I've been meaning to check out the San Francisco Film Festival since I moved to this city, so what a better opportunity to finally do it than the movie Soul Power. It's a documentary about the African music festival organized in Kinshasa in 1974 to coincide with the famous boxing championship fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman known as Rumble in the Jungle. The idea behind the festival, which became known as Zaire '74 (Zaire is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, in case you're confused), was to connect African-American musicians with their African roots, and through a creative dialogue with local African musicians to rediscover their common heritage. The list of participating musicians included legends like James Brown, BB King, Miriam Makeba, Bill Withers, Celia Cruz and the Fania All-Stars, Franco or Tabu Ley. Basically, everyone that was someone at the time was invited to perform.
The promoters of the event, that was funded by a a Liberian businessman, had planned a movie about it. But when the businessman in question died in an accident about a month later the different parties involved started suing each other for the rights, preventing the footage from seeing the light for more than 20 years. Some of it was finally put together in 1996 in the documentary When we were kings, that was widely acclaimed and even won an Academy award. When we were kings focused on fight between Ali and Foreman and the buiding up to it, relegating the music festival to a small, supporting role. Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, the editor of the film, became increasingly interested in using that unused extensive footage of the concerts that he thought was amazing. He thought that it was a shame that the world was being deprived of enjoying all that great music, but it didn't seem like a good idea to release two films about the same events. So he thought about releasing the footage as a concert DVD, but somehow 14 more years had to pass until a project materialized.
Levy-Hinte, who answered some questions at the end of the screening, explained that his wake up call was the James Brown's death at the end of 2006. On the first days of 2007 he started making phone calls to access the reels, stored in a warehouse in Jersey. He said it took him six months to transfer all the footage for editing and to synchronize it with the sound, which had been recorded separately by a professional recording studio from LA that was moved to Kinshasa for the event. It was a painful process, but also cathartic.
The result is the outcome of a long labor of love and patience with the piles of material, and of a lot of back and forth editing. About half of the film is made of raw musical performance, while the rest shows the process of organizing the festival, behind the scenes reflections and anecdotes, and some minimal context scenes around the city that I thoroughly enjoyed. Here's a little trailer of the movie:
Soul Power is an extremely fun movie to watch for anyone that loves music, but also for many other reasons. I particularly enjoyed one of several monologues by Muhammand Ali right after landing in Kinshasa, in which he says that he expected Africa to be jungle and mud huts, but instead he found a big city with clean, paved streets and nice cars and businesses and hotels. He said that people in America think that in Africa they are savages, but the real savages are in New York city where every minute there are rapes, armed robberies and assaults. While he was saying all this the audience was laughing like it was a joke, but I really think that most of the musicians and boxing professionals on that trip were surprised by what they found. The fact that they were all staying at the best hotel in Kinshasa, the Intercontinental (today the Grand Hotel), probably helped.
The other famous upscale hotel in Kinshasa, the Memling, also makes a brief appearance in the movie, as the backdrop for some unidentified talented street musicians orderly playing while everybody politely stands around them. How different from today's Memling street, which seems to have become the favorite spot for all sorts of overpriced street vendors, hawkers and beggars.
Another gossipy anecdote from the director that I enjoyed was how Etta James threw a tantrum because the performance preceding hers by Fania All-Stars kept on going much longer than expected making her wait until 2 or 3 am, and so she decided not to perform out of spite. Yes, that's a woman with a temper, traveling all the way to Kinshasa to end up not performing.
Speaking of Fania All-Stars, in the movie they gave me the impression to be having the time of their lives and to be the ones more at ease in Zaïre. This was confirmed by the director after somebody asked him about how they regarded their Afro-Caribbean identity compared to their colleagues from the US. He said they didn't say anything specific on film, but that in every scene they were in they appeared extremely comfortable with their surrounding and feeling the most connected with the local musicians. Actually, some of my favorite scenes in the movie are with them: at the beginning, when all the musicians are traveling from New York to Kinshasa they start playing and singing inside the plane, and at one point Celia Cruz accompanies BB King's guitar drumming with her shoe on the ceiling of the plane. In another scene, the whole Fania crew goes to the art market (the famous marché des valeurs or voleurs, depending on your experiences), and they improvise an amazing drumming jam session with the vendors.
But beyond all these great music scenes and human details, I really enjoyed this movie for obvious reasons: because it captured an era that no longer exists. An era of dreams and hopes by African Americans reconnecting with their roots, and by Africans still fresh out of independence. An era in which Kinshasa looked like a paradise city of manicured white buildings and perfectly blue swimming pools, and in which it hosted world entertainment events that brought stars from far away lands.
A couple of weeks ago I attended a panel discussion at the Human Rights Center of UC Berkeley titled "Giving Voice to the Voiceless: Bringing Stories of Atrocities to the World" that was part of a two-day symposium on international criminal justice funded by the MacArtur Foundation. In the panel there were two journalists from conflict areas in Africa, Bill Oketch from Northern Uganda and Jack Kahorha from the Eastern DRC, as well as the regional director for Sub-Saharan Africa for the Global Fund for Women, Muadi Mukenge, who is also originally from the DRC. The moderator was Peter Eichstaedt, the Africa editor for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) who is also the author of the book "First Kill Your Family: Child Soldiers of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army".
The panel was supposed to focus on reporting about the International Criminal Court (ICC) in Central Africa, but they ended up talking about a lot of different things regarding their countries. It was inevitable for an audience of academics to ask about the solutions to the ongoing conflicts in Eastern Congo and Northern Uganda and about the politics of the region. Here are a few notes I took of the two-hour talk.
Peter Eichstaedt opened the session saying that international criminal justice is the only piece of good news that we get from Central Africa, where for example the LRA has been fighting for 20 years and has abducted about 40,000 children to become soldiers. The two African journalists said that most people in their home countries don't really understand why the ICC was created and why it was created so far away from the cases it judges. Jack Kahorha said, there have been so many criminal warlords in the DRC (and there still are) but only three of them have been sent to The Hague, so Congolese people are wondering why only three and why those three while others were reintegrated into the national Congolese army. Some people are also wondering why Presidential candidate JP Bemba was sent to The Hague but current President Joseph Kabila wasn't. The way the ICC justice works seems very confusing.
Muadi Mukenge said that although her first career of choice had been journalism, she is now working in women's rights because women are always the most affected by poverty and conflict. The moderator of course had to ask about sexual violence, and Kahorha said that the main problem in the DRC is corruption in the judiciary and the time prosecution takes. Mukenge agreed that access to justice and to the rule of law is a big problem for victims of rape in such countries, and that's why her organization is funding NGOs that pay the legal fees for women to seek trial, and also groups that provide economic empowerment through vocational training, for example. Mukenge also emphasized the importance of addressing not only the humanitarian issues, but also its roots so that need for assistance is not perpetuated. For her one of the big problems in the DRC is the politization of ethnicity by certain groups for their own gain, since nobody is born resenting another ethnicity, as well as arms proliferation.
Bill Oketch, who is only 26 and is based in the town of Lira in Northern Uganda, explained that he became a journalist to help end the conflict in his region after his brothers were killed by the LRA. He said he wanted to use the media to tell the world about the atrocities committed in Northern Uganda. However, he said that war is only one problem, but rebuilding the region is another problem. The ongoing cause of the conflict in Uganda is the disenfranchisement of the North, a long-time divide that has caused the population's resentment since 1986. So far the government has done nothing to end the conflict, which means rebuilding the North because if they don't the resentment will still be there and other people will pick up the fight even if the LRA disappeared.
Bill Oketch also talked about the problem of corruption in Uganda, an issue he has been researching quite a bit recently especially regarding the disappearance of World Bank funds that were supposed to be for Northern Uganda. But such stories are not so easy to publish because of government threats, abuse of power, absence of a system of checks and balances, etc. He also said that sometimes he gets a really good story from sources that put themselves in danger, and he uses his own money to research it and get to an internet cafe to send it, but then the media is not interested in publishing it because of legal implications of uncovering corruption scandals. The main problem for journalists in the DRC and Uganda is security, theirs and that of their sources. But another problem is that they often work at a loss.
Jack Kahorha is a very experienced journalist based in Goma, the capital of North Kivu, that has been in the profession for 13 years since the First Congo War, and who says that he gets arrested "all the time" for his reporting. But he quotes a Congolese saying that can be roughly translated as "the fly that dies on a wound can be proud", meaning that a journalist who dies while reporting does it with honor. Kahorha often works as a fixer for all types of foreign journalists, from freelancers to big names in large outlets such as Andersoon Cooper of the CNN. He said that most of these journalists never stay long enough to really have a full understanding of the ongoing situation, and that their stories tend to focus on the dead, but what about the survivors? What about life in Africa, not just death?
I just found out that the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center has uploaded an audio file of the whole discussion, which you can find here.
I read on the BBC News website that a judge in the US has given the green light to lawsuits against several companies accused of helping South Africa's repressive government to commit human rights violations during Apartheid years. IBM, Daimler, Ford, General Motors and Rheinmetall Group, the German parent of an armaments maker are among those corporations now expected to face demands for damages from thousands of Apartheid's victims. They argue that the firms supplied equipment used by the South African security forces to suppress dissent. It seems that initially more than 50 companies were sued, but the plaintiffs later decided to target fewer companies.
What I found the most interesting about this story is what it says at the end:
The US and South African governments have supported the companies' efforts to get the complaints dismissed. They argue that the legal action is damaging to international relations and may threaten South Africa's economic development.
It seems that the South African government doesn't want to look back and talk about the past, even less to accuse anyone of anything. As the blog Africa is a country so aptly put it, this ruling is breaking the spell of denial so many people seem to live in:
Nobody wants to talk about Apartheid. No one supported Apartheid. No one worked for Apartheid. Nobody should pay for Apartheid. At sometime everybody did resistance work. No one broke the law. Workers weren’t exploited. Everybody loved Nelson Mandela even when he was in jail for 27 years. The poverty, inequality and violence are now all the African National Congress’s fault. Well, a judge in New York City (yes, not in South Africa) has started chipping away at that myth. Somebody made profits. Somebody made a killing.
His comment made me think of the book I'm currently reading, titled The mirror at midnight - A South African journey. The author is Adam Hochschild, the author of the famous King Leopold's Ghost about the colonization and exploitation of the Belgian Congo. He wrote it in 1988, before Apartheid ended, during an extended trip around South Africa in which he interviewed a number of anti-Apartheid leaders and tracked some of the myths of white South African history. I've only read half of the book, but in one of the first chapters Hochschild describes the contradictions he observes in what's happening in the townships, with weekly deaths and constant fighting between opposition groups and government supported forces, and on white-dominated South African media. He is totally fascinated by how the media chooses to portray the country as a "land of summer folk" and "a country of white dreams", what he calls Sunny South Africa:
Why is it so fascinating to see white South Africans lavishing their attention on all this, when we know their country is such an unhappy time bomb? How, I think, can these people be so blind? And yet perhaps the very strength of their denial of South Africa's violent, precarious reality is testimony to some subconscious awareness of it. It is as if that constant drumbeat of sex scandals and rugby matches, rock concerts and horse races, is necessary to drown out the guilt and the dread that would be there otherwise.In this denial of reality I hear an echo of something familiar, as so often in South Africa. In the United States or Europe or anywhere else, we live in a world of proliferating nuclear weapons, a shrinking ozone shield, a looming greenhouse effect, and a widening gap between rich and poor nations. Are they not, also, time bombs everyone? But seldom do we linger long over these problems; almost all the time we would far rather read about, or watch, something else. And we do. White South Africans are not the only ones who prefer Sunny South Africa to the real world.
It seems that the Africa Rising party I described last month, combining food, music, art, and fashion - all with an African theme - has become a monthly event at Project One Gallery in San Francisco. And I just discovered that the two singers that I enjoyed the most that night have recently posted videos of their latest songs.
The first one is Black President by Sila and the Afrofunk Experience, a San Francisco-based band of 7 musicians led by Kenyan-born Victor Sila. As you've probably guessed, the song is dedicated to President Obama and is all about change. Catchy.
The second song is Yearning for home by Adé Siji, a British-Nigerian singer also based in San Francisco who is less funk and more soul, but still full of afrobeats. A very sensuous rythm.
