by Eckhard Weber
On Sunday, March 30th, 2014, three films from different countries and historical periods were on the program at Arsenal, the two features MUEDA, MEMORIA E MASSACRE (Ruy Guerra, Mozambique 1979) and COME BACK, AFRICA (Lionel Rogosin, South Africa/USA 1958), and the short film MATSOGO (Lerato Shadi, South Africa 2013), which was shown between them. The films were accompanied by introductions and discussions moderated by the two curators of the Visionary Archive “It all depends” series, Marie-Hélène Gutberlet and Tobias Hering.
A group of South African artists were also in attendance as guests, who were in Berlin from the end of February to April 2014 as artists in residence for the On Fire project series. On Fire, a project by the Constanza Macras/DorkyPark dance company curated by Constanza Macras and Tamara Saphir, examines the situation of LGBTI people (lesbians, gays, bi-, trans- and intersexuals) and activists in South Africa and questions gender and sexual identity norms and their construction. Several of the South African artists involved were present at the discussions at Arsenal: dancer, actress and choreographer Mmakgosi Kgabi, dancer and choreographer Mamela Nyamza, and dancer and choreographer Lucky Kele. In addition, video and performance artist Lerato Shadi presented her video piece MATSOGO.
“Mueda, memoria e massacre”
MUEDA, MEMORIA E MASSACRE (Mozambique 1979) was shot by Brazilian director Ruy Guerra (born 1931 in Mozambique) and was both one of the first feature-length films to be produced by the newly founded National Film Institute of the People’s Republic of Mozambique (INAC) and the country’s first feature film production following independence in 1975. At least two different cuts of the film exist, as the 35mm print that entered the Arsenal archive as part of the 1981 Berlinale Forum program differs from the print in the INAC archive in Maputo in several scenes. The German subtitled print from the Arsenal archive was shown at the screening on March 30th, 2014 and supplemented on this occasion with additional live subtitles in English, which were at points more detailed than the original German ones. The differences between the two edits of the film remain a subject of research within the Visionary Archive project.
MUEDA, MEMORIA E MASSACRE is about the uprising against the Portuguese colonial government in Mueda in the district of Cabo Delgado in northern Mozambique that was brutally put down, a key historical event for the independent Mozambique. The Portuguese colonial rulers who had controlled Mozambique since the time of the conquistadores exploited the country’s resources for centuries and forced the indigenous population into slavery. Well into the 20th century, the local population were oppressed by means of forced labor and kept in poverty and hardship by the levying of high taxes in the form of natural produce. In June 1960, several delegations of the Mozambican population, including many living in exile in Tanzania, demanded independence from the local Portuguese colonial administrator in Mueda. The administrator informed the governor and on June 16, 1960, the protests were brutally put down by the military. Around 600 demonstrators were killed in the process. The trauma of this massacre was later seen as triggering the anti-colonialist fight for liberation which became an armed struggle in 1964 and only came to an official end with the 1974 revolution in Portugal, thus paving the way to independence. Even during the fight for independence, the Mueda massacre was re-enacted each year by non-professional actors at the place it happened, initially in secret and unnoticed by the Portuguese colonial government, and later, following independence, as an official remembrance event for audiences in Mueda, who themselves equally formed part of the proceedings. Ruy Guerra placed a performance of this reenactment at the heart of his film, which he structured according to an external narrative stance. He also edited interview sequences into the events, in which various contemporary witnesses, including one of the 1960 demonstrators, a policeman and a nurse all have their say.
The film visualizes the reenactments as an act of collective cultural remembrance, an annual ritual, a memorial constructed via performance and a means of coming to terms with the terrible events. Many of those participating in the reenactment actually experienced the massacre themselves and knew the collaborators in the population. The reenactment by non-professional actors reconstructs how the colonial power and its executive organs bullied and humiliated the population in many different ways and breached fundamental human rights. Physical violence is used when the given tasks were not fulfilled, with people arrested at random when offering even the slightest resistance. In the process, the Portuguese and their helpers in the population, from whose ranks the police and army staff are recruited, are caricatured in grotesque fashion. One absurd distancing technique involves one of the colonial administrator’s secretaries wearing a long white false nose and a false stomach under his uniform (perhaps a sarcastic response to the deplorable tradition of black facing or a reference to avant-garde theatre and film practices in 1970s Brazil?). The soldiers and policemen are depicted as being stupid and groveling, only there to carry out orders. A priest is summoned to baptize the delegates of the newly forming resistance. In this way, different scenes showing the actions of the colonial power and the course of the protests are reconstructed and the mechanisms of colonial repression exposed in vivid manner. Individual delegations of the fight for independence appear, including a group of farmers who lodge a complaint with the colonial administration with respect to their land rights. When the protests spread and the demonstrators persist with their demands, the military open fire and shoot into the crowd at random. During the performance, both the actors and the audience chant slogans used during the independence struggle: “Freedom and Human Dignity!”, “The Battle of the People is a Just One”, “A Hero is Anyone who Gives their Life”, “Long live FreLiMo (Frente da Libertação de Moçambique)!!, “The Struggle is Not Over”.
Alongside the collective process of coming to terms with the events in Mueda, it is the slogan “The Struggle is Not Over” that forms this film’s central message. Many of the actors and audience members involved in the restaging lost relatives during the battle for independence and experienced great suffering. In addition to remembering the victims, one of the film’s narratives also conveys the insight that the country has indeed achieved independence following this painful journey of deprivation. And that this must continue to be defended.
During the discussion, the South African guests emphasized the many parallels to the fight against the Apartheid regime in South Africa which they saw reverberate in Mueda, memoria e massacre, including the 1976 Soweto uprising that was brutally put down. It was the huge significance of the reenactment as a collective ritual that they were able to relate to in particular both personally and socially, given that the reenactment is equally about an ongoing healing process for those who collaborated with the oppressors and continue to live in this society. This too is the message behind “The Struggle is Not Over” slogan repeatedly heard in the film: the painful process of grappling with these traumatic events does not stop. Ignoring or forgetting them will be of little help.
“Matsogo”
The short film MATSOGO (South Africa 2013) by South African performance and video artist Lerato Shadi shows the artist’s hands crumbling a piece of chocolate cake over the New York Times, opened at the stock market page. She forms a triangular shape from the resultant crumbs that is similar to the original piece of cake but still something new. This wordless portrayal, only accompanied by two children’s songs, challenges the perception of forms and meanings and at the same time poses questions as to economic and political self-determination.
Children are told not to play with food. Yet this is exactly what Lerato Shadi is doing in her video with a piece of cake, which enables her to create a confoundingly similar form from it. Not one single crumb is lost during this transformation, with each individual crumb being carefully picked up and kneaded into the new form. Shadi’s film offers a whole wealth of different interpretations: does the cake stand for the African continent’s resource? Or for the continent itself, which is still the target of manipulations that carry the mark of post-colonialism? Who has access to resources in Africa? “We don’t just want a piece of cake, we want the whole bakery” was also thrown in during the discussion (a quote from the distribution battles in 1970s Berlin). Concrete reference was also made to South Africa, where the still striking economic inequality is structurally related to the consequences of Apartheid, such as in the education systems or in unaddressed land ownership issues. The scandal surrounding South African President Zumas’s estate in Nkandla in the province of KwaZulu-Natal was also mentioned, where more than 200 million Rand (15 million Euro) of public funds were used for construction measures on his property, including a gigantic swimming pool and an amphitheatre. Lerato Shadi’s short film about a piece of cake thus formulates controversial questions about economic freedom and equality.
“Come Back, Africa”
COME BACK, AFRICA (South Africa/USA 1958) is an important independent film shot by American director Lionel Rogosin which undertakes a critical examination of the South African Apartheid system. It grapples with the fate of a black worker, with racism and thus also with inhumanity, brutality and massive breaches of human rights. Rogosin shot in secret in and around Johannesburg using non-professional actors. The individual unedited rolls of film were immediately sent out of the country. Rogosin managed to convince the South African authorizes that he was working on a documentary about the black population’s musical cultures. Numerous music scenes did indeed find their way into the film, with various different street musicians being shown, including a gumboot dance and a scene with the young Miriam Makeba in a shebeen.
Zachariah, the film’s male protagonist, undergoes a sort of odyssey through racist South African society. He works in one of Johannesburg’s gold mines and first lives in a worker’s hostel, separated from his family in the country. He is not allowed to move freely in Johannesburg. The difficult, dangerous work underground is so badly paid that Zachariah also looks for other ways of making money, whereby he is humiliated, exploited and slandered by his white bosses. At a garage, he receives abuse for being an alleged communist and is fired, is found guilty of unproved sexual harassment in a hotel, and continually bullied in a white household. Without any rights of his own, he is at the mercy of the moods and caprices of his white superiors and their surroundings. At the same time, the film shows both the violence in the townships stemming from the frustrated, bitter young men living there and the secret meetings held by critical black intellectuals in shebeen. In one of the shebeen scenes, the various positions of black resistance against the Aparthheid system are explored: the whites in South Africa stir up the blacks against one another, keep them down and treat them like underage children.
Zachariah’s wife follows him to Johannesburg with their children and works as a home help there. The servants’ garden house resembles an army barracks. Zachariah visits her and is arrested by the police on a whim because his work and residency permits are not longer valid and he is thus breaking the restrictive passport laws. While he is in prison, Vinah must fight off various attempts at rape, also on the part of white policemen, and is eventually murdered by one of the criminals from the township. Upon his release from prison, Zachariah discovered his murdered wife in her house in Sophiatown.
COME BACK, AFRICA is still disturbing even today in its unflinching portrayal of the occurrences in Apartheid South Africa. Although Lionel Rogosin clearly takes the side of the oppressed black population in the film, COME BACK, AFRICA often receives somewhat mixed reactions today. “Well-meaning but perhaps not told in the right manner” would be a diplomatic way of describing the reactions during the screening at Arsenal in March 30th – there was also fierce resistance to the film and how it tells its story. The discussion made clear the lack of clarity in Lionel Rogosin’s position and that his project to show inequality and politically motivated violence runs the risk of perpetrating equally contemptuous approaches. It also made clear that one cannot completely elude prejudices, hierarchies and clichés in historical terms, even if they are meant to be being criticized. While the guests from South Africa did indeed see the fates and life stories of their grandparents and parents reflected in COME BACK, AFRICA to a certain extent, they also saw racist prejudices being reproduced in cinematic terms. In their opinion, black men were depicted as brutal alcoholics, with even the song by Miriam Makeba being about a drunk lover, while the protagonist was a naive construction; there is no clear voice to balance out the clichéd presentation. When it comes down to it, the black population is also not given a voice here either. It is only in certain parts of the shebeen scenes involving the people from DRUM magazine where tangible black positions are formulated. The structural violence of the system is thus not sufficiently exposed, it is only the street scenes in the high-rise canyons of Johannesburg that indicate the wealth of the white minority and thus also the unequal distribution of capital.
The discussion at Arsenal shows that from today’s critical perspective, even a committed filmmaker like Lionel Rogosin in the 1950s was still caught up in the racist thinking of his time, despite it being precisely this sort of thinking and forms of action he wanted to expose. The discussion also show how differentiated and critical the view from today is and how different perspectives become when they come into contact with the views and experiences of South Africans from the post-Apartheid period, as was the case during the discussions as part of the March, 30th 2014 event at Arsenal. The debate following the screening of the films also arguably showed the relevance of a project such as Visionary Archive and such group film screenings as far as providing a forum in Berlin for current discussions surrounding African film and the historical, political and cultural debates that go long with it is concerned. Inviting guests from the film’s countries of origins provides an opportunity to present multi-faceted positions on the films, positions that the European and Euro-centric gaze are not capable of generating by themselves. Alongside providing exciting insights into African cinema, it is this which is the most valuable thing about the Visionary Archive events.
