First, on griots: these were the African Mande people’s historians, genealogists, poets, and court jesters. They were the official storytellers, and, as writers of their people’s narratives, held considerable political power, akin to the astrologers of the Biblical world and with no real parallel to our own. We like to think of our historians and storytellers as specialized positions that, sure, “hold power” in a very humble, almost incidental, way in today’s world; but imagine being one of the very few who could recollect a people’s history and present it in any way they’d like in an era without writing. Give some points to the “all art is political” crowd there.
So, you can imagine my excitement upon finding out that one of the most celebrated Burkinabé filmmakers came from one of the most prestigious lines of griots dating back to the 13th century: Dani Kouyaté. Though he was never formally trained as a griot, his father (Sotigui Kouyaté) was a celebrated griot and actor who was able to blend the traditional griot’s responsibilities into the storytelling art forms of the twentieth century. Dani followed his father’s path and left his native Burkina Faso in order to learn acting and directing from the richer, resource-laden land of France (long the colonizer of Burkina Faso’s previous iteration, the Upper Volta). He then literally followed the elder Kouyaté as he traveled the world in a griot-inspired theater troupe before returning to Burkina Faso in 1989 to make films inspired by this traveling theater in his home country.
But, while a country like Portugal can regularly send its filmmakers to Paris and generally subsidize these films’ productions, Burkina Faso has no strong economic or political ties to the rich and influential filmmaking capitals. How was Kouyaté able to make Burkinabé films while the country was routinely ranked as one of the most resource-poor countries in the world?
Even before Thomas Sankara instituted his revolutionary reforms for the country in the early 1980s, the military dictatorship of Sangoulé Lamizana was willing to cooperate with nearby filmmaking countries (Cameroon, Niger, Ivory Coast, and Senegal) in Africa and permitted the capital city, Ouagadougou, to host FESPACO (Festival panafricain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou) in 1968. It’s an organization and festival that still operates with the energy of 1960s pan-Africanism, supporting and screening only African filmmakers. That said, these governments and FESPACO itself never subsidized filmgoing for the general populace. A 1980 survey found that while Burkina Faso was ranked second in film production (thanks to outside money), it offered only twelve cinemas in the entire country. A healthy arthouse filmmaking culture, a government that routinely ships out its best artists to Paris under the auspices that they will return home to make their best work, and a general public that has no way of actually watching and enjoying these movies: all of these factors mirror my last column’s image of the cinema of Portugal.
And, just like those Portuguese films, picking an undersung masterpiece could be done by drawing lots. Sure enough, I visited Dani Kouyaté’s Sia, Dream of the Python on a whim after briefly exploring this history of Burkinabé cinema, and — surprise, surprise — it felt like the key to the filmmaking of the Sahara.
Having made the award-winning Keita! Voice of the Griot in 1995, a film that adapted the Malinke epic Sunjata from the time of the earliest Kouyatés, the director again turned to another griot classic in La Légende du Wagadu vue par Sia Yatabéré by the Mauritanian playwright Moussa Diagana. The play was from 1988, and the costuming implied a distant West African past; but according to Roy Armes in African Filmmaking: North and South of the Sahara (the source of most of this column’s anecdotes), Kouyaté wanted his story about a female ritual sacrifice victim to reach as universal an audience as possible. The film even begins with a quote from Jean Cocteau that says as much: “Legends have the privilege of being ageless.” And, like the best of Greek drama and Shakespeare, it succeeds at this sort of universalism if only by playing cheekily into its own specific history.
In the 2000 film, the priests of the dreaded Python God demand the sacrifice of a young, beautiful, and beloved virgin named Sia (Fatoumata Diawara) to mollify the ophidian spirit of the Koumbi empire. The emperor Kaya Maghan (Kardigué Laïco Traoré) seems all-too-willing to acquiesce to his seemingly omniscient, black-robed wise men. But, two men stand in his way. The first, a nuisance: the madman Kerfa (Hamadoun Kassogué). He has been gallivanting about town, speaking ill of the emperor and inciting the starving people to rid themselves of their cowardice. But, no one pays him any mind, allowing him to hide Sia, who had immediately run from her family as she heard the news. The second, a snake: the general Wakhane (the most versatile role, played by none other than Sotigui Kouyaté). He convinces the emperor that Kerfa is not a problem (even as he’s already discovered Sia’s hiding place), but he also objects to Sia’s sacrifice for personal reasons, as she’s newly engaged to his nephew Mamadi (Ibrahim Baba Cissé), currently at the frontline of battle and unable to object to this rather upsetting development. Additionally, his own daughter was once made scapegoat to the Python God, making him morbidly curious about the details of their esoteric ritual. A griot (Balla Habib Dembélé) sows discord among these contemptuous factions by both yes-manning the emperor and spreading rumors of a potential coup. And, after the sacrifice ritual is revealed to be nothing more than a chance for the priests to rape and murder the most attractive young women of the city, the quivering fault lines of this kingdom begin splitting wider, bringing about a political apocalypse.
The whole thing is composed of cowboy shots, as Kerfa stands off against prankster kids or a determined Sia faces her captors. Occasionally, the camera pulls back, revealing a whole society happening behind the scenes: dancers, architecture, games, daily toil. It’s easy to find European comparisons, especially since Kouyaté was trained in France, which would have screened contemporary arthouse films indebted to European painting composition as well as Hollywood genre films, but each shot seems composed according to necessity.
But, this family of backstabbers, a collapsing political dynasty that will determine the fate of its people, a medium-sized cast of characters with ever-changing motives, and even a man who’s thought mad for speaking the truth — it all seems very, very Shakespeare to my Anglophone brain. Perhaps this is what Kouyaté meant by universal; perhaps the rot in the state of Denmark is the same as the rot in Koumbi.
Of course, Kouyaté could also be expressing a specific disappointment with the state of Burkina Faso, which had gone from French colonial control to a republic under Maurice Yaméogo to a military dictatorship that changed hands frequently thanks to a series of assassinations. What good that had been built up was under constant threat of collapse, and what bad existed in the country kept getting worse. Even the radical efforts of Thomas Sankara (such as, relevant to this column, revitalizing the infrastructure for FESPACO) could be overshadowed thanks to his paranoid turn to tyranny before his own assassination.
But my own curiosity brings me to Sia’s witchcraft narrative — one that condemns the backwards thinking of the regime and the sheep-like masses, but, by extension, fits in comfortably with European wishes of a modernizing, developing (and therefore ready for IDF loans and capital investment) West Africa. While European festivals were comfortable with a religious Tarkovsky film here and there, most arthouse features expressed a newfound comfort with the disenchantment of the world and an antipathy for religion as a tool of political control (which I may argue would inevitably throw the baby Jesus out with his corrupted bathwater). Since watching Sia and researching for this piece, I’ve come across several other Burkinabé films (1989’s Yaaba, the aforementioned Keita!, 2005’s Delwende) that seek to demystify their history of witchcraft as being a mere tool of the powerful and the herded masses. As we saw in the previous Portugal column, these festivals routinely program films from poorer countries that fit those richer Europeans’ conceptions of their historical struggles. That so many Burkinabé films that saw the Croisette happened to denounce witchcraft practices in their nation is either a unique, genuine feature of contemporary West African filmmaking or simply an indicator of just which Burkinabé films were allowed access to the rich European distribution networks. Perhaps I’m being too cynical; perhaps we’ll never know. But this is for certain: these collections of historical factors and rich traditions of the Malinke people did produce Sia, Dream of the Python, and for that, we can be thankful.
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