BY MULUGEA GUDETA
The Festival of Pan-African Cinema (FESPACO) that took place between February 25 to March 4 in the Burkinabe Capital Ouagadougou, could not come at a symbolically better time as the present when the 36th ordinary meeting of the African Union (AU) has just completed its deliberations here in Addis Ababa. Ethiopia and the entire black race across the world celebrated the 127th anniversary of the Victory of Adwa just last week.
This may also provide an opportunity for Africans to reflect both on the cultural aspects or significance of both events while putting Adwa and the cultural of artistic and cultural resistance it has generate- although little recognized- in its proper perspectives.
The cultural significance of the Victory of Adwa to the development African and Ethiopian culture may be huge but little attention is given to this aspect while dozens of studies have appeared dealing with its political, military, economic and social contributions. Here in Ethiopia, speakers at various forums have been appreciating one particular aspect of the positive impact Adwa has on women’s role during times of conflicts.
They were saying that women played a no less significant role than the one played by their male counterparts before, during and after the war. Many women were said to have borne the brunt of the logistic aspects of the war in terms of feeding the fighters and encouraging the faint-hearted during engagements.
Although the post-Adwa period was a time of glory and national celebration, women who contributed to the war efforts were quickly forgotten and relegated to their traditional roles as housekeepers.
Apart from the numerous poems, songs, dances and novels Adwa continues to inspire singers, poets, dancers, novelists and movie makers to capture that immortal and historic moment. Adwa keeps on reverberating in the world of international culture as well. History is proving that Adwa is indeed more than an Ethiopian victory, more than an African victory but also a victory of black people everywhere in the world. What is more amazing is that Adwa is gaining more recognition and providing more attraction with the passage of time. More than the American War of Independence, the battle of Adwa is continuing to inspire more people and writers more subject matters to pen the stories of Adwa from various perspectives.
There are numerous studies of Adwa highlighting its political, economic, social and other aspects, rare are the cultural implications of that moment for the development of black Consciousness and Black Resistance against colonialism, neocolonialism and imperialism. Black filmmakers have not yet fully exploited the themes of Adwa from different perspectives. There is an epic movie lurking within Adwa and waiting to be turned into a living and moving battle of will between colonialists and the free people who refused to be subjugated to oppression and dehumanization.
Haile Gerima may be the one and only filmmaker who showed legitimate obsession with the theme of the epic battle of Adwa. His cultural or cinematographic interpretations of Adwa are not confined to Ethiopia. His vision is broader than Africa. Haile has a particularly broad outlook on the black struggle, black consciousness and the lasting influence Adwa has on black consciousness movement from the black struggles from the time of black slavery in America to the ongoing “Black Lives Matter” movement. Its spirit is guiding black people in the many wars of independence in Africa to the “No More” movement in Ethiopia against foreign intervention.
Discussing the cultural implications or influences of Adwa on modern cinema, we are inevitably led to Haile Gerima’s movie that is both pioneering and militant. According to sources, “Haile Gerima is an Ethiopian filmmaker who lives and works in the United States. He is a leading member of the L.A. Rebellion film movement also known as the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers.
His films have received wide international acclaim. Since 1975, Haile has been influential film professor at Howard University in Washington D.C. he is first known for Sankofa (1993) which a 1993 film centered on the transatlantic slave trade. “The world Sankofa derives its meaning from the Ghanaian Akan language which means “to go back, look for and gain wisdom power and hope. The word Sankofa stresses the importance of one not drifting too far away from one’s past in order to progress in the future.
Gerima’s film showed the importance not having people of African descent drift far away from their African roots. “Gerima used the journey of the character Mona to show how the African perception of identity included recognizing one’s roots and ‘returning to one’s roots” This statement obviously brings to mind the 1977 American film entitled “Roots” which is “a film based on Alex Haley’s book and tells the story African teen Kunta Kunte, brought to America to be enslaved, and the generation of his family.”
The difference between “Roots” and “Sankofa” may be thematically small because both deal with the black experience of enslavement. While Roots, deals with the entire long process of slave trade from Africa to America or the displacement of black African Americans from their land of origins, Sankofa is smaller in perspective in the sense that it deals with the experience of a single character in the painful process of rediscovery of his identity through struggle.
Adwa has also inspired Hollywood, the world most venerated and greatest movie making machine, to use allusive scenes and stories to indirectly refer to Ethiopia as a country never colonized by foreign powers. Some critics say that Adwa provided inspiration for making the Hollywood blockbuster movie, namely “Black Panther”, a film based somewhere in East Africa in a country that has never been colonized and projecting Africans’ new power through sometimes supernatural and in other times post-modern cinematic devices that emphasize on a futuristic Africa of many possibilities.
As historian and film critic D.B. Connoly said that “Black Panther was a powerful fictional analogy for real life struggles that tap into 500-year old history of African-descended people imagining freedom, land and national autonomy.” Another critic Carl Wallace said that in contrast earlier Black superhero films Black Panther is steeped very specifically into and purposefully in its Blackness…Wakanda would become a “promised land” for future generations of Black Americans “untroubled by the criminal horrors of our current American existence.”
The struggle of Black Americans against racial and political oppression is often captured by Hollywood. Despite the fictional nature of these films, they have depicted the realities of oppression and the urge for freedom. Nowadays, the struggle of Black people against the modern oppressors has assumed global dimension and this is no doubt a legacy bestowed on the present generations of blacks by the gallant Ethiopian freedom fighters who showed the way to the world and served as inspiration to present and future generations.
However, the legacy of Adwa is not yet fully depicted in an epic masterpiece of the silver screen. Cinematically speaking, an epic film about Adwa would be more meaningful than say, Sergey Einstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” which is about Russian seamen’s rebellion against the tsarist order that ushered in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. However an epic about Adwa would be a sweeping statement about the beginning of the struggle of all black people in the world against neocolonialism and imperialism.
This is the film we should encourage our talented filmmakers to start thinking about with courage and inevitable glory. That will certainly be an epic worthy of Adwa which is the harbinger of global black resistance in the struggle for the promised land of black people everywhere.
The Ethiopian Herald March 10/2023
