Cognizant of the shortcomings of the education system and juvenile delinquency dilemma in Kenya as a whole and Siaya District in particular, the Ugunja Community Resource Centre developed the Nyasanda Peace and Sports Academy. The Nyasanda Peace and Sports Academy is a multi-faceted program providing youth in the Ugunja community the opportunity to participate in sports, academic and social development activities.

The black horde was coming and you were afraid
Afraid you pushed and pushed and grunted as you did so
So you held them back long enough to feel the strength in your own arms
Arms that had tried eight times to drown that accursed black kitten

But then the black horde came anyway
Surging into the streets, across the big roads that divided
Them from
Others
Into the towns of the nation
And they came, some chanting, some singing
But all dancing, because that it what black people do
Long black fingers clawed at your throat
Would not stop choking until you stopped pushing
So you sighed and said, 'I surrender'
And showed your hands—although stuffed with money—to prove that you had stopped pushing

And the angry black horde drew back.

Now it is hanging back in shadows as dark as itself
A little smaller now (some of its number has been emancipated) but only a little
Agitated, but only enough to hurt itself
With delicate wrist flicks of knife wielding hands
And angry pressure on triggers meant for the past struggle

Struggle. Past.

I am the black horde come again
No one struggles with me
Or if they do, they hide
And I am the only one among the horde
But even my eyes are averted…inward?

The black horde is waiting again
For another couple of centuries of pushing

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/300/yes-i-am.jpg
The documentary film, Yes I Am, tells the story of Flame, Mamadee, Xavier and Adé and the story of the Brothers Keepers/Sisters Keepers. It tells of the power of music and shows how good it feels to raise one's voice as a group.

When Flame was sixteen, he left his parents' place to live in a home where he learnt the "gangsta" trade. When Mamadee was ten, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) collapsed, dashing her dreams of wearing the Thälmann pioneers' red scarf. When Adé was fifteen, his father was killed and he left Nigeria for Leverkusenin Germany. Xavier Naidoo learnt early from his parents that owning a car made one respectable in the community.

These artists grew up as German children of African fathers and German mothers, except for Xavier whose father had some Indian ancestry and D-Flame whose father was an African-American GI soldier. In the end, all of them grew up without their fathers. Yet they have made it big time through determination, self-will and religious faith.

Their paths never crossed till an African from Mozambique, Alberto Adriano, was brutally killed by three Nazi youths in a park in the Eastern German city of Dessau. Following the murder, more than twenty of the best-known African-German musicians joined up to found the band project Brothers Keepers. They recorded the maxi Adriano (Last Warning) and the album Lightkultur on which they were partnered by the female counterpart, Sisters Keepers. They visited, and still visit, schools in East Germany to talk to schoolchildren.

As a contribution to this year’s commemoration, African Rights is publishing a book dedicated to Murambi. “Go. If You Die, Perhaps I Will Live”: A Collective Account of Genocide and Survival in Murambi, Gikongoro, April-July 1994 weaves together the testimonies of 91 survivors, witnesses and perpetrators to create an intricate and nuanced narrative.

UNESCO's Community Multimedia Centres initiative is in its fifth year of operation, with 39 pilot CMCs established in communities across Latin America/Caribbean, Africa and South Asia. UNESCO has also provided networking opportunities and support tools for management, multimedia training, offline access to Internet content, and action research and evaluation.

I woke up this morning
After a week of hibernation
I decided I had been hiding long enough
So I blasted myself in to her heart
Pumping the blood through her veins
You think you can turn your eyes, close your ears,
Shut your mind to me who has the name of
Pain?

Length of poetry contributions: Poems to fit a full page of the Agenda Journal. Deadline: 28 June 2007. All submissions must be emailed to [email][email protected] For more information contact [email][email protected]

The April issue of Words Without Borders focuses on African literature, with work by Marguerite Abouet, Alain Mabanckou, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Yasmina Khadra, Amina Saïd, Ondjaki, and the late, great Ahmadou Kourouma. What a relief to see that, unlike many other literary editors, those at WWB understand that Africa also includes North Africa.

The broken garden

The ash moon like a hole
siphoned all flowers
to adorn the other side.

Every plant of every seed
all gone for the sole
glory of hyper-powers;

gone forever is the star’s
confession, where we stood
in lineage a little while,

God’s hope, the life of soil,
the need that feeds my hours
in the night, muddied blood

let for gain. Look at the sons
of slavery among the saints!
© Rethabile Masilo

Maria was raped 48 hours ago today
We found this out the hard way
You see, Maria is five years,
10 months and 18 days old
She's less than a metre tall
Barely reaches my hip
Her corn-rowed head is bowed
As her gaze fixes on my knee

For 48 hours Maria didn't speak
She didn't eat
Maria didn't play
Didn't want to leave her bed

Today Maria is on her feet
We watch as she struggles to walk straight
She fights to carry her normal gait
Fights to hide the wince of pain
Fights to be a child again

Turns out Maria was raped by her father
On Monday before the sun quite went down
Rudely pulled atop him with all his might
Threatened to a whimpering silence
Her innocence plundered, tattered and forever scarred
As tear-filled eyes stared back without fight

Maria was raped by an economic system
that keeps her in a one-room house
She was raped by a President
Who does nothing to improve her life
Maria was raped by an MP
Who year after year spews out useless words
Deafens us with empty promises
She was raped by those among us
Who dare not speak out
Who bury their anger in silence

Her father's guilty as sin
Without doubt his act of unabated greed
Was full of shame
He must carry his own cross
Pay for this disgusting thing
But the system must pay too
And all who choose to turn a blind eye
For he should not bear the punishment alone

Lioness © 2nd April 07

UNESCO's first progress report since the 2000 World Education Forum reveals that more than 70 countries will not be able to attain the goals set at Dakar for 2015, which include acceptable primary schooling for all children, eliminating gender disparities in school, and cutting adult illiteracy by fifty percent.

As the first feature length film covering the Rwandan genocide, Hotel Rwanda had the opportunity to contextualise the genocide and act as an informative piece of work.

Instead, the producers choose to focus on the drama of one individuals attempt to save a group of people. Thereby they made the film more commercially acceptable. In doing so the truth is compromised and an opportunity missed.

Hotel Rwanda is based on the true story of Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), house manager at the luxurious Hotel des Milles Collines in Kigali, who used his position and influence to save the lives of nearly 1300 victims who had sought refuge at the hotel during the Rwandan genocide.

In what many rank as the most horrifying episode in African history, an estimated 800,000 people, mainly Tutsi, were massacred by their Hutu countrymen in little more than three months between April and July 1994.

Most victims were hacked to death with machetes, spiked clubs or farming implements. A unique and disturbing feature of the Rwandan genocide was widespread popular participation in the killing.

A further 500,000 people died as a result of disease, famine and military action. While over 2,000,000 Hutus fled to neighbouring countries for fear of reprisals when a Tutsi-dominated government was installed by the invading Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) that took control of the country in July 1994.

These casualty figures are enormous if one considers that the population of Rwanda was in the region of 7,000,000 at the start of the genocide and that Tutsis formed about fifteen per cent or just over one million of this total.

At the start of the film, Rusesabagina is depicted as a suave, stylish man. Through a combination of deference, flattery and canny bribery consciously he stores up favours with the rich and powerful and, through his charm and resourcefulness manages to keep the hotel’s clientele happy.

Although Hotel Rwanda is well-intentioned and is moving, even potent, in parts, it has serious flaws and its execution is at times below par. A central weakness of Hotel Rwanda is that the film makes little more than a cursory attempt to explain why the genocide happened or to sketch the political and historical context in which it unfolded.

The film instead focuses on the intense drama around Paul Rusesabagina’s heroic attempts to save his charges. The choice of a strong dramatic centre clearly did not preclude director, Terry George, from also providing sufficient background to make the slaughter more comprehensible to viewers because the film carries a lot of flab.

Simply replacing some of the superfluous and repetitious scenes, especially those involving a frightened and tearful Tatiana, with ones clarifying some of the complexities of the Rwandan situation would have gone a long way toward achieving this objective.

Appropriate contextualization would thus have helped strengthen the flaccid plot line and improved the coherence of the film. This disembodiment of Rusesabagina’s story from the complexity of its context deprives the film of much of its power to provoke, enlighten or simply to raise critical questions.

More importantly, being the first feature-length offering with mass appeal on the genocide, it would not be unfair to regard the film as having some duty to inform, perhaps even educate, viewers to a greater extent than it does. Some people might think that this places an unfair burden on the film-makers but one could argue that Hotel Rwanda is, after all, not a movie viewers are likely to want to see purely for entertainment.

This is not to advocate an overt didacticism but to ask for better contextualisation. Hotel Rwanda’s simplistic approach to the genocide is, in my opinion, more likely to perpetuate than dispel stereotypes of Africa as a place of senseless violence and roiling tribal animosities.

The absence of a well-founded explanation of the genocide is bound to result in many viewers falling back on shop worn, racist conventions of Western attitudes toward Africa. Indeed, the film inadvertently reinforces such mystification. When Dube (Desmond Dube) asks Rusesabagina how such cruelty could be possible, Paul simply replies, ‘Hatred… insanity’, as if the mass killing defies logical explanation.

The failure to contextualise the story properly is symptomatic of a wider problem, namely, the director and script-writers’ flawed commercial strategy for dealing with the challenge of representing the extreme violence of the Rwandan genocide.

Terry George’s overall approach may be summed up as one of evading the key issues at stake in the Rwandan genocide. As Keith Turan, the reviewer for the Los Angeles Times, very neatly put it; ‘One of the ways filmmakers have traditionally tried to make unpleasant scenarios more palatable to audiences is by changing the focus from the awfulness of events to individual acts of bravery, from the complicity of the many to the heroism of the few. Hotel Rwanda saw the opportunity to take this path and did not hesitate’ (Cape Times, 2005).

Many viewers will have been enticed into seeing the movie in the expectation of gaining insight into one of the most heinous crimes of the recent past. Instead they come away with little real insight but a formulaic story about the triumph of the human spirit in which the focus is diverted from the dire human cost of the carnage and the troubling questions it raises, to the noble actions of a single hero.

In celebrating the relatively minor triumph of Rusesabagina’s extraordinary courage, Hotel Rwanda promotes a simplistic morality of good conquering evil and has little of substance to offer by way of elucidating why the greater evil of the Rwandan genocide was possible in the first instance.

This is not to criticise Hotel Rwanda for focusing on an individual, for individual experiences can indeed be a most effective vehicle for illuminating broader social, even global, experiences and truths. The trick in doing this successfully is to bring into a simultaneous frame of reference localized detail and broader social structures and experience.

Hotel Rwanda fails to do this through a lack of proper contextualisation of its subject matter and choosing to focus on a set of experiences that were atypical of the Rwandan genocide. Rusesabagina may well have succeeded in saving all of the refugees at the Milles Collines Hotel but we can’t ignore that about 80 per cent of the internal Tutsi population succumbed in the genocide.

This is also not in the least to argue that the film is not justified in reinforcing the optimistic message that the actions of individuals of conscience can make a big difference, even in the face of overwhelming odds and the most abominable evils imaginable. After all, like its most obvious parallel, Schindler’s List, Hotel Rwanda is based on a true story and the real-life Rusesabagina deserves to be lauded for his bravery, his integrity and his altruism.

But to communicate this message as ineptly as Hotel Rwanda does, represents a missed opportunity to disseminate a cogent understanding of the Rwandan genocide to an expectant world-wide viewership which has had little opportunity of grappling with the meaning of this atrocity through the popular media.

Given its box-office strategy it should not come as any surprise that Hotel Rwanda deliberately shies away from realistic representations of the violence perpetrated during the Rwandan genocide. In an interview in Johannesburg to promote the movie Terry George answered critics of his evasion of graphic violence by making clear that; ‘… there was no way I was going to shoot a bloodfest film with people being hacked to death with machetes... I set out to create a political entertainment story rather than a pornographic depiction of the terror and violence’ (Sunday Times, 2005).

So the only actual killing one sees is a short, indistinct sequence of people being hacked by machete, filmed at a distance and replayed on a tiny television screen by members of the news crew stationed at the Milles Collines.

For the rest, the slaughter is presented indirectly. For example, a few corpses are strewn about the front gardens of houses and Rusesabagina’s blood spattered son serves as evidence of the murder of one of his neighbours.

The high point of horror in the movie does not show actual killing. It occurs when Paul and Gregoire (Tony Kgoroge) encounter the victims of a massacre after being deliberately sent along the ‘river road’ by George Rutaganda. Driving along, their van suddenly seems to hit an exceptionally bumpy and deeply rutted stretch. Thinking that they had strayed from the road, Paul gets out of the vehicle only to fall onto mutilated bodies that had been left lying in their path. The camera then pans upwards to reveal corpses carpeting the outstretched thoroughfare in the gathering light.

Depicting mass violence in ways that do not diminish its reality for the viewer yet do not denigrate victims or trivialize the pain of survivors is one of the core challenges movie-makers of genocide face. Films about mass violence will always raise vexing questions about the ethics of creating entertainment out of mass murder, of appropriate ways of commercializing atrocity, of engaging viewers with visual representations of unspeakable cruelty without desensitizing or alienating them.

Finding a balance between these sorts of tensions lie at the heart of making feature films about genocide. The specific circumstances of the Rwandan genocide demands a degree of engagement with human depravity and mass violence that is lacking in Hotel Rwanda. Terry George gets the balance wrong. There is too much heroism and too little horror in Hotel Rwanda, too much romanticism and too little reality.

Hotel Rwanda has a decided tendency to understate the horrors of the Rwandan genocide and even to romanticize aspects of the story it tells. This is mostly due to a box-office strategy that seeks to make the genocide more tolerable to a mass audience. It is, however, also partly a result of trying to communicate an optimistic message about the ultimate triumph of human benevolence and partly a product of the decision to focus on a case that is unrepresentative of the Rwandan catastrophe.

The tendency for romanticism is nowhere more marked than in the clumsy wrapping up of the story at the end of the film. The improbable saving of the UN convoy from an Interahamwe mob through a fortuitous RPF ambush is inept and the subsequent depiction of an all too orderly refugee camp with its all too ample medical facilities is a good example of the movie’s tendency to underplay the wretchedness of the Rwandan situation. Most conspicuously, however, the film succumbs to a cloying sentimentality with its conventionally Hollywood ending.

Hotel Rwanda could, however, have done a far better job, given the constraints of the medium and the opportunities offered by the Rusesabagina story, of informing a receptive audience about the Rwandan holocaust and of raising consciousness about the scourge of genocide.

The feature film is an extremely powerful medium and the Rwandan genocide a potentially explosive issue but Hotel Rwanda comes nowhere close to fully exploiting their potential.

* Mohamed Adhikari, University of Cape Town

* * Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

African love stories? Is that an anomaly? We are tempted to ask this with Ama Ata Aidoo of the book that she edits. As we ask, we wonder what will happen to us if we step into this world. Will we meet the people we expect to meet: the drunken, cheating husbands and the cowed, abused wives? The stereotypes?

Leave your expectations aside. Bring with you nothing but a healthy amount of curiosity. For stretching from Sudan to South Africa, with Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe and much of Africa in-between, we see love in the most diverse ways imaginable.

We meet the beautiful Sudanese bride-to-be of a Scottish man with whom she would love to ride off into the sunset. But she must first obtain a visa. We meet Mrs Mensah, whose marriage is threatened by her niece. We congratulate Moriyike, the defiant love child of a union that is never legitimised. We follow two Ugandan girls, Anyango and Sanyu, whose love for each other forces them apart.

From interracial unions and queer relationships to unrequited love and extra-marital affairs, we begin to see just how multi-faceted African love is. But if the themes are diverse, the authors and their writing styles are even more so.

Ama Ata Aidoo puts her own short story in her introduction to the anthology, giving this unconventional and surprising love story a deadpan tone in simple but effective language.

Chimamanda Adichie comes with her own combination of everyday actions accompanied by deep reflection. Sefi Atta brings to her own tale a slight obscurity that makes us have to work to figure out how it fits in with the overarching theme of love. Tomi Adeaga’s conversational style draws us in, Pidgin English, German and all.

And the superb cast of writers, some well known and others upcoming, give the reader different experiences until we get to Helen Oyeyemi’s 'The Telltale Heart', and here we must stop.

We stop, not because it’s the final story in the anthology, but because 'The Telltale Heart' is a most striking story. The anthology thus far leaves the reader happy to realise that African love stories are very real, unlike the usual perfect-protagonists, perfect-timing, ride-off-into-the-sunset tales we associate with love stories.

Oyeyemi’s piece is the closest we come to 'unreal', but not in the sense of fake. Instead her powerful imagery take us into a very different realm, that of the surrealist rendering of a story that leaves us wondering why we ever thought love was only about the mundane.

This piece carries us along and wraps us up in words that we have to read twice, three times over only to realise that we cannot form complete images of the characters or the places or the story even.

We cannot rely solely on our imaginations to visualise things, her words must be our crutch if we are to understand the young man born with eyes like a famine and the young woman who must leave her heart in a love shrine, for it is too heavy for her.

'The Telltale Heart' stands out as a strangely oppressive yet beautifully written story that leaves us floating in the abstract clouds of love and pain and death.

And then as we move on to Veronique Tadjo and Chike Unigwe, and eventually close the anthology with Wangui wa Goro, we realise that our notion of 'African love' as existing only in the harsh realities of life is in itself a stereotype.

* Annie Quarcoopome is a student of comparative literture at Williams College in the US.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/296/fespaco.jpgA biannual source of tremendous local pride, the largest cultural event on the continent, and the premiere pan-African film festival worldwide, FESPACO (Festival panafricain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou), is the destination of African film cinephiles, film and media industry professionals, actors, journalists and film critics, festival programmers, film students and filmmakers. The festival was created in 1969 and always held in Ouagadougou but after a government decree in 1972, FESPACO became an institution. The theme for the 20th edition of the 2007 festival is 'The Actor in the Creation and Promotion of African Films'.

Ouaga, a bustling, moped-saturated, smoldering capitol city is a paradise for lovers of African cinema. The city is awash with moviegoers and they get to intensely do it for almost ten days, the duration of the festival. The cinemas are filled with the Burkinabe (men, women and children) and visitors or festivaliers, a term coined by locals, soaking up African images and stories that will rarely be seen again albeit art-house programmes in the West or international African-themed festivals. The city is filled with wonderful statues and art work commemorating the spirit and history of FESPACO, most notably, the Place des Cineaste, a beautiful statue of film reels in the middle of a busy street. There are movie posters everywhere and festival t-shirts and memorabilia for sale on many corners. There is a FESPACO center that administers registration, fees and badges but it is utter confusion and a process that may mean an entire day in long queues, limited bilingual assistance and technological support. The process is frustrating and made worse by Western management visions of operating as if we are in Paris or New York, so given the lack of reliable technological infrastructure and specialized skills in the city, it is unfair and again, overlooking the benefit of being absorbed in an African cinephile city that despite many limitations, strives to continually showcase African filmmakers more than any other city in the world so be prepared to grab a Brakina or Castel (very good local beers) and chill.

This was my first FESPACO, and my first visit to this land-locked nation with such cinematic pride. There are two lasting impressions. The first is how the festival is so incredibly male-dominated and after all these years no programming has developed to showcase African women directors, provide a forum or special film retrospective of the few African women directors who have a body of work. The second is the reality of the heavy Francophone weight pervasive throughout the festival, informing its structure; almost exclusively funded by largely French (France) and European resources, the tension between the Anglophone and Francophone cinema and television community is evident. French global television network TV5Monde, ARTE, Organisation International de la Francophonie, and Radio France International were everywhere; and a lack of fluency in French is a critical deficit, reducing film screening choices almost in half because few movies have English subtitles. The lack of a translation mechanism and financial resources for subtitling is an ongoing issue and greatly diminishes the 'international' perspective considerably. The dominance of France was evident everywhere with the legions of French youth; French television news media types running around with microphones and television camerapersons in tow; and those 'teeth-sucking' moments during the film trailer when, for many of the films screened, a beautiful black woman with a bright smile walks down the street, singing and casually handing white passerby’s chilled bottles of Coca-Cola from a large shoulder bag then the screen goes to a slick TV5Monde graphic! Every screening I attended, the audience made their distaste loud and clear. And I thought only Americans were bombarded with trailers of crass junk food commercials at the cinema!

Thus the 'pan' in pan-African does not completely exist and has been a constant complaint since FESPACO’s beginning. Francophone African countries dominate the film programme and there are even fewer films representing the diaspora. The Paul Robeson Initiative, now known as Promoting Reel African Images (PRAI) was launched in recent years to address this issue and fill the gap and films included in the programme compete for the FESPACO Diaspora Prize, the Paul Robeson Award. The entire PRAI program was screened at CENASA (Centre national des arte du spectacles et de l’audiovisuel) but the same issue existed—the majority of the films were in English language with no French subtitles plus the location seemed to be segregate the programme from the more popular, centrally located cinemas which the Burkinabe frequented.

But the opportunity to witness thousands of African film lovers in one place is a sight to behold. The magnitude of the pride is evident during the opening and closing ceremonies where visitors and the Burkinabe filled the stadium to capacity and enjoy live music, drummers, traditional dancers, horseback riders in honor of the Yennega Stallion legend, awards presented and ending with glorious fireworks.

There are five air-conditioned, technically-equipped cinemas with small bars and cafes throughout Ouaga to view the festival programme: Cine Neerwaya; the Centre Culturel George Melies, the French Cultural Center (CCGM) which houses the International Market of African television and cinema (MICA) during FESPACO; CENASA; and my favorite, Cine Burkina, right on a busy shopping street in the heart of town. Films are running concurrently so the day and evening is spent walking along the dusty streets, stopping to eat and drink while waiting for the next film to start. And when a new film opens, two very young FESPACO representatives walk out on stage accompanied by a drummer and the director. The film, and director are introduced in French and English and the director is allowed to speak about the movie before the screening. That’s the spirit!

Hotel Independence is the unofficial headquarters and where the majority of festivaliers lodge; it has enjoyed much better days, the food is overpriced and not very good; tiny rooms; the lobby is cramped and filled with local vendors, a currency exchange booth and four terminal business centers so it is hardly conducive to the swell of people wanting to hangout and network; and poolside is poorly lit with bats swooping around at night. But the evening entertainment on a small band stage near the pool was not to be missed; a wonderful band featured a drumming troupe, excellent female vocalists and a dancer on stilts grooving to the beautiful acoustic guitar, high life, bossa nova, R&B and American pop music.

Alongside the film screenings were a number of workshops and screenings sponsored by La Guilde Africaine Des Realisateurs Producteurs (The Guild of African Directors and Producers) known as 'La Guilde', an initiative of young, progressive African filmmakers, many living in Europe and Africa, defining a new and alternative approach and strategy to the old-guard, pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FESPACI); workshops included panels and roundtables on African film distribution, technology and cinema, globalisation and cinema and the role of women in African film. And to further demonstrate Burkina Faso’s commitment to sustaining FESPACO and supporting, teaching and training African filmmakers—on the continent and throughout the diaspora—Gaston Kabore, the eminent Burkinabe director and former Secretary General of FESPACO, established Imagine Film Training Institute a multi-story building described as a space for the transmission of knowledge and expertise that houses an African film repository, screening and conference rooms, editing decks and beautiful outdoor eating and lounge areas. A huge portrait of Paul Robeson—a lifelong pan-Africanist and champion of celebrating African culture worldwide.

The highlight and a somewhat tongue-in-cheek moment since I had visited the gravesite of assassinated former President, Thomas Sankara earlier in the week, was the celebration at the Presidential Palace at Kos-Yam of Blaise Compaoré, current President of Burkina Faso, given the well-known rumors about his role in the death of his predecessor. Many people throughout the diaspora refuse to attend the festival or even visit the country for this reason. The 'Palace' based far outside of the city, features manicured green grounds, waterfalls and formidable contemporary buildings (I was informed that this was not his only residence!), rivaling anything in Chicago or Los Angeles. The contrast, from the surrounding arid, drought-prone landscape, enormous poverty and lack of basic services is upsetting. But guests dined on roasted suckling pig, goat, champagne, very good wines and trays of fruits and fancy desserts as Compaoré and his wife Chantal and dignitaries seated in the dais as we were all entertained by various singers and musicians. Well known, jazz saxophonist, Manu Dibango, honorary president of FESPACO was honored during the event.

The FESPACO film programme included many categories of film: feature length, short, animation, documentary and special programmes: Focus on Morocco; Retrospective of Malian Cinema; Focus on South African Documentaries; and TV & Video—Series and Sitcoms.

The 2007 FESPACO Grand Prize Winners, Ezra, directed by Newton Aduaka, was the only Nigerian film in competition and was the winner of the Golden Stallion of Yennenga. The film is the heartbreaking story of a child soldier on trial and suffering memory loss and the realisation that he may have murdered his parents.

Les Saignantes directed by Jean-Pierre Bekolo won the Silver Stallion of Yennenga. Besides Bamako, Les Saignantes was my FESPACO favorite. Bekolo, Cameroonian-born and living in Paris is an active member of La Guilde and created the most provocative, visually stunning story of corruption, sexuality and supernatural power all taking place in Yaoundé in 2025. Nothing like his work has been done on screen from an African director. Les Saignantes is groundbreaking and represents a new cinematic form and a completely different way of telling a universal story.

Daratt ('dry season') directed by Mahammat Salleh Haroun (Chad) won the Bronze Stallion of Yennenga.

Le president a-t-il le Sida, ('does the President have Aids?') directed by Arnold Antonin (Haiti) won the FESPACO Paul Robeson Diaspora Prize.

Other standouts for me were:
Shoot The Messenger directed by Ngozi Onwurah (United Kingdom); one of the few women directors represented at FESPACO. She has a brave, satirical and controversial comedy examining race and self-image set in London, England.

La Vague Blanche ('the white wave') directed by Mohamed Ali El Mejoub (Morocco); beautifully shot, mesmerising, and weaves two doomed, desperate men together. In Arabic with English subtitles.

The Mother House directed by François Verster (South Africa); a poignant and troubling but ultimately hopeful documentary of a young girl, Miché, who is followed along with her HIV positive mother and grandmother for four years.

The JuJu Factory directed by Balafu Bakupa-Kayinda (France); an excellent film that provides a slice of life in the contemporary Congolese community of Brussels and the story of a writer who refuses to give into a 'European-African-village-travel-guide'.

Bamako directed by Abderrahmnane Sissako (Mauritania); also an active member of La Guilde has given us one of the most important African films in years. Sissako tells a very simple story of a marriage falling apart against the backdrop of a court trial indicting the World Bank. A masterpiece! Danny Glover produced the film and has a small role.

Salud! Directed by Connie Fields (USA)
Barakat! Directed by Djamila Sahraoui (Algeria)
Teranga Blues by Senegalese director Moussa Sene-Absa (Senegal)
Homeland directed by Jacqueline Kalimunda (Rwanda)
Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican directed by Claire Andrade-Watkins (USA)

FESPACO is amazing, overwhelming at times but fulfilling on many levels, I’ll sum it up in the words of director Newton Aduaka, stated during his emotional speech upon winning the Grand Prize, 'I produced the film (Ezra) in a pan-Africanist spirit'. Most of us attended FESPACO in a pan-Africanist spirit.

Unfortunately, the majority of the films will not be seen beyond the continent. But they hold a special place and moment in time for us—each FESPACO is a visual documentation of African history and contemporary life and times and I am immensely proud of having been a part of the 20th Edition. Fewer and fewer movie theatres exist in sub-Saharan Africa, distribution outlets are elusive and drying up, as are funding streams, but an indelible film spirit endures and a maverick group has emerged: insistent, bold, pan-Africanist, transnational and unwilling to do things as they have been done - the African cinema lion is ready to roar!

* Del Hornbuckle is a writer, jazz/electronica-head and librarian lives in Washington, DC.

* Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org

* FESPACO website

Strife by Shimmer Chinodya is a rich and densely written novel that provides a dark exposé of the tension between modernity and tradition, and deep insights into culture in Zimbabwe in the 21st century.

Strife is a rich and densely written novel that provides a dark exposé of the tension between modernity and tradition, and deep insights into culture in Zimbabwe in the 21st century. Chinodya explores the powerful draw that conflicting ideologies exercise over an emerging middle-class that at once yearns for autonomy and unconsciously desires the irresponsibility of an all-pervading destiny. Tracing the Gwanagara’s roots back over a century, Chinodya interweaves past and the present, juxtaposing incidents never forgotten or resolved, revealing how memory becomes an actor in lived time.

A large family grows up in Gweru. Their father aspires to be an enlightened Christian man; he sees his children through school and college where they do well. But as adults, they are struck by illness. Who is to blame? Who is to cure these ailments? What wrongs have they committed to offend the ancestors? How can atonement be made? Can education, science and medicine provide any solution? Their mother, the moon huntress, seeks out the answers and the cures in traditional beliefs and customs.

Shimmer Chinodya is one of Zimbabwe’s most celebrated post-independence literary writers. He won The Commonwealth Writers Prize, Africa region in 1990, for his critically acclaimed novel, Harvest of Thorns. His works of fi ction include Chairman of Fools (Weaver Press 2005) Dew in the Morning (1982), Tale of Tamari (2004) and Can we Talk and Other Stories (1998), which was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2000. Chinodya has received numerous writing fellowships. From 1995- 1997, he was visiting professor in creative writing and African literature at the University of St Lawrence.

Home
I have to draw maps
I have to ride my feet like chariots
I have to see like water
I have to speak like stone and rock
I have to love like mother tongue
I have to wrestle with the bones of my dead
I have to wade through the sand, leap through the dungeons
So I feel
So I feel as I wander through my life
Not knowing me, not knowing now
See my mirrors and my footprints dance,
My mirrors and my footprints dance
Behind me
Me my back to the wind posing
in the cracks of my winded smile
see me search my trembling,
gut my spine a knot, my life not knowing
see my questions barren black shoving marks
against my wall
burning holes in charcoal dreams
I am here but seldom seen
I am here
I am…

I have to draw maps
I have to ride my feet like chariots
I have to speak like stone and rock
I have to see like water
I have to love like mother tongue
I have to wrestle with the bones of my dead
I have to wade through the sand, leap through the dungeon
So I know
So I know the duststamp footfall
A murmuring earth call
Knowing where, knowing how
Knowing me, knowing now
I have to draw maps
To make the swindler mute
To sound the horn
To speak by using my own tongue
And annihilate the mutant words

I have to ride my feet like chariots
To win her back
To find her soles/souls and grow my own
In the new places
I call home

I have to wrestle with the bones of my dead
So I may live here in their stead
Carrying their wisdom on the lean road
Carrying the lesson by which I am lead

I have to wade through the sand, leap through the dungeon
To find her footprint, to find her footprint
To make a footprint, to make a footprint
Of my own
So I will know
That I
am home.

Using a vivid mosaic of public controversies and ethnographic vignettes, Fassin works through the controversial denials of South African president Thabo Mbeki and the precautionary policies of his health ministers within histories of apartheid, epidemics which justified segregation, and secret biological warfare plans of Project Coast, as well as wider battles over the ethical protocols of Aids testing and widening inequalities."-Michael M.J.Fischer, author of _Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice.

In this book, France's leading medical anthropologist takes on one of the most tragic stories of the global Aids crisis-the failure of the ANC government to stem the tide of the Aids epidemic in South Africa. Didier Fassin traces the deep roots of the AIDS crisis to apartheid and, before that, to the colonial period. One person in ten is infected with HIV in South Africa, and President Thabo Mbeki has initiated a global controversy by funding questionable medical research, casting doubt on the benefits of preventing mother-to-child transmission, and embracing dissidents who challenge the viral theory of Aids. Fassin contextualises Mbeki's position by sensitively exploring issues of race and genocide that surround this controversy. Basing his discussion on vivid ethnographical data collected in the townships of Johannesburg, he passionately demonstrates that the unprecedented epidemiological crisis in South Africa is a demographic catastrophe as well as a human tragedy, one that cannot be understood without reference to the social history of the country, in particular to institutionalised racial inequality as the fundamental principle of government during the past century.

The African Centre for Democracy and Human Rights Studies (ACDHRS) will hold an African Human Rights Book Fair in Accra, Ghana starting May 12 to 14, 2007. The book fair will take place on the occasion of the 41st Ordinary session of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. It seeks to support networking amongst NGOs through exchange of materials, information sharing and publicity of activities on human rights advocacy. Attached are two brochures (English and French versions) which provide additional details on the book fair.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o is a controversial man! I read some chapters from his Decolonizing the Mind and it was deeply thought-provoking. It made me think especially about what I want to call myself. Let me explain. Most bloggers consider themselves authors, writers. I call myself a writer. (A soon to be published African writer! Am I?

I suppose the answer to that would depend on how I define an African writer. For me, anyone who writes and is African, is an African writer. We will not go into what it means to be African because that is a whole different kettle of fish. So if I am African but set my story in space with a Marsian protagonist, I am still an African writer. But if Bill Gates wrote a novel set in Accra with a spear-wielding 'native' that would not make him an African writer. I think this explanation would go down well with most. It’s simply a question of geography and/or race. Or is it? Ngugi doesn’t think so. Indeed according to him, I am not an African writer at all!

'…"the whole uncritical acceptance of English and French as the inevitable medium for educated African writing is misdirected, and has no chance of advancing African literature and culture...until African writers accepted that any true African literature must be written in African languages, they would merely be pursuing a dead end."'

This is a quote from Obi Wali who Ngugi agrees with in his book. Ngugi himself says:

'What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?'

So what this means for me, by Ngugi’s assesment of an African who writes in English, is that I am actually an Afro-European writer. As someone who does not identify in any way with Europe, I find this hard to swallow. The implications are a little too disturbing. The category 'African writers' is now reserved for an elite few who can write in their local languages. There is also the practical aspect to consider. How many people can read your local language? For many of us, our languages are not internationally spoken. But Ngugi has stopped writing in English, opting for his mother tongue, Gikuyu. So how does he circumvent the question of practicality? His books are translated. And that is where my problem lies.

Ngugi’s main contention is that language is a carrier of culture. It expresses and communicates ideas in a way in which a foreign language cannot. It also shapes our world view. If there is no word for 'bomb' in your language, chances are you wouldn’t think much about bombs if that was the only language you knew. So clearly the 'African-ness' of your work would be lost if you wrote in English. But think of how much can be lost in translation. Is this all just mental gymnastics then? Is Ngugi talking the talk but not walking the walk? Am I really an African writer, especially since my first language is English? And then there are those writers who would, under my criteria, fall under the category of 'African writer' but say they are not. To what extent does self-definition shape the work you produce?

* Annie Quarcoopome is from Ghana and is studying Comparative Literature in the US. She is a blogger at Blacklooks.org

what if you were a flower
and your roots were lodged
on that part of earth that
separates Israel from Palestine?

would you give your scent to Israel
your beauty to Palestine
or withhold both?

what if you were a bee
and at some point in your buzzing about
you stopped to draw nectar
from the flower rooted on the edge
of the green line that separates Israel from Palestine?

would you make your nest
in Tel Aviv maybe Bethlehem, or on no strip at all?

what if you were a honey farmer
and you made a living selling
honey that you got from the hive
in which lived the bee
that got its nectar from the flower
that struggled for six days to sprout
and take root along the frame of the wall
that separates Israel from Palestine?

would you sell its texture to Israel
its sweetness to Palestine,
or forfeit the sale?

what if you were a tongue
and on you rolled the taste of the honey
you bought from the farmer
who got it from the hive, in which lived the bee
that got its nectar from the flower (watered by blood)
and rooted on that part of earth
that separates fear from hope?

would you savour its sweetness
spew out its bitterness, or plain ignore the taste in between?

what if…

* Lindiwe Nkutha is a poet, storyteller and film maker based in South Africa