it is filmed in, Maromena. Despite this, the cast is engaging, particularly the actors who portray Solo and the village wisewoman Bakanga.

One of the rumours that keeps being spread by the villagers is that the Americans will come to their aid. This may puzzle many viewers. American reviewer Thomas E. Billings, who reviewed the film in 1989 after watching the U.S. Premiere at the San Fransisco Film Festival, at which Raymond Rajaonarivelo was in attendance, explains:

At several points in the film, there are references to the fact that the Malagasy people believed that America would intervene on their behalf and send weapons. This was due to two things. First, the Malagasy heard that America had “saved” France in 1945 (liberation of France in World War II) and they thought that America was going to “save” the entire world, including Madagascar. Additionally, an American sea captain had given (in early 1947) a pistol as a gift to a native on the west coast of Madagascar, and this caused many rumors that America was going to help the Malagasy. The information above concerning the belief of the Malagasy people that America would help them is not explained in the film. As this was the U.S. premiere, the film’s director was in attendance, and chaired a discussion afterwards where this information was brought out.

Again, the villagers are relying on rumours that are entirely baseless to make life and death decisions. The death of Raomby is a turning point in the film, and as we see with the symbolic burning of his house, his role in the village as its educator was crucial. As an educated man, he could have helped the villagers discern fact from rumour. He also advocated peaceful resistance over violence.

However, as he was not like the villagers, as he was a man from the city, he perhaps did not fully understand the villagers’ anger against the French for taking their land. The villagers are farmers but what they are cultivating is coffee, a plant which is not native to Madagascar and which they don’t even use. The coffee they are growing is for export. Although not stated in the film, famine had become a regular occurence in Madagascar as less and less farmland was available to grow food and was instead used to grow useless products to satisfy colonial appetites. Of course, tea was similarly cultivated in Kenya by the British.

The French use of les tirailleurs senegalais (Senegalese Riflemen) to crush the revolt particularly disturbed me. The ways in which colonizers use colonized and marginalized peoples against each other never ceases to trouble me, whether it be the Nubians used by the British to suppress the Mau Mau Revolt in Kenya, or the Americans’ use of African-American ”Buffalo Soldiers” to suppress resistance in the Philippines. Les tirailleurs senegalais were used extensively during World War 1 and World War 11 to defend France, and after 1945, were used by France to protect its colonial possessions in Indochina and Algeria.

Rajaonarivelo has continued to make political films in Madagascar, most recently the documentary Mahaleo (2005) about the Malagasy music group by the same name whose music was the inspiration for the 1972 uprising against the neo-colonial regime in Madagascar. In 2007, he opened a free online Film School in order to teach aspiring Malagasy filmmakers.

Other Malagasy writers have taken it upon themselves to write about the events of 1947, such as Malagasy Novelist Jean-Luc Raharimanana’s Nour 1947, written in French. Valérie Magdelaine-Andrianjafitrimo  discusses this novel as well as others in her essay Madagascar, 29 mars 1947, « Tabataba ou parole des temps troubles »

Further Reading:

Tabataba Film Review by Karine Blanchon

Tabataba Film Review by Thomas E. Billings

Trailer in French available online

Interview (2007) with Raymond Rajaonarivelo in French available online

Tabataba, un film malagache by Francoise Raison-Jourde (film review in French available online)

Madagascar, 29 mars 1947, « Tabataba ou parole des temps troubles » by Valérie Magdelaine-Andrianjafitrimo (essay in French available online)

Painful memories of the revolt of 1947: Nationalism or survival? by Philippe Leymarie (Monde diplomatique article in English available online)

African Women’s Lives: Sebenzile Matsebula

I had the opportunity to meet Sebenzile Matsebula here in Ottawa during the Women’s Worlds Conference which took place from July 3-7 2011 at the University of Ottawa.

Matsebula is an internationally recognized disability rights activist. She worked as the Director of the Office on the Status of Disabled People (OSDP) in the Presidency of Thabo Mbeki for 8 years. She is currently the Executive Director of Motswako Office Solutions, which is recognized by the South African Government as a Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) contributer. In 2009, South African President Jacob Zuma appointed Matsebula to the Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment Advisory Council, which is mandated to advise the government on Black Economic Empowerment in order to remedy the economic legacy of Apartheid. She is the mother of two grown sons.

Sebenzile Matsebula was born in Barberton, in the Eastern Transvaal, South Africa. In 1957, at the age of ten months, she contracted polio. She ended up in the hospital with a very high fever. The illness resulted in both her lower limbs becoming paralysed, therefore Matsebula must use a wheelchair. Matsebula studied at the University of Botswana and Swaziland where she obtained a B. Sc. Biology, Statistics and Environmental Science. She has furthered her studies in the field of Biometrics at Pennsylvania State University and the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon in Canada.

According to Matsebula she first became involved in the disability rights movement while she was still in Swaziland:

I remember having many interactions with [William Rowland], Friday Mavuso, Maria Rantho – all those people that came out to Swaziland to create an awareness of this new shift in thinking. We had come from a culture of a welfare state, where disabled people were looked after and cared for by charities, by the good Samaritans. Then there was this movement, saying, in effect, “No, that actually isn’t the right way…disabled people have a responsibility to effect changes in their own lives.” That was my first exposure, which I must say was a wonderful exposure. I was involved with the sector from 1986 as a researcher – because I was trained in the sciences – but it wasn’t until 1988-89 that I got involved with the movement as a movement of people with disabilities. And I have been involved ever since, with an increasing awareness and an increasing understanding of what disability rights are all about.

In a 2004 interview with Disability World, Matsebula described some of the achievements of the Office on the Status of Disabled People (OSDP) :

Well, you could write a book about that; but let me pick up some highlights. There are several aspects: At government level one of our key successes has been the training in departments. When our new democracy started, a lot of posts were created to ensure the mainstreaming concept, and people were deployed into government departments to facilitate this mainstreaming. Those people would have had experience in social welfare, as teachers, and whatever, but they did not have experience or an understanding of disability. We then trained those people so that, as they discharged their duties, they had a clear understanding of disability as a concept, as a principle, and as a way of living.

That has been a very successful project because, besides creating awareness and making people do their work effectively, it has enabled us to gain allies in government. Because of their strong understanding of disability, these people have become passionate about their work and go out of their way to promote disability issues. So we now have what we call “focal persons”, but they’re actually allies that serve as our ears and eyes and inform us of what is going on and of any problems. If we need an entry point into a department, we know there is somebody who will work with us meaningfully.

The following is a statement Matsebula made at the Danish Civil Society Conference in 2006:

I contracted polio at ten months of age in the Eastern part of South African where I was born. I then lived through an era of disempowerment as a black African, as a female and as a disabled person. Therefore I can relate to all forms of discrimination, marginalisation and disempowerment in a real sense.

Yet inspite of rather difficult social circumstances my experience in life as a adult was of a more positive one resulting from now living in a new political dispensation that promotes the rights of marginalised sectors of the society, the equalisation of opportunities and self representation particularly in decision making processes.

This experience was brought about in my work in my 8 years of working in the highest office of South Africa, in the Presidency of Thabo Mbeki as head of the disability unit. The government of South Africa and its political principals has unconditional political commitment to the respect of rights of all vulnerable groups through the constitution and the bill of rights. This high level political commitment subsequently enabled me and my compatriots to play a meaningful in the development of the country at all spheres of governance. It is commitment that is substantiated by an annual allocation of government resources.

As a result of this equality and equity of local participation, South Africa subsequently has some of the best policies, best practices and programs that govern vulnerable groups.

However in my work on the African continent I have observed real hardships, which are faced by vulnerable groups in African societies as a result of the absence of meaningful policies and a lack of political commitment to the alleviation of tragic social problems.

This is also evident in that the voices of the poor are continuously marginalised in PRO-POOR development processes, which has unfortunately been perpetuated by external influences. From my experience I have a total conviction that sustainable development and the real and true African ownership of processes will be realised only through meaningful and recognised public participation and self representation by all marginalised sectors of our societies.

Further Reading:

Profile of Sebenzile Matsebula available online

Interview (2004) with Disability World available online

Integrating disability within government: the Office on the Status of Disabled Persons by Sebenzile Matsebula, Marguerite Schneider and Brian Watermeyer, available online in Disabilty and Social Change: A South African Agenda by HRSC Press

The Top 50 African Artists according to Britain’s The Independent

The following list of 50 African Artists comes from the article Art of Africa: The 50 Best African Artists, published on December 1st, 2006 for a special edition of Britain’s The Independent marking World AIDS Day.

Novelists and Playwrights

OGA STEVE ABAH (Nigeria)

Oga Steve Abah is a tireless, prolific theatre activist whose work focuses on creating dramas based on the everyday lives of ordinary people: poor, powerless, without a channel for learning to cope with the pressures of contemporary life. In his work, he aims for a creative, aesthetic “empowering” theatre practice drawing on masquerade and dance, the existing forms of performance of both peasant society and urban workers. Through this technique, people address the inequalities in their lives and create exquisite dramas in open-air settings all over Africa.

CHINUA ACHEBE  (Nigeria)

The father of the African novel, Achebe made his literary debut in 1958 with the classic Things Fall Apart, which has been translated into 50 languages. It is hard to resist his beguiling style, which infuses standard English with Igbo proverbs and speech patterns. As the founding editor of Heinemann’s African writers series, he was instrumental in introducing the world to much new writing from Africa. Also an essayist, writer of short stories and university professor, he continues to inspire and teach, despite having been paralysed in a car accident in 1990. He could be considered literary godparent to several fledgling novelists (including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the writer of Purple Hibiscus). In 2004, he declined to accept Nigeria’s second-highest honour in protest at the state of affairs in his country. Many believe a Nobel Prize would be a more appropriate honour.

AMA ATA AIDOO (Ghana)

Ama Ata Aidoo is best known for her play Anowa, a complex tale of a husband and wife’s relationship set against the background of the iniquities of the slavery and the disapproval of her conservative, resentful mother. Initially strong, Anowa eventually succumbs to madness and death as her husband finds himself disempowered by her strength. Aidoo’s work, published in the 1960s, was ahead of its time, pointing to the contradictions and tensions in love and the abuse of power; her husband Kofi employs slave labour in their business, a practice Anowa despises.

AYI KWEI ARMAH (Ghana)

Born in 1939, and one of only a few Ghanaian novelists who have been published internationally since the 1960s, Ayi Kwei Armah is rather less known but is no less talented than his more widely feted Nigerian contemporaries. Variously based over the years in the United States, Algeria, Paris, Tanzania and Senegal, Armah has gathered a dedicated fan-base who might wish that his output had been somewhat greater than it has been. However, he has also worked as a translator, editor, scriptwriter and teacher. His novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born burst on to the scene in 1968, to be followed by others that display his extraordinary way with prose, at once excoriating and spiritual: Two Thousand Seasons (1973), Osiris Rising: A Novel of Africa Past, Present and Future (1995) and The Healers (2000).

BIYI BANDELE (Nigeria)

Born in 1967, Bandele is one of the most versatile and prolific of the UK-based Nigerian writers, having turned his hand to theatre, journalism, television, film and radio, as well as the fiction with which he first made his name. His novels, which include The Man Who Came In From the Back of Beyond (1991) and The Street (2000), are rewarding reading, capable of wild surrealism and wit, as well as political engagement, as is all his writing. As a playwright, his ambition is admirable.

LUEEN CONNING/MALIKA NDLOVU (South Africa)

In her play A Coloured Place, Conning has produced an exciting piece of writing that explores the contradictions inherent in being “coloured” in post-apartheid South Africa. Using multi-media staging, the play is unrelenting as its barrage of images, perceptions and attitudes spill out on to the stage from bodyless voices.

Visit Malika Ndlovu’s Website

TSITSI DANGAREMBGA  (Zimbabwe)

When Dangarembga’s first book, Nervous Conditions, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Fiction in 1989, Doris Lessing wrote: “Many good novels written by men have come out of Africa, but few black women. This is the novel we have been waiting for… it will become a classic.” It was read by millions, and was among the top 12 titles in the project to identify Africa’s 100 best books of the 20th century. The follow-up has been long coming (Dangaremgba turned her attention to film), but The Book of Not, just published by Ayebia Clarke Publishing, was worth the wait; it’s a powerful story spanning the period from minority rule to the emergence of independent Zimbabwe.

DELIA JARRETT-MACAULEY (Sierra Leone)

Drawing on her Sierra Leonian background for an uplifting story about a child soldier, Moses, Citizen & Me (2005), Jarrett-Macauley’s confident first novel did not enjoy the sort of hype that greeted, say, Helen Oyayemi. But a measure of her accomplishment in dealing with sensitivity, humour and empathy with disturbing material is that the novel won the George Orwell Prize for political writing. Already the author of The Life of Una Marson, 1905-65, a biography of the first black programme-maker at the BBC, Jarrett-Macauley exemplifies the African diasporic talent that has continued to invigorate mainstream English literature.

Visit Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s Website

WOLE SOYINKA (Nigeria)

Soyinka is an iconic figure who, in 1986, became the first black (and first African) Nobel laureate. Outspoken against government oppression in his native Nigeria (like his cousin Fela Kuti), his writing career over 40 years has encompassed prison, exile and a death sentence for treason. He is the best-known playwright from the continent. His plays include Death and the King’s Horseman, an exploration of morality, human weakness and pomposity within the performance of sacrificial rituals. Some of his most important writing is as an autobiographer, such as his 1970s prison memoir The Man Died and Aké: A Childhood Memoir. As a novelist he is less accessible.

NGUGI WA THIONG’O (Kenya)

Exiled from Kenya for 22 years because of his highly political work (including the best-selling novel Petals of Blood), one of Africa’s greatest and most highly respected writers has just returned to attention with his first novel in 20 years, Wizard of the Crow, a magisterial, acerbic milestone work set in a fictional modern African state.

Visit Ngugi wa Thiong’o's Website

BINYAVANGA WAINANA (Kenya)

Born in Kenya, but with an imagination that transcends borders and cultures, Wainana won the Caine Prize for African Writing (the “African Booker”) in 2002. His Granta-published essay, “How To Write About Africa”, brilliantly satirising the clichés and stereotypes that can ensnare non-African writers, will make any but the guilty laugh out loud. As founder of the journal Kwani? he nurtures new writers, including Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, the 2004 Caine winner.

ATHOL FUGARD  (South Africa)

Fugard has written benchmark plays, statement plays and wonderful pieces that introduced us to the township. He was responsible for making a lot of people focus on South Africa in a theatrical context. The Road to Mecca affected the political thinking of everyone who saw it. The truthfulness of his writing strikes painfully at the heart. What he has to say makes him an international writer but, first and foremost, it convinces us that he is a great and good man.

Architects

DAVID ADJAYE (Tanzania/Ghana)

The 40-year-old is the head of Adjaye/ Associates, having received his Masters in architecture in 1993 from the Royal College of Art. Based in London, Adjaye has received commissions all over Europe and the United States. His work strives to create a sense of dialogue between the building and its space. He has given lectures around the world and has worked for the BBC, notably hosting a six-part TV series, Dreamspaces, about modern architecture. His company’s designs include the east London projects Elektra House in Whitechapel and Idea Store in Poplar, and the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo.

Visit David Adjaye’s Website

PIERRE ATEPA GOUDIABY (Senegal)

Through the African Scholarship Program, Goudiaby took a degree in architecture from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York in 1973. Born in the village of Baila, his humble beginnings are a thing of the past; he is now among Africa’s most respected and successful architects. His company, Atepa Group, is responsible for some of the most innovative and modern buildings in Senegal. His West Africa Central Bank in Dakar is modelled on the baobab tree. Elders in his culture gather round this sacred tree and have discussions. In 2003, the Africa-America Institute awarded Goudiaby the Special Recognition Award for Architecture and Business Enterprise in Africa.

Visit Pierre Atepa Goudiaby’s Website

Visual Artists, Photographers and Fashion Designers

SOKARI DOUGLAS CAMP (Nigeria)

Sokari Douglas Camp is one of the first female African artists to have attracted the attention of the European art market. She left her country at the age of 21 to study in Oakland, California and at the London Royal College of Art. Her expressive man-high steel sculptures show her immediate relationship to her home country. She uses masks and ritual clothing as compositional themes in her work, reflecting the political and cultural relationship between Africa and the Western world.

Visit Sokari Douglas Camp’s Website

DILOMPRIZULIKE (Nigeria)

Dilomprizulike, the self-proclaimed “junk man of Africa”, is among the most enigmatic of artists. Dilom creates sculpture and performances tied deeply into traditional African masquerade, yet which are informed by a post-modern awareness. Dilom is the art. He lives in what seems to be a junkyard in a permanent performance, recycling the detritus of Lagos into artwork, clothes, a home and a way of life that questions much of what we take for granted. Yet the work wrought from rubbish is deeply beautiful, intriguing and has a real gravitas; he is a philosophical Gaudi for the 21st century.

SAMUEL FOSSO (Cameroon)

Samuel Fosso is a prolific and witty photographer, whose colourful and outlandish portraits range from African chiefs to American women. But they all have one thing in common; on close inspection, they can be seen to be self-portraits. His explorations of identity have featured in the Guggenheim in New York and the Photographers’ Gallery in London.

ABDOULAYE KONATE (Mali)

The contemporary artist, 53, began his career as a graphic designer at the Musée National in Bamako and went on to be appointed director of the Palais de la Culture. In 2002, he received two awards: the Chevalier d’Ordre National du Mali and Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de France. Having started as a painter, his style has evolved into multi-medium and large installation work. His political, social and environmental views are expressed through his art. Recently, his work has depicted the devastating effects of Aids on society and individuals.

TRACEY ROSE  (South Africa)

Tracey Rose makes Tracey Emin look like a Girl Guide. Rose is a mixed-race feminist who uses identity and sexual politics as incendiary devices, waging war on her fellow South Africans’ sensibilities with almost narrative-less performances, films and artworks. It is hard to resist the crazy world she weaves, a car crash of popular culture and extreme sociology, so assuredly absurd that it has a kind of convincing intoxication that pulls you in. Even against a backdrop of the extremes of her home town Johannesburg, she is wild, seeming to weave a visual poetry across the polarities of South Africa’s political landscape that can make you laugh, yet feel guilty for your collusion.

IBRAHIM EL SALAHI  (Sudan)

It is difficult not to fall in love with the deeply serene El Salahi, the godfather of African modernism. He has created great work over five decades, has had as many chapters to his practice as Picasso, and has generated his own personal art-history. There’s a story that when he worked as the Sudanese cultural minister in the Seventies he was imprisoned for six months, accused by the military dictator of anti-government activities. In prison, he asked the guard for paper and pencils. The guard laughed: “You’re not in New York now!” Salahi managed to beg and steal the means to paint and draw, under threat of being beaten or worse. His work helps one to see why someone might be driven to take such risks.

OUMOU SY (Senegal)

The Senegalese designer is known as “Queen of Couture”. Her bold avant-garde and Afrocentric fashions are her signature style, with a touch of Western glamour. The 55-year-old Sy is a Renaissance woman, she founded the Dakar Carnival and International Fashion Week and is also a teacher. Elaborate headdresses, vibrant colours, baskets, and even adorning CDs are her trademarks. She has pride for her culture and designs for the modern African woman, who has a bit of a fun side to her.

Musicians

MAHMOUD AHMED (Ethiopia)

Little known outside his native country, Mahmoud Ahmed was born in the Mercato district of Addis Ababa and spent his formative years listening to music by the Imperial Body Guard Band and the famous Ethiopian singer Tlahoun Gessesse, before heading into the capital and shining shoes for a living. He found a job at the Arizona club, one of few “semi-legal” clubs permitted by Emperor Haile Selassie, which became a favourite haunt of the Imperial Body Guard Band, whom he eventually joined before recording in his own right. He was rediscovered by the West through the groundbreaking Ethiopiques series released by Buda Musique in the late 1990s.

AMADOU AND MARIAM (Mali)

Success was a long time coming for this talented, award-winning Malian couple who met in 1977 at the Institute for the Blind in Bamako. The guitarist and singer Amadou Bagayoko had served his apprenticeship by playing guitar in legendary band Les Ambassadeurs. After moving to Abidjan, Ivory Coast, in 1986, they recorded a series of cassette-only releases that made them stars in their homeland. These were recently re-released on the French label Because Records (1990-1995: The Best of the African Years). They recorded three successful major-label albums after moving to Paris in the late 1990s before meeting up with Manu Chao, who produced their biggest and (by general agreement) best album so far, Dimanche á Bamako.

Visit Amadou and Mariam’s Website

TOUMANI DIABATE (Mali)

Perhaps the best-known kora player in the world, the Malian star Toumani Diabaté has released a string of albums alongside the likes of Ballake Sissoko (New Ancient Strings) and the late, great Ali Farke Touré (In the Heart of the Moon). Refusing to be pigeonholed, he’s worked with the blues legend Taj Mahal and Spanish superstars Ketama, and is always willing to mix various styles with his Malian roots. This year saw the release of the critically acclaimed Boulevard de l’Independance with his band Symmetric Orchestra. Recorded at the same time as In the Heart of the Moon, it showcases the diversity of his playing.

CESARIA EVORA (Cape Verde)

This Grammy-winning singer hails from the port town of Mindelo, on Sao Vincente. She possesses one of the most powerful and alluring voices in the world, helped by a bitter-sweet style of singing called morna, a descendent of Portuguese fado, sung in Creole-Portuguese. Ostensibly a folk singer (although the style is known as Cape Verdean blues), she’s accompanied by guitar, accordion, violin, cavaquinho (a small four-string guitar) and clarinet, and often sings of isolation, love and slavery.

Visit Cesaria Evora’s Website

SALIF KEITA (Mali)

One of the founders of Afro-pop, Keita was born in Mali in 1949 to a noble family. He was born an albino, which led his mother to hide him for fear of reprisals from superstitious neighbours. His decision to become a singer met with hostility from his family because it was seen as an occupation beneath his noble standing. He stuck to his guns and left his village for the capital Bamako aged 18. He later played with the Rail Band and Les Ambassadeurs before becoming a solo artist, recording such classics as Soro and the Grammy-nominated Amen.

KHALED (Algeria)

Possibly the most famous Algerian rai singer of all time, Khaled is one of the few North African artists to have won wide acclaim, particularly in his adopted home of France, where his singles “Aicha” and “Didi” flew to the top of the charts. Born Khaled Hadj Brahim in Sidi-El-Houri in 1960, he left school at 16 to record his first single. Influenced by Arabic, Spanish and French music, as well as The Beatles and James Brown, his sound soon typified rai’s smooth synth-pop output of the Eighties. Moving to France in 1986, he recorded a string of successful albums such as Kenza and Sahra before going back to his roots with his latest, Ya-Rayi.

Visit Khaled’s Website in French

KONONO NO 1 (Democratic Republic of Congo)

Konono No 1 are a unique musical collective from Kinshasa. They use percussion instruments salvaged from junkyards, and combine electric likembé (a thumb piano) with percussion and voices, filtered though a PA system that consists of a microphone carved out of wood, fitted with a magnet from a car alternator and an oversized horn-shaped amp. The cacophony is unforgettable. Likembé player Mawangu Mingiedi is the leader of the band. A former truck driver, now in his seventies, he adapts trance-inducing zombo ritual music (from his homeland near the Angolan border), as heard on the band’s critically acclaimed album Congotronics

FEMI KUTI (Nigeria)

He’ll never quite escape the shadow of his father (the Afro-beat legend Fela Kuti), but Femi Anikulapo Kuti has done a creditable job of emulating his father’s work, albeit in a much cleaner (and less risqué) way. Kuti was born in London in 1962, but grew up in Nigeria’s former capital, Lagos. He quickly adapted to his new musical and politically active surroundings, learning various instruments as well as singing. He put this education to good use on a series of albums with his band Positive Force. He headlines the African Soul Rebels Tour next year.

SOUAD MASSI (Algeria)

This talented singer/songwriter fled her homeland after being hounded out by Islamic fundamentalists who took exception to her promotion of independence for young women. She ended up in Paris, where she started to create her own unique blend of folk, rock, flamenco and shaabi (Arabic street pop), releasing her acclaimed debut album Raoui (“Storyteller”) in 2001. She’s toured prolifically for the past few years, and won a Planet Award at the 2006 BBC world music awards. She is defiantly outspoken about the problems in Algeria: “Remaining silent would mean that terrorists have won and that all the intellectuals they murdered died for nothing,” she says.

Visit Souad Massi’s Website in French

YOUSSOU N’DOUR (Senegal)

Perhaps the best-known African singer of all, most people remember N’Dour for his hit “7 Seconds” with Neneh Cherry, but there is much more to him. With his band Super Etoile de Dakar, he changed the face of Senegalese music with a radical form of energetic, polyrhythmic music called mbalax, which spread across West Africa like wildfire. He’s become a figurehead for Africa, campaigning for Aids awareness and speaking against corruption and genocide. His finest albums remain Immigrés and the Grammy-winning Egypt, a devotional album in praise of Islamic sages.

Visit Youssou N’Dour’s Website

RACHID TAHA (Algeria)

Taha is the perfect foil to the sugary love songs sung by many modern rai artists. His music emulates the guttural, promiscuous and socially satirical rural rai style typified by the late great Cheikha Remitti, and also the shaabi singer Dahmane El Harrachi, whose song “Ya Rayah” he covered for his biggest hit. Taha started out in the French rock band Carte De Séjour, where his politically charged lyrics took shape. A string of solo albums followed, bursting with traditional Algerian rhythms and a healthy punk-rock attitude. His best-loved album Diwan, covering classic Algerian songs, was recently followed up with Diwan 2.

Visit Rachid Taha’s Website in French

TINARIWEN (Mali)

Formed in 1982 in Muammar Gaddafi’s Tuareg rebel camps, this celebrated Tuareg blues band gave up guns for guitars, singing in French and Tamashek and playing a style of music called tishmoumaren (“music of the unemployed”). Their creative heart is the vocalist and guitarist Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, who can strike a mean Chuck Berry riff. The band’s first album, The Radio Tisdas Sessions, recorded in 2000, was followed by Amassakoul (“Traveller”) in 2004. Their third album Aman Iman: Water Is Life is released in January on Independiente.

Visit Tinariwen’s Website

ROKIA TRAORE (Mali)

One of the most distinctive new voices of Mali, and a tremendous live performer, Rokia Traoré came to UK attention at Womad in 2000. Although not a griot, her family encouraged her to sing at weddings, though her father was a wealthy diplomat and such things were frowned upon. While studying in France she sang with a rap group, and this led her to begin writing songs. She was discovered on the French festival circuit, and in 1997 became a protégé of Ali Farka Touré, who persuaded her to record her first album Mouneissa. A series of critically acclaimed albums have followed.

Visit Rokia Traore’s Website in French

ZOLA (South Africa)

Born in Soweto, Bonginkosi Dlamini, known as Zola, is one of the most famous singers of kwaito (a form of dance music pitched somewhere between house and hip-hop). He performed the score and appeared in the Oscar-winning film Tsotsi. His father abandoned his mother and their three children in one of the roughest and most notorious areas, where unemployment, violence, alcoholism and drugs were rife. This helped him prepare for his role as the gangster Papa Action in Yizo Yizo 2. His music reflects his tough upbringing.

Visit Zola’s Website

K’NAAN (Somalia)

A relative newcomer, this Somali rapper made a name in hip hop and world music circles with his inventive 2006 album The Dusty Foot Philosopher. Born in 1978, his spent his formative years trying to avoid Somalia’s civil war and listening to hip-hop records sent to him by his father, who was working as a taxi driver in New York. At 13 he moved with his siblings to Harlem, and then on to Rexdale, Ontario, where he became part of a large Somali community and started rapping. A rapid rise ensued, including performing at the 50th anniversary of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 2001, and contributing to Youssou N’Dour’s album Building Bridges.

Visit K’naan’s Website

Dancers and Choreographers

LES BALLETS AFRICAINS (Guinea)

The Guinean choreographer Keita Fodeba formed the dance company in Paris in 1952. They successfully toured the world until Guinea’s independence in 1958. On returning to their native country, the company became a national treasure; Les Ballets Africains, affectionately known as “roving ambassadors”, are credited with enlightening their audiences about Guinean culture. The company strives to foster better understanding of Africa and build relationships with other countries. Their lively music is made by drums, flutes and Guinean castanets; audiences enjoy their elaborate costumes, dance and storytelling.

Visit Les Ballets Africains’ Website

BOYZIE CEKWANA (South Africa)

The choreographer works mainly in South Africa but also presents a lot of work in Europe, mostly in France. Cekwana has taken contemporary dance to the next level in Africa. He is important because he has changed perceptions about dance, particularly in South Africa. Trained in classical ballet, he has found his own way of blending the heritage of his country with his work. He deals with identity and history, fusing politics with the mainstream of art and finding his South African forms within the classical form.

FAUSTIN LINYEKULA (Democratic Republic of Congo)

Born in Ubunvu in north-east Congo, Faustin Linyekula doesn’t conform to any form or structure or place. He’s inspired by nothing and creates something out of it. Coming from Congo, he’s always worked under very difficult circumstances, but for him these circumstances have become a form of inspiration. After eight years in self-imposed exile (1993-2001), Linyekula returned to his homeland with a renewed desire to create art there and established a company, Les Studios Kabako, in Kinshasa. His work can best be described as experimental performance art, using text and theatre to examine the links between art and society and issues of identity.

Visit Faustin Linyekula’s Website

VINCENT MANTSOE (South Africa)

Vincent Mantsoe grew up dancing in the township of Soweto, and trained at the Moving Into Dance school in Johannesburg. He is the pioneer of Afro-fusion – a blend of African aesthetics and traditions with European forms – bringing it to the world stage. His work draws on traditional African dance, the song and dance rituals of the sangomas (traditional healers) as well as modern, ballet and Asian forms.

Visit Vincent Mantsoe’s Website

KETTLY NOEL (Haiti/Mali)

Kettly Noël, from Port au Prince, Haiti, began dancing seriously at the age of 17. In 1996, she moved to Benin, where she began giving training in contemporary dance to local youngsters, many of whom went on to become members of the Benin National Ballet. At the end of 1999, Noël relocated to Mali, with the intention of starting a similar project there. She’s a female choreographer who deals with women’s issues in Africa. Her work deals with identity and the fight for the position of women in the continent. She confronts issues other people are not willing to go near in their work. She likes to go deeply into dark areas in search of light

Filmmakers

NEWTON ADUAKA (Nigeria)

Born in Ogidi, eastern Nigeria, in 1966, Newton Aduaka moved to Lagos in 1970 and then to England in 1985. After a diploma in video arts and post-production, he studied at the London International Film School, graduating in 1990. He wrote and published short stories while working as a sound mixer on a wide range of productions. In 1997, he set up Granite FilmWorks with Maria Elena L’Abbate to produce cutting-edge, uncompromising films. His debut feature Rage (2000) was released to acclaim, becoming the first independent film by a black film-maker to gain a national release in Britain. It won many festival prizes, including best director at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles and the Oumarou Ganda Award at Fespaco, Africa’s biggest film festival. Aduaka has directed commercials and several short films. Funeral (2002) was commissioned for the Cannes Film Festival alongside similarly-themed work from directors such as Walter Salles, Arturo Ripstein and Amos Gitai. The short film Aicha (2004) demonstrates his poetic and visual skills in telling a story.

SOULEYMANE CISSE (Mali)

Cissé has crafted a body of films that combine visual elegance with Marxist ideology and allegorical storytelling. His best-known film is Yeelen (“Brightness”), a Jury Prize-winner at Cannes in 1987 and one of the great experiences of world cinema. Born in 1940, Cissé began his career as a projectionist and photographer in Mali. After studying cinema in the Soviet Union for seven years, he returned to Mali, where he made newsreels and documentaries. His first fiction film, Cinq jours d’une vie (“Five Days in a Life”, 1972), launched his career and gained attention for the burgeoning African film movement. In 1975, Cissé directed the first feature film in his native language of Bambara, The Girl, only to have the film banned. Drawing on indigenous lifestyles and folklore, Cissé attempts to explore conflicts in Malian society

FLORA GOMES (Guinea-Bissau)

Gomes is the only film-maker to emerge from Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony in West Africa. He attended a course in cinematography at the Institute of Cuban Art in Havana under the legendary Santiago Alvarez and qualified as a cameraman and director of photography in 1972. Gomes started working for television with the late Senegalese film-maker Paulin Vieyra. In 1973, he made his first news film about the second congress of PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Portuguese Guinea and Cape Verde). In 1983, he made Mortu Nega, the first full-length film produced in Guinea-Bissau, a remarkable tale of love during the liberation and the struggles of independence.

Read The Woyingi Blogger’s Profile of Flora Gomes

MAHAMAT SALEH HAROUN (Chad)

Born in N’Djamena in 1961, Haroun was forced to leave his home country at the start of the 1980s because of civil war, fleeing to Cameroon and later Paris. He studied in France – film, then journalism – and worked for five years as a reporter before directing his first short film in 1994. Among his early shorts are Maral Tanie (1994) and Goi-Goi, le nain (1995). His first documentary, Bord d’Africa (1995), focuses on African musicians living in Bordeaux. The second, Sotgui Kouyaté, un griot modern (1996), tells the story of a griot from Burkina Faso. The film explores the life of the famous griot in the different worlds of Africa and Europe. Haroun provides a new language and aesthetic for African cinema. Bye Bye Africa (1999) was the first film of its kind to be produced entirely in Chad; it’s a “documentary fiction”, a story about making a documentary in which he himself plays an exiled African film-maker. His latest film is Daratt (“Dry Season”).

ZOLA MASEKO (South Africa)

During apartheid, the handful of South Africa’s black film-makers were either unable to work in their country or were in exile. The end of apartheid provided opportunities to make films that were in synch with their history and realities. Maseko became the first South African to win the Etalon de Yennega, Africa’s leading prize for fiction film, at Fespaco (2005) with his biopic Drum on the life and death of the journalist Henry Nxumalo. Maseko was born in exile in 1967 and educated in Swaziland and Tanzania. He studied at the National Film School at Beaconsfield, England. He also directed an 11-part series for the South African Broadcasting Corporation entitled In Search of Our History. The capturing of popular memory lies at the heart of his work.

IDRISSA OUEDRAOGO (Burkina Faso)

Born in Banfora in 1954, Ouedraogo’s early knowledge of film came from the travelling cinemas that visited villages. He made his mark at the Cannes Film Festival with his 1990 film Tilai, which won the Jury Prize. His 1989 film Yaaba about a 10-year-old boy who befriended an older woman remains an international success. Having studied film in Paris, his style is dubbed “Francophone African cinema”. His films are known for their visual charm and the attention he pays to the composition of each scene.

OUSMANE SEMBENE (Senegal)

Sembène is the “father” of African cinema. Best known for his historical-political works with strong social comment, Sembène was born in Senegal in 1923. He left school at 15 and worked as a plumber, bricklayer and apprentice mechanic. In 1944, he was called up to active duty to liberate France and was subsequently sent to the colony of Niger. After his discharge he took part in the Dakar-Niger railroad strike, which inspired his book Les bouts de bois de Dieu (“God’s Bits of Wood”) (1960). In 1948, Sembène went back to France, worked in Marseilles docks, became a trade union activist and joined the French Communist Party. In 1956, his first book Le docker noir (“The Black Docker”) was published. Sembène began to realise the greater potential of cinema for a largely illiterate mass audience. He went to Moscow to study under Mark Donskoj at the Gorky Studios). His short film Borom Sarret (1963) is the cornerstone on which African cinema has been built.

ABDERRAHMANE SISSAKO (Mauritania/Mali)

Sissako is the most distinguished and inventive film-maker working in Africa today. Born in Kiffa, Mauritania, in 1961 and raised in Mali, his father’s homeland, he returned to Mauritania in 1980. The difficulties of adjustment encouraged him to turn to literature and film. A study grant allowed him to attend the Institute of the University of Moscow. Le Jeu (1990), first presented as a graduation assignment, won the best short prize at the Giornate del Cinema Africano of Perugia in 1991. In 1993, Octobre was shown at Locarno and won prizes the world over. Waiting for Happiness was screened at Cannes 2002 and won best film in the Un Certain Regard section. It was shown at the New York Film Festival in 2002 and won the Grand Prize at Fespaco in 2003. His latest film Bamako, in which Western financial institutions are put on trial by African civil society, had its premiere in Cannes in May this year and its UK premiere at the London Film Festival last month.

About The Prudent Women’s Foundation in Nigeria

After learning of the Leading Women, Building Communities Award I was honoured with by the Government of Ontario, my father decided to introduce me to his neighbour, Ijeoma Chinakwe, the founder of The Prudent Women’s Foundation. We spoke on the phone and by e-mail and Facebook. I learned that Ijeoma has worked with Baobab for Women’s Human Rights, based in Lagos, which is a Nigerian women’s rights organization that I have been following with much interest for years. I have taken a great interest in the work of The Prudent Women’s Foundation as well after learning more about it from Ijeoma.

The Prudent Women's Foundation in Nigeria (Ijeoma is standing in the centre in a pink dress)

The Prudent Women’s Foundation came into existence as the result of personal experiences and research carried out by women’s rights and legal activists. The team is composed of about 25 people including women right activists, school directors, social scientists, doctors and religion workers. The Foundation aims at addressing on a grassroots level women’s rights issues in Nigeria such as  high rate of unwanted pregnancies among Nigerian women, some resulting in early death caused by abortion; the high school drop out rate among female children; the intimidation of widows; and the spread of HIV/AIDS.

According to Ijeoma “Our goal, to help youths and adults (mostly mothers and widows) to adopt healthy behaviour and sustainable life styles. Our mission is to equip the women with much knowledge and services that will improve their physical, mental and social well-being; also to promote and protect women, widows and young girls.”

For example, The Prudent Women’s Foundation conducted a workshop in Imo State, in Eastern Nigeria aimed at supporting widows. Widows who have no male children are particularly vulnerable to intimidation by their late husband’s family. According to Ijeoma, “ a case was reported of a woman with three girls without any male child. The woman was forcefully pushed out of her matrimonial home by her husband’s relatives. This is because she had no male child for their brother for the years they lived together as a couple. As a result of these, she was sent out with her three female children with nothing to fall back to.“

While looking to learn more about Ijeoma’s work, I discovered a fascinating article about Nigerian sex workers and their allies.  On March 3 2011, Nigerian sex workers in Lagos celebrated International Sex Workers’ Rights Day by marching for their rights.

Celebration of the day began in 2001 in India when Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, a Calcutta based group whose membership consists of somewhere upwards of 50,000 sex workers and members of their communities, organized a sex worker festival. Sex worker groups across the world have subsequently celebrated 3 March as International Sex Workers’ Rights Day. For the first time in Nigeria, sex workers publicly teamed up with their counterparts in cities across Africa, mobilized by the Africa Sex Workers Alliance (ASWA), to celebrate the day.

According to Margaret Onah, founder of Safe Haven International which aims at supporting girls and women who are victims of violence and co-ordinator of the Africa Sex Workers Alliance in Nigeria, the day is important in order to put an end to “the human rights violations against sex workers and to build in its place an enabling human rights environment in which sex workers enjoy the full-scale of their rights. This include being afforded equal protection of the law and opportunity to practice sex work without fear of prejudice in their communities.”

The march culminated in a gathering under Falomo Bridge in Ikoyi, Lagos where Ijeoma Chinakwe spoke to the crowd and told the women to “be proud of what you are doing. Do not let anybody trample on your rights. Everybody passed through something before they became what they are today.”

I will continue to follow the work of The Prudent Women’s Foundation and Ijeoma Chinakwe.

Further Reading:

Violence Against Women Without a Male Child by Ijeoma Chinakwe, article from Baobab for Women’s Human Rights blog available online

Blessed are the Sex Workers by F. Adebayo 2011 article in Tell Nigeria’s Independent Weekly available online

2008 Interview with Margaret Onah avaiable online

Video of the 2011 International Sex Workers Rights Day march in Johannesburg available online

Baobab for Women’s Human Rights Website

Africa Sex Workers Alliance Website