Originally published in Sisters of the Screen: Women of Africa on Film Video and Television. Africa World Press, Trenton, NJ, 2000.
Interviews held during two occasions: during FESPACO, February 1997, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and in Washington, DC, October 1997.
You have a particularly multi-faceted training in film and theater. Could you talk about your background and how you became involved in cinema?
I went to drama school in England for four years at the Guildhall School of Drama. So I was trained in acting for film, but also the technical side as well; it was a multi-disciplinary school. It was very practical so we did our own short films. We wrote them as well as acted in them. It gave us a very broad spectrum of all the things you can do with film and theater.
Theater is really my first love and I have done theater and music since I was very small. We used to live in Russia, so I did a lot of piano and music at the conservatory there. So doing film was a natural progression. I am used to all types of visual and performing arts but at the moment, I am doing a lot more film than I have before. Actually, my first professional work was in film. Even though I had majored in drama in school, the work that I did upon completion was mostly in film, big feature films such as Cry Freedom, which I worked on when I was eighteen years old, Nuns on the Run, and The Crossing. So I had been exposed to it as an actor, but I was always much more interested in the production aspect of it, behind the camera as opposed to in front of the camera. So, since 1986, I have been interested in film and decided that I was going to pursue that.
In another discussion, you told me that you prefer to be viewed as simply a Southern African. Could you talk a bit of your experiences growing up in Southern African?
I was born in Zambia. And if you know a bit about colonial history before 1884, my particular part of Southern Africa was called the kingdom of Barotseland. The people in this particular part of Southern Africa originally migrated from South Africa, so culturally speaking, our languages were spoken by the same people, Sesotho-speaking people. So that when I meet people from South Africa we have the same culture, the same cultural practices, the same language, only the dialect is different. It's the difference between Americans from the southern United States and Americans from the northern United States, it's the same language but it is different in sound.
My family is the royal family in that area and is still recognized as the royal family. So we still have very strong ties with South Africa. All my grandparents were educated in South Africa, Fort Hare where Nelson Mandela went, and Lovedale and places like. I have always had strong connections with South Africa.
I was born in Zambia; my father is Namibian by origin, if you take in the divisions. He became part of a liberation party called UNIP in the 1960s. If you know the history of nationalism in Southern Africa, he was one of the first Africans to go abroad in the 1960s. He moved to New York and started the first mission for Zambia at the UN. That was the first place where I grew up, in New York City.
Zambia was the head of the front line states for the liberation movements in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, South Africa. So all of the liberation parties were attached to the Zambian embassy in a certain way. My father was responsible for all of the students and all of the health issues for all of these countries, because they had no representation since they were not considered legal at that time. They were considered terrorist groups as opposed to legitimate liberation organizations.
This brought me very close to Southern Africa in that sense. I grew up with all the liberation leaders in my own house. That is why when people ask me where I am from I say very strongly that I am Southern African. There is not one place that I consider home more than anywhere else because all these places are very much a part of me. And I actually don't recognize any of those borders myself, but if someone asks me where I am from, I say yes, I am a Zambian. I have a Zambian passport, but I also have British, American, and a bunch of other things.
Has your political background while growing up influenced you in wanting to do film? How do you want to see these experiences in your film stories?
I think life is political, every part of life is political, especially as a woman, I think it is very political. Everything that I was surrounded by was extremely political. I define the way that I look at the world as so. Those things that happen in history are very true for me. For example, I have cousins in Angola and I have to get a visa to go see my cousins. I have cousins in Namibia it is the same thing. So that kind of life that I have has influenced how I have seen the world, obviously. I think that I see myself as a very global person because I have lived in other parts of Africa.
I think that film has always been a mark culturally, in terms of people seeing visually who they are. And so for me having this sort of fragmented kind of history and life, I always thought that film was a very important thing for me. Because it is very necessary for people to see who they are. And the history of Southern Africa has always been told by someone else. I have recently been doing a lot of graduate study of my own history and its mostly been written by other people. But fortunately, one of the things about colonization is that there were a large number of people from my part of Southern Africa that were highly educated. And so there are very good books written by Silozi-speaking people.
It is all tied together, I don't see any difference between the written word and the visual word, really, but the visual media is the dominant media in the world right now. People don't pick up books, people turn on things, whether it is the Internet or the television. That is the thing that people connect with more than anything. In that case, that is what I want to be involved in, because I have a duty in terms of my own family to tell the right story. I have to tell our history from our perspective. That is the connection between why I think it is important, why I do it, and because it is the ultimate media.
What do you want to contribute to African Cinema, or more particularly Southern African Cinema?
I can talk about Southern African films because that is what I am familiar with. Some of the oldest movies in Southern Africa are films like Come Back Africa, which came out in the fifties. And most films were from South Africa in particular, dramatic films, the narrative films. They were made by whites who had their own agendas, some positive, some negative. These were mostly social context stuff, social issues that had to do with apartheid, and it was very informative. And I am glad those films were made. I am glad there was a record of who we were then.
I am not familiar with Angola or Mozambique, because South Africa was the only place that had a film history. Zimbabwe is very recent, and Botswana it is pretty much non-existent except for films that have to do with social issues such as breast-feeding, or AIDS or those kinds of things. But as far as the narrative, South Africa is the only place where there was that kind of filmmaking. And those films have depicted Africans to be a certain way. Most definitely in a derogatory way, as savages, as non-human, as apartheid claimed they were. So that really is the history. There was a period in the sixties and seventies when white filmmakers in South Africa were making social-issue films that were quite good, but also from that perspective.
You have to be in Southern Africa to know that it is such a serious distinction between the life of a white person and the life of a black person, the life of a colored person and the life of an Indian person. They are very different in the ways they see the world, and they have very different positions in life. So these positions and views color the images that they paint of those worlds. And because all of the groups were completely separate and not allowed to mix in any way, it created a very surreal kind of fragmented idea of who people are.
Historically people in Southern Africa are dealing with such enormous things right now because history was written in one way, which was completely a lie. People are losing their jobs in South Africa and Namibia, because they wrote history in one way. I mean literally losing their jobs. So it is creating insecurity for people, all people. In terms of who am I, I feel that I am not completely attached to one kind of Southern Africa. So I think that I can fill in that gap and be objective in telling the story of certain groups and their history.
What kinds of stories, are you interested in telling? Are you interested in fiction, documentaries, docu-dramas?
Every job that one does fulfills a certain need in oneself. So I don't specifically see myself as only doing feature films, only doing docu-dramas, only doing documentaries. I like it all. I like to tell stories, stories that I think people should know, because I think certain stories help people understand who they are. And that is ultimately what I want to do, talk about identity, the issue of identity.
Earlier you stated that as a woman especially you think that life is very political. As an African woman in cinema, do you see specific sensibilities that may come out because you are an African woman?
Yes, I think so. But I think it would be the same if I were an African man. But, no I am being a bit trite. Yes, there are those specific things, because in that climate of colonization it did—like in America—create rifts between the sexes. There is the oppressor and there is the man and the woman, and the man ultimately oppresses the woman.
From my own perspective, I come from a matrilineal society so there was always a respect for women. Women always governed. In fact, a woman was always the queen of the two capitals. We had two capitals in Barotseland. So from that perspective women have always had a lot of dignity, but over the years during the nationalist years in Southern Africa, men seized the power. So historically, I think I am in a good position, because in my society women have had a lot of respect.
But there are these same social problems that are around the whole world, women being battered, and so on. My position is that yes, I have a lot of things to say that I think a man couldn't say. There are a lot of things I can see that I think Southern African male filmmakers can't see. And that is from being a woman. And I think you understand that yourself, there is a certain sensitivity that we have and there is a certain sensitivity that men have.
You have now ventured into another area of cinema. Could you talk about your studies in film at American University in Washington, DC and why you are studying film production?
I am doing graduate studies in producing. And it is the first producing program in the country, I have been told. I really want to learn to be a good producer. I've done a lot of directing, I've done acting. I am doing a 16mm film that I will begin soon. Over the last two years, I have been concentrating on film production, distribution, financing, and development for multi-media and for film and video. We will do managing and enterprise. Mostly it has focused on the business side, and that is what I went there for.
Creatively I am very comfortable; I know what to do with film. But I wanted to get skills in terms of finding the means to be able to produce good work and not necessarily always begging at development agencies. I have done a lot of stuff with Norwegian agencies, French agencies. When I was in Namibia I did a lot of stuff with international development agencies and I really didn't want to go that route anymore I really wanted to try and go the private route in terms of private financing with a specialty in Asia.
Now I am basically peddling. I came to FESPACO specifically to meet some people I know and with whom I worked on Cry Freedom about ten years ago. Over the years we have been researching and working on certain themes and concepts in the hope of making a feature film. So we met here and I will be going to South Africa in November 1997 for the film and video market there. I am starting to look for financing deals in South Africa. You are writing at the same time that you are meeting people, at the same time that you are traveling and building up the knowledge and the information that you need to do it. It is being done spontaneously it is not straight. The only thing that is straight is that I am in school and that's good, and it is challenging.
You mentioned that you will be doing a film soon. Could you talk about the specifics of the film that you are now preparing to shoot?
It's going to be a full-length feature film, it's about the life of a nineteen-year-old girl who goes back to Southern Africa to take part in the democratic elections, in search of her family and her identity. There was a big massacre in Angola in the 1970s called the Kasinga Massacre where a lot of young Namibians were orphaned. Many of them were taken to Germany, to the U.S. and to Cuba. And come independence they were all basically told, you are Namibian, you are eighteen, you have to come back to your country and vote. They tracked them all down. And it resulted in the biggest airlift in African history.
The story is about a girl coming back home to look for her parents. In the massacre, many children lost their parents. They did not know if their parents survived. It is quite a well-known history in Namibia, so that is what the story is about. So it's a political thriller essentially.
Do you find that films and filmmaking in Southern Africa tend to focus on themes of liberation and struggle? Perhaps you are not at the point where you make entertainment fiction and the "I love you" types?
Right, well we haven't done any of those "I love you's" yet. I think first we have to know who we are. And so to know who you are you have to go back a bit and figure out what happened, "How did I come to be the person that I am?" But I think within that we are going to mature.
The film that I make, the main story line, the main thread of the story, is going to be the politics. But essentially its going to be a story of a young girl coming of age. That is really what it's going to be about. And in that, she is going to fall in love, and all of those very human things.
But I think as I mentioned before, we can't escape from our history in Southern Africa, it is so intense. I couldn't think of writing a story like Trainspotting, or something like that. But I think those things will happen in time. Right now people are writing and telling stories based on who they are, because it is so fresh. It was only thirty years ago that other countries in Southern Africa first started to become independent, that's my lifetime, which is no time. People are going to free up a little on those heavy political things, but right now, I think it is very necessary.
Are there legends and stories in the oral tradition that you see that you may want to adapt into film?
Yes, in this film that I hope to make, one of the other threads is the oral history, the passing on of knowledge from grandparent to granddaughter, the initiation ceremony which I never had—and I am going to have one eventually—but it is very important for us, these rituals and ceremonies. I definitely want to have that as a very strong aspect of the story. I do not want it to be a narrative in the Western sense. I am struggling still to really find my own way of telling that story in the context of our own oral history.
Are there other Southern African women that you are connecting with, or other African women in general?
Well, right now I think we are very fragmented. Because some of us are or have studied abroad such as the director of Everyone's Child, Tsitsi Dangarembga, so people are just beginning to come back. So I cannot say in real detail who is in Southern Africa. Because we are basically just finding out who we are. But I definitely think within the film market in Capetown in November 1997 this specific one will be where I will see a lot more people. This will be the first time that I am going to go. In Namibia, there was one other woman who was a producer at that time, called Bridget Pickering and that is about it. In Namibia there are very few.
It's just beginning. The whole film industry in Southern Africa is still in its infancy, even though it has still been sort of going on for I think about ten years. But really in the last three years, it has taken off, especially with the elections in South Africa and the independence of Namibia in 1990.
Flame, a film in competition at this FESPACO, was directed by Ingrid Sinclair a white woman from Zimbabwe. With the multi-racial context in a lot of the Southern African states, will we find more black and white Southern Africans coming together, where race is not as much the issue in defining what is African?
The question sounds as if you are asking are we going to be able to work together.
I was asking in terms of identity, how will race be played out in defining who is African and how do you see this being presented in film?
We have to look at it in two ways. One way is that one group had all the means, all the access, all the legal rights to make films and show images of themselves and images of others. And on the other hand, you had a group that had no rights, no legal standing, no resources, no training. Apartheid was total, it was not just color, it was health. It was every aspect of the way you lived.
The latter group is the group that I am in. So for me personally, I don't believe that a white person can define who I am. Absolutely not, because they were separated from us in physical terms. It was not like in the United States when beginning in the sixties people could live right next door to each other. There was not that in Southern Africa. So for me I think that it is absolutely necessary for black people to make the films about themselves. Absolutely! I think it is perfectly fine if someone white wants to make a film or someone Indian wants to make a film about black people, but my question is "Why?" Why not get a black person to make that film about that, because they live that, and they know that? But I congratulate, and I have full support for anybody who is going to make films in Southern Africa because I think they need to be made.
For me, it was very gratifying coming to FESPACO because I can see where people are mentally, their treatment of the issues. It is totally educational for me to see people's films in general, whether they are Southern African or not. Because I think, film ultimately is an individual's vision of the world. And so if Ingrid Sinclair...if that is her idea of what the war in Zimbabwe was all about she has every right to that. Constitutionally, she has every right to say those things. But for me personally, because I will only be critical about my own, I feel that definitely I should be the one to write the history of Barotseland. For one, I've got the education, I've got the historical background, and I think I can find the means to do it. I have no problem with white people making films, but ultimately the person's film that I will appreciate and that I think will be in-depth enough, will be that person who has lived that experience, and who has black skin. Because we have two totally different experiences and you know it as well in America.
Speaking of the United States, what has it been like for you living in the United States? Could you talk about your relationships with African diasporans, and the links and connections that your have and want to make?
I think that African people right now are at a brilliant point, at the same time we are at the worst point. In Europe—you see what is happening in France—people are being deported, all these kinds of things that dig at peoples egos. But because we are at the worst point in terms of being excluded in really serious ways, I think people of African descent globally, are really recognizing their commonalties just because of the color of their skin, and also what we share in common culturally.
I have traveled enough to see that there are really some distinct issues and things that we do share in common so I think this is actually a good point for us. There are people who would never have come to FESPACO maybe, had it been another time. For instance, had it been in the eighties when things were more cushy for people. But now because life is more difficult, black people are coming more together. And I feel as much at home in South Carolina as I feel in Ouagadougou. To me there really is no difference anymore; the world is very similar. In a lot of places, people are dealing with the same issues. People are oppressed in the same ways, in terms of education and in other ways.
I am glad that I am very connected with Howard University, and Washington DC because that is a hub in terms of independent black filmmakers, non-Hollywood filmmakers who want to make films that touch on issues that are dear to their heart. So I am really excited and I am glad that I am in that location.
Do you see making a film with a Diasporan component?
Oh yes, this film that I am making is going to have that, because the protagonist is coming from the U.S. Essentially this character is American, she talks, walks, acts, thinks, American, but she is told that she is Namibian and has to go back. How does this person who is a so-called American, identify herself when back in Africa? That is what I really want to see played strongly in the film? Because that is what I am interested in, the cross-Diaspora situation.
You are the Artistic Director of your company Global Posse, could you talk about the activities and objectives of the company?
Global Posse began as a creative outlet for me and my partner Rodney Hopson when we were both at the University of Namibia in 1992. He was doing research in the Division of Social and Economic Research and I was a lecturer in the Department of Drama.
When I first went back to Southern Africa, I worked in Namibia, because my grandfather was born there, and as I said before, I have very long ties with Namibia. We found that in the development process of Namibia there was more focus on physical and material opportunity, rather than social and human development and change. So I thought that the arts would be an interesting way of addressing those social issues that were in place as a result of apartheid. I went out and looked for Namibian talent that never had access to any space where they were able to show their creativity, and we basically put on a show for the first time. That show, which was called "Afrika Festival Party" was a huge success, it was a historic event in the country, actually.
Because of it a lot of young writers, poets, musicians, and artists in general, approached me to direct, edit, and produce their shows. I started doing it and before we knew it, we had established a production company, because there was so much activity happening. We registered the company, wrote proposals to development agencies, and got funding to stage, produce, write and direct all sorts of productions for film, video, and commercials.
Could you talk about the actual name "Global Posse"?
I have always had a sort of global perspective of things, looking at that bigger picture. Posse is a term that's got a lot of meanings, actually. But the meaning that I am familiar with was that of a pack of people that are fighting against a force, a negative force to that group. I thought of Global Posse in terms of a group of people who have got global concerns, that are fighting against being marginalized in any kind of way; and in our particular way it was through media.
Because it is global, I suppose you can take it and use it wherever you are. How do you use it in the United States?
How we operate is that the company is registered in Namibia, where we still have very strong connections. We still consult with people there on many levels on different projects. I still write proposals and plan to continue to do productions there. I was back there a couple of years ago doing a radio series. I am always going to be connected to Southern Africa, that is never going to change.
We also became incorporated in the state of Virginia and basically run it in the way that we run it in Namibia, which is finding funding and finding young people who have a desire to learn about production. We put on productions or co-produce video productions, and get involved in a variety of things. So we are doing exactly the same things, just in another country, and it is a similar kind of situation, because most of the people that we work with are black youth, which is the focus of the company.
Do you actually do training in video, film and theater work?
We train them to do different things. For example in a proposal for a documentary film, I'll say that I want to use young people from a certain area, and I would like to be able to film the process of putting on a production with these young people, from the casting, to the performances and even beyond that. It takes on many forms, that is the thing about Global Posse; we take it wherever it goes.
When you taught drama in Namibia, did you connect acting for the theater with acting for cinema? Did you also combine your Global Posse activities with your drama teaching?
I taught both acting for theater and cinema. Global Posse was separate from the University of Namibia's drama department but sometimes we would work together. Sometimes we would co-produce. For example, if I wanted to bring visiting artists from different parts of the world and I wanted to have them perform at the theater or work at the University of Namibia, then we would do it together, and we would have an equal share in the responsibility. It is a very fluid company. The mission is to use the visual and performing arts as a vehicle for social change in manifestations of film, literature, dance, music, drama, multi-media, it is quite wide. And that is what I am going back to school for, to narrow it down a little, if I need to.
You also taught at the University of Virginia, could you talk about that experience?
I was an adjunct professor in the drama department. My main responsibility was putting on productions. I put on a South African play called "Joys of War." For a year, I was basically preparing to produce and direct that, but I was also teaching the basic theater techniques. I gave workshops for a number of weeks on stagecraft, voice and speech, and movement.
Do you see the trajectory from theater to film to be a fluid, interchangeable process? How do you bring them together?
Well the disciplines meet in so many ways but they are very different. The production approach is pretty much the same, you have pre-production where you are doing your research, you're doing your casting, you're doing your writing, (since I usually write my own plays that I produce), and then you've got production and then you've got the post-production where you are putting the pieces together. At times, it crosses over, but it is a very different medium. The time line is much longer for doing documentary.
Film is not so accessible in terms of being able to just pick up and do it because you need so many physical things to do it with. Whereas with theater, I used to do theater in the bush with my students. We would go on tours around the country and perform to villages, without any sets or props, just the actors and the audience.
In terms of the two media which one would you say, really, in terms of access, availability of equipment, and financial means, is more within the reality of African people? If I could talk about this in the context of an equal exchange between the art and the audience.
Most definitely theater, in fact, personally, the more that I have gotten into film the more I have felt that it is kind of pointless, making films right now in Africa. For several reasons, one, our culture is oral, that is what we are about. Whereas with visuals, we absolutely have no access to them.
The technology is changing so fast because there is so much competition in terms of who is going to rule the technology, it is very expensive because it is changing so fast. Once you have mastered one format, another format is in place, is on the way. Right now, high definition television, HDT technology is coming in and so the video equipment that you are using right now, well the shelf life is going to be very short. So now as filmmakers, we are having to think about the format that we are going to work in. Even with projects that I have started, I am thinking now that I'm not going to shoot in a certain format any more because it is going to be obsolete in a couple of years.
So to answer your question as far as Africa, for me the most satisfying thing, I think, is working with theater, because you have your response right there. You are much more in touch with your audience, as opposed to film, which is so elitist right now. Even getting to see a film is a problem if you are in Africa; the ticket price, the location. In Namibia, there was only one movie theater and maybe two drive-in theaters, now there are one or two more since 1996. Black people do not got to the movies in Namibia, they can't afford it, and they cannot get there, there is no transportation.
But I love film, I love working with it, I love that long struggle to get that piece of tape out and I love the fact that you can hold on to those memories. But logistically, it doesn't make any sense. And the more I do it, the more I feel that way. That is why I try to tie in any production project that I do with real life performance, with real contact with real audiences. Because they take away a lot more. I think the times that I have worked with people in theater, I find that it is much more organic, I keep more in touch with the people that I work with in the theater than with people I work with in film.
Film is a very fast industry and there is a high turnover. Even movies that are made ten years ago, people don't really watch them today. It is all about what is out at the moment, about first week box office receipts, and the rest is history.
What are some of your future plans, thoughts, dreams for Global Posse?
We would like to make the company more viable, so that it could be self-sustaining. Oftentimes, young production companies collapse after a few years because there is not a clear business plan. Because ours started so spontaneously, I was afraid that that was going to happen. So I decided that I had to definitely go back to school to learn about running a business, so right now I am working on a business plan for the next five years.
Pittsburgh will be our base in the United States after 1998. Insh'Allah, God willing, we will also be having something in Cape Town because I am part of a consortium that is bidding for the first free-to-air television station in South Africa. I am really trying to get into broadcasting, because that is much more where Global Posse is going. Broadcasting is much more accessible to Africans. As satellite continues to expand it will also be much more of a threat to Africa, even those free-to-air television stations are not going to have that much say because it will be cheaper to satellite something that is coming from Murdock down to Africa. It will be much easier for news corps to send us news feed than for us to produce our own stuff.
Global Posse also has several feature films in development. We are now in the process of starting a limited liability company called Global Posse Television, which is going to be a group of people that will run it. We would like to be based in the U.S. and in Southern Africa. We would like to produce info-mercials, community services programs, documentaries, animation, a variety of things that can be on television.
In another discussion, you expressed your interest in getting in the mix of cyber-technology, where do you see Global Posse in this context?
For me I would want to make this new technology more accessible to Africans in Africa. I have been working on a proposal for a multi-media information kiosk that would be in a public space. For instance in Windhoek, there is a public square; it could be there. It would be a solid feature, like an ATM machine and it would be for the public. The feature in the kiosks would change every three months. It would always be about some kind of social issue.
The proposal that I put through was for an interactive kiosk for teens. One month it would be about sex, teenage pregnancy, and so on. It would have a video feature, the computer would ask questions, and public would answer them. It would also collect data. It would allow people to touch it, to see what is this information age that people are talking about.
How will you continue to include theater?
I work with a lot of writers in Africa, in Southern Africa in particular, and I still love to direct theater plays. I would like to do as many African plays in the United States as possible and involve film in some way in terms of documenting the performances, as well as interviewing the directors, or presenting the concept of what they are doing.
My hope is that Global Posse becomes much more cross-cultural in terms of black culture, more multi-lingual. We have worked with lusophone and francophone projects before. I would like Global Posse to be in a position to provide programming from London to Brazil, to be doing things that black people all over the world can identify with, even if it has got subtitles, even if it is in another language.
