Originally published in Sisters of the Screen: Women of Africa on Film Video and Television by Beti Ellerson. Africa World Press, Trenton, NJ, 2000. Interview held at the African Literature Association Conference, East Lansing, Michigan, April 1997.
In another conversation, we talked about your identity as an African woman filmmaker based in London. You stated that you wanted to describe some of the ways that you find that portrayal problematic, especially when it is imposed externally.
As a black woman filmmaker, I get invited to a lot of different things and sometimes they want me to wear different hats. Sometimes I am a woman filmmaker and that's the priority at that particular event. Where it gets particularly muddy is when it has to do with being an African filmmaker. Because the way that black America has appropriated the word African American, the context in which people refer to Africa gets very muddy.
As a filmmaker who works out of London, the problems that I have making films are completely different to a woman who, say, lives in Nigeria, who lives and works in Zambia, or Zaire, or Tanzania. The problems that she has as a filmmaker are completely different to the problems that I have as a filmmaker, or the people who we make the films for are different. So, in terms of who I am on a professional level, it gets very complicated.
It is less complicated on a personal level. On a personal level, I know who I am; I know where I am from. But in terms of talking about it, you cannot lump together a woman who lives in London, who gets funding from the BBC to make films, with someone who is living in Nigeria, where literally the budgets, the facilities, everything, would be completely different in terms of how she has to work. So it gets complicated and sometimes I don't think there is enough differential made between black people or people of African descent working outside of Africa and people of African descent working in Africa. It is two different experiences.
In terms of how you bring your identity into your work, would you say that your work often centers around being of mixed race within the context of being British as well as Nigerian?
The fact that I have a white mother and a black father is essential to my identity. Obviously, it gives me a unique perspective politically. Politically I am black; emotionally I'm black. But once you say that "unequivocally, I'm black," there are specifics that come out of the fact that I have a white mother and a black father and that I lived half my childhood in Africa and half my childhood in an all-white neighborhood in Newcastle in England, that give me a specific viewpoint on everything I see.
On another level, there are issues around a kind of polarization, especially in America, but also in England, though nowhere near to the extent as in America: The two races are incredibly polarized in America, there's black and there's white and they seem to very rarely mix. They seem to very rarely live in the same neighborhoods, and that's not the case in England.
If I had to choose...if someone says to me, choose...if there was a war between black people and white people and someone says choose who you are going to shoot, obviously I'd go over to the black side, but I don't particularly want my mother to be my enemy and I think that informs a lot of what I do. Basically, the woman, the person who has loved me most in my life—who has loved me more than Malcolm X, who has loved me more than Mandela, has loved me more than any person on the face of this earth—is my mother; second my grandmother. These are two white women. These are the people who have formed me. And yet I am completely removed from them culturally and politically, there is a whole world between us. This is a strange place to be. It informs everything you do basically.
In the context of African cinema, how do you situate yourself as a filmmaker in terms of being African, in terms of being black British? You talk about different hats, I had not before necessarily associated you as an African woman filmmaker, I am familiar with you more as a black British filmmaker. A lot of your work appears to address your experiences as a black British, as a mixed-race woman, where, as the director of Monday's Girls, you are viewed as an African woman filmmaker.
It's more complicated than that.
Could you talk about these complicated identities?
It is incredibly complicated. All I can say is that my whole life has been a training ground to live this life. Basically, since I came out of my mother's womb it's been a chameleon situation for me. It's much more complicated than saying I have a lot of hats I wear. I have a lot of hats I have to wear but I wear them all simultaneously.
You say a lot of my work before Monday's Girls was about my black British identity, but I wouldn't agree. My work has always been specifically about being three or four things simultaneously. It's about being black British, it's about being bi-racial, it's about being African and it's about being all those things, because that is what I am.
Up until the age of twelve I lived completely in Nigeria, Ibo was my first language. I was the doctor's daughter on the compound, I knew nothing else. I was light-skinned compared to everybody else, but it was not really an issue. I may be considered slightly prettier, maybe I would have a higher bride-price. The fact that I was lighter-skinned in Nigeria was not a big issue. And where it was a big issue, it was a positive issue.
There was a bit of a backlash against my mother because we were Biafrans, and England had supported Nigeria during the Biafran Civil War, so she got a bit of a stink. But, basically, Nigerians, Biafrans, Ibos, Africans, in general, are too friendly, they take people for what they are. My mother never encountered the level of racism a black person would encounter in Britain.
So when I arrived in England at twelve, I arrived completely as an African child. I arrived in November in Newcastle, but it was an African child arriving in Newcastle. Newcastle, for those of you who don't know, it is a completely white city. I was the first black person at my school and everywhere. Everywhere we went we were the first black people the city knew and they laughed at us, they could not understand a word we said. I did really silly things; I used to carry my schoolbooks on my head, because that is what I used to do back home. I used to carry my brother on my shoulder; I used to take my shoes off when it was hot. So I made all these cultural faux pas if you like, and I lost my accent. My mother says I lost my Nigerian accent within eight months of arriving in England. It caused me too much grief.
So I assumed this neo-white identity, where I was trying to blend in as much as I possibly could with all the other children so they wouldn't make my life hell, and then I couldn't handle it. I actually left Newcastle when I was about fifteen or sixteen with my mother's blessing because it was such a nightmarish place to be. I came to London and became black British. So I have these three identities that are concurrent with each other and yet the only natural one, the only one that was natural and not forced on me in any way was the one I had in Nigeria up until the age of twelve.
Coffee Coloured Children is about an African child with a white mother growing up in Newcastle. Still I Rise follows the journey from Africa all the way to America and to Britain, of black women and how they are perceived. For me as a filmmaker, I have two eyes always, constantly; I am both on the outside looking in and the insider reporting out. And I think that is something slightly different in my work from other black women filmmakers, whether they are African filmmakers, or black British filmmakers. Quite often I have an insider's eye and an outsider's eye on the same situation and that goes through all my work. So that when I made the film in Nigeria, it was both as a Nigerian and woman. Because I knew how to treat the chiefs, I knew the traditions, I knew the order and hierarchies, I knew the procedures. But on the other side, I was not a Nigerian living in Nigeria.
There appears to be a dichotomy, or separation in relationship to Monday's Girls and your other works, which are not viewed as African films. It is true that Monday's Girls is not your work as an independent filmmaker, at least that is the impression I get. What is this separation of Monday's Girls from your other works?
And like Monday's Girls, there was The Desired Number, another documentary that was done in Nigeria. If I were to talk aesthetically, artistically, and structurally, I would say that Monday's Girls is my most European work. In terms of the formal way that it was filmed. Because what I inherited coming from Africa and living in Africa until I was twelve, the thing that was the most important to me, was storytelling. I was told a lot of stories. My whole approach to storytelling comes from what I grew up on in Africa.
In Africa, stories are neither realism nor non-realism, there is no line between what is real and what is non-real. So the spirit's world, or whatever, co-exists side-by-side with the real world. And they are not one thing or another. And what I think about European filmmaking, even African-American filmmaking, is that it is very much lodged in realism.
Storytelling is realism, so that if you are walking down the street, you are real, you are three-dimensional and what is going on in your brain is something that you cannot see. If you look at all of my other work apart from Mondays' Girls there is a certain amount of mixing of reality, what's called reality, and what's called non-reality.
In The Body Beautiful, the mother is having the love scene with the younger man. That didn't really in actual fact happen; that happens in her head, but you bring it to life and the daughter is watching it. In Welcome to the Terrordome, the Africans go underneath the water because they are trying to walk back to Africa and we see what their life is like underneath the water. These are all things that are absolutely comprehensible to Africans. If you look at a lot of African literature, it deals with the spiritual world side by side with the real world.
Monday's Girls is completely literal, it is completely observational filmmaking, and therefore completely the most European of my work. I think it has a lot to do with the eyes of the people and the stereotypes that they have in their head. That means that if you see a picture of an African woman in Africa wearing certain types of clothes, that's real African filmmaking; and then if you see a film, like The Body Beautiful or whatever, that's European filmmaking and that's so ridiculous.
You stated during the film screening discussion of Monday's Girls that as a woman filmmaker, Monday's Girls, which was commissioned and produced by the BBC, would not have been what you would choose as a film. You also stated that it was "another case of naked African women dancing around, painting their bodies." So are you saying this is a European vision of African women?
The problem with a situation like this is that you end up also denigrating Africa. I think it is brilliant that there are these ceremonies, there is nothing wrong with African women dancing naked. European women have far too many hang-ups about what should and shouldn't be covered.
What I am saying is that the European is willing to finance films that show Africans in that context because, in their eyes, that is the only part of Africans that they see. That is the area in which they are most easily able to absorb the information. The "Discovery Channel" kind of programs or the "National Geographic" kind of programs, these are how they expect to see, or are interested in seeing Africans. Whether they are liberals and they are looking at it as the noble savage kind of thing:"These simple people know things that we don't know, with our complicated lives", or whether they straight up expect to see African women naked; so when they see them naked, it completely meshes in their mind that this is how it should be.
But for me there are all kinds of other things that if I had the choice to make, if I had the amount of money given to me to make something else rather than Monday's Girls, there are at least ten or fifteen other subjects that I would have chosen way before I got to making a film like Monday's Girls.
Such as? Would they be situated in Africa?
Yes, that is literally too big a question because there are so many. And also I am a professional filmmaker, so I am quite used to the notion that there are certain programs that the programmers want and that they don't. So even if they had given me a brief that says we want a film about African women or Nigerian women going from adolescence into womanhood, it would still not be a brief that I would choose as first choice. But since we were going to be disciplined and professional about this, this was the brief of the program.
What was interesting to me was the way those girls/women were dealing with the fattening rooms, the generational gaps in terms of what the elder women wanted from them, what they wanted to do, how they interacted with me as an African American/African British woman coming over to them. Naomi Campbell popped up in their everyday conversations, and it was quite a visual juxtaposition to see these girls in their completely traditional African dress, sitting talking about how Naomi Campbell puts on her makeup. It was a scene you could have shot in Brixton or you could have shot in Brooklyn. These black women were sitting around basically "dissing" the way this girl puts her makeup on [Ngozi sucks her teeth to mimic the girls].
In the context of the fattening rooms in Monday's Girls, there could have been a lot of parallels made. Even in terms of how a lot of them were reacting with the camera. A lot of them knew what to do in front of the camera. When you turned the camera on, they were one thing; when you turn the camera off, they were something else—which is exactly the same thing it would be in Europe.
There were all these things about how they thought people were viewing them when they were being watched in Britain, outside of Nigeria, because a lot of them were aware. A lot of times these girls played African for the camera because a lot of times they knew what people were expecting from them. There were a lot of interesting dynamics in that. But the brief wasn't that. The brief was that they wanted to see some girls go into a room and come out fat.
You have stated that what critics and intellectuals can do for African cinema is to watch a range of things coming out of Africa. You also said that oftentimes the West dictates what films are made in Africa. So you feel that African filmmakers are particularly sensitive to the attitudes in the West in terms of the work they do?
That question has two answers. The fact of the matter is that American cinema has conquered the entire world so that even this myth that people have—that if you go to the cinema in Africa you'll see African films—is preposterous. If you go to the cinema in Africa you will see: firstly, American films; secondly Hong Kong/Kung Fu films; thirdly Indian films; finally, and occasionally, African films. So the bigger question is where the money comes from.
Indigenous filmmakers that live on the continent and produce films and television programs do so primarily for their national broadcasters. Nigerian filmmakers working in Nigeria work for Nigerian television and the money and resources are so limited. There are very few Beta cameras. A lot of people still work on U-matics for broadcast. There is so little money.
The indigenous audiences, what they want primarily from their broadcasters is news programs to find out what is going on in Nigeria, what's going on in Zaire, and local soaps. That's what they want from their broadcasters, what is different from the imports, because they get "The Cosby Show" imported, they get Eddie Murphy films. What they want specifically from their broadcasters that they can't get from American imports or British imports are the news programs and the local soaps. So these two sections gobble up the tiny budget that is available for indigenous filmmakers to make indigenous programming.
Above and beyond that, if you want to make anything else other than that, you need to get money from somewhere else. If you are from a French-speaking country you'll get in from the French authorities or the French TV or French funding or the EEC. And if you are from English-speaking countries, you have to scrape around to get the money. But then what you're doing is applying around somewhere else for money. These people are not charities. They don't give you the money to go off and make films or programs just for that audience back home. There is a crossover audience. You have to then make the films to be watched outside of Africa. If you are from Burkina Faso, the biggest audience that you will get for you film will be in France. You might somewhere along the line make videos and there'll be copies made and people in Burkina Faso will see it. But by far the people that will pay to see it, the people who will decide to give the money for you to make another film because you've made a profitable film, or you didn't make a film that made a loss, will be the French. You are answerable to the French and the people who go to see it in France. The hope is that a lot of black French people or black people living in France will go see it, so you will have to compromise less.
When I make a film that you go to see, rather than my old white headmistress to go see, I am making less of a compromise. There is still a compromise involved for me to make it for you, because Americans, especially, are notorious for never setting foot in a theater with subtitles, and that includes black Americans as well as white Americans. Black Americans will not go see subtitled films.
So you are already dealing with a situation where a filmmaker might be forced...say I come from Nigeria; in Nigeria a lot of people speak English, but the language of emotion is Ibo. Where I come from, when they are really happy, when they are really mad, the formal language is English, but the language they speak among themselves is Ibo, but I might be forced by an American financier to make them speak in English. And what you have is a very stilted performance.
Even now, when I swear really badly—and I'm nearly thirty, and I left Nigeria when I was twelve—but when I am really angry and I swear, I swear in Ibo, its the language of emotion still for me. So you have these emotional films, these people are speaking English, and it's wrong, it's completely wrong. You have made a fundamental change to the story. So when we are making films we are still answerable to European audiences.
So, then, when it is said that this is an authentic African movie, they are not actually seeing an authentic African movie. An authentic African movie has not yet been made. When you think about black cinema in America, it has been only recently that you could see authentic black films being made. Because Spike Lee and all these people still have to get their money from Hollywood and they are Hollywood-dictated. So it's pretty obvious that African filmmaking is still even more removed from the source than that, so you have to actually answer to others.
Therefore, liberals and people that run institutions like this must open their eyes and think, just because in Monday's Girls these girls are wearing traditional clothes this isn't the only concept of Africa. People must begin to say, "If I see African films, I am willing to watch something that might be challenging me as to what I thought my definition of Africa was." So that would be the only way that we would get money to make films that tell you more about us. You guys must know so much about our initiation ceremonies. You guys probably know more about our initiation ceremonies than the people in the next village know about the village next door, because they are the ones that get made.
Would you say that you bring a woman's sensibility to your work as a woman filmmaker?
A long time ago, I made the decision to disconnect myself from the female film circuit because what was happening was I was always getting invited as a woman filmmaker. When I first came on the scene—when I first came out, if you like, on the filmmaking scene—the first group of people that literally tried to swallow me up was the female filmmaking circuit. Because it was a predominantly white circuit. And the notion of this very young (I was only about twenty-two) black woman coming out, they kind of literally jumped on me.
The situation that I found myself in at these festivals, was confronting a sea of white women's faces. And somehow I was supposed to have the same experiences as these women, and I didn't. If I were standing in a room full of black guys and not one single black woman, I would have still had more in common with everybody in that room than with a sea of white women. And what they expected me to say was so phenomenal. They "dissed" their men in a way that I can't possibly "dis" black men. For them, it is very easy to say men do this, this, and this. For me, it is absolutely impossible to say in the same way.
So for a long time I went around denying the fact that I was a woman filmmaker simply because I did not want to be associated with this. Just on so many fundamental levels, the campaign against abortion and for contraceptives. As black women, we don't have any problems with getting abortion. They will whip your baby out of you faster than you can cough. In Nigeria, there are millions of women, Catholic women, liberal women all setting up clinics. This is not our problem.
Now I can relax, and yes, ultimately I have a female sensibility, whatever that is. It's like Haile, you know Haile Gerima, he said your grandmother used to tell a story and your grandfather used to tell a story. It would be the same story but yet it would be told completely differently. If you notice, I have made twenty-two films and twenty of them must be about women. I definitely do have a female sensibility, but how you define what a female sensibility is, and where a black female sensibility differs from a white female sensibility, and where an African woman sensibility differs from a black woman sensibility, they are all very complicated.
I can say that stories are really important to me, but then if you look at Charles Burnett, stories are really important to him. I like filming violence, where a lot of people would say it isn't a woman's sensibility to film violence. But I have always thought that the big thing about film is to show people, and the thing about a lot of what has happened to us in history is—everyone acknowledges that the Holocaust was a really bad crime, partly because everyone was white, and partly because they have images to see how horrific it was. There were none of those images from slavery because, if there were, they would be every bit as bad as the images from the Holocaust, but there are no images. What I have always thought is as a filmmaker my job is to show some of these images of what really happened and for me that means being violent sometimes. Whereas, if you've got someone like Julie Dash, she has a very poetic sensibility. So I think that it is so impossible to categorize.
You and I know why we are women and why we are not men. But how do you explain it to someone? It's not about having a period, it's not about—but it's absolutely impossible to explain what makes me a woman and why I like being a woman. I don't like having periods; I don't particularly want to push a baby out of my womb for twenty-four hours. I think the big difference between Africans and Europeans is that I am quite prepared to accept that there are some things that I don't understand, I will never understand, and that I am not meant to understand. You guys, and the guys in Europe you want to logically explain everything. There is no logic, I am female, I have a female sensibility, I make female films, and when I die God will explain to me what the difference was [laughter].
