The first thing one senses in Safi Faye’s MAN SA YAY (I, Your Mother, 1980) is the pressure. A pressure so palpable, an eventual combustion is anticipated. Through a series of letters from home, notably from his mother, we hear of the life Moussa has left behind in Senegal. In Berlin, we observe his current routine as a student working odd jobs. Faye, an ethnologist and filmmaker, presents a conveyor belt of challenges experienced by Moussa, Omar, Babacar and their course-mates while abroad.
The weight of their responsibilities back home is not lessened by distance or unemployment, rather it is heightened by constant material demands. In Germany, despite trying their best to assimilate, the interrogations persist: “Why are you here?” “When will you return home?”
The migrants’ presence in Europe is not without purpose. Moussa and his friends are studying for degrees in hydraulic engineering and electrical engineering at the Technische Universität Berlin. Their goal is to gain their degrees—operating on the belief that foreign degrees boost access to better employment opportunities—and then return home, empowered to eliminate the problems plaguing their communities and to contribute to an equitable society.
As one of the students points out, it is important to contextualise this flow of migration to Europe within the complex domestic situation that many hope to escape. This condition is referenced in the correspondence from Moussa’s family. We read of the most detailed minutiae of their daily lives while also learning of strikes, price hikes, and a conjunctivitis outbreak.
There is no avoiding the ubiquitous “misery” in the students’ conversations. Unemployment and a lack of career progression are not their only problems at home or in Germany. There is tension in every aspect of their previous lives: cultural, economic, and socio-political. In Senegal, press censorship, staff lay-off and business closures were rife in the twenty years since independence in 1960, no thanks to detrimental economic policies by the government. In the ‘70s, the country received its first IMF loan and would be the first African nation to accept the debilitating conditions it required.
Unfriendly agricultural industrialisation policies had long affected local farmers, and life in most villages had become distressing. Faye addresses a similar theme in her award-winning film KADDU BEYKAT (1975) about rural life in her hometown, showing the effects of misguided state policies, including the imposition of single-crop production on farmers and the discarding of traditional farming techniques. According to one farmer in the film, politics brings him no benefit and has ensured he can have no more than a meal a day for six months in a year. KADDU BEYKAT was initially banned in Senegal.
In MAN SA YAY’s opening scene, Moussa is gawked at by white passers-by, young and old; Safi Faye herself had the same experience while studying and working (as a model and in film) in Paris.
With such economic disparities leading to gross underdevelopment in rural areas, many had no choice but to leave for Europe. As they soon discover, it is no utopia. In MAN SA YAY’s opening scene, Moussa is gawked at by white passers-by, young and old; Faye herself had the same experience while studying and working (as a model and in film) in Paris. She re-enacts this in her short film LA PASSANTE (1972).
Later in MAN SA YAY, Moussa picks up a discarded rotary phone on his way home and in voice-over says, “The telephone will never make a sound”. At home, he proceeds in an imaginary telephone conversation and delivers one of the film’s most poignant sequences: a right of reply to the enquiries about his presence in Berlin.
“You ask why I am here? I would like to reply.
You said I was too loud, and I reply that peace and silence reign here.
So what should I do now? I work. I study. I even learn German…
How long will I be here? When will I return to Africa? My placenta is buried in Africa.
Sooner or later, I shall return to the place where my second self dwells.
[…] I will not die here.”
Moussa’s pride is at stake, and he is intent on succeeding.
The scene recalls the line, “I hate a wasted journey—I am African”from Wole Soyinka’s poem “Telephone Conversation” (1962) satirising racial discrimination in the United Kingdom. None of these migrants is here as “a tourist” so subsequent scenes in the film foreground the stark reality of unemployment and homelessness that they face. Two words seal the migrants’ fate: “Nur für Deutsche.” Germans only.
The flux of migrants continues and many remain unwelcome in certain places. MAN SA YAY’s message is as relevant today as it was when the film was made. While the pressure from home and abroad may or may not lead to a combustion, the migrant perseveres in the pursuit of excellence: After a bad day of sales, Omar says to Babacar, “Pack your things. Let’s go home”. At that moment, “home” is not in Senegal; it is somewhere in Berlin, and would be for a while longer.
Aderinsola Ajao is based in Lagos, Nigeria. She is an arts manager and founder/curator of Screen Out Loud, an independent cinema programme.
