Social Identities, Volume 6, Number 3, 2000

Politics and Facets of Identity:

Changing Lenses in Gaston Kabore s Cinema
1
GIRMA NEGASH
University of South Carolina at Aiken
ABSTRACT: In spite of the resurgence of interest in the re-examination of the concept
of identity, the shaping of multiple identities can benet from interdisciplinary
scholarly efforts and artistic insights. Based on a diagnostic political reading of
cinematic text and an interview with the artist, this article draws some conclusions on
the shaping of multiple identities. Following a conceptual scheme of characteristic
locations of identity in a postcolonial setting, the study identies four political forms
of identity the global, the cultural, the ideological/political and the individual. Those
different facets are congured through ideological and discourse analyses of three
cinematic texts and the declared intentions of Burkinabe lmmaker Gaston Kabore.
Strangely the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of
our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which
understanding and afnity founder.
Julia Kristeva (1991)
I think that once you have understood a number of things, it is necessary
to try to retrieve your roots, without falling into the cliche of authentic-
ity and going back to the sources. Its not that, but its a real journey and
a kind of reappropriation of oneself.
Gaston Kabore (1994)
Introduction
In Buud Yam, the lm by Burkina Fasos Gaston Kabore, the hero Wend Kuuni,
is repeatedly depicted as an intruding foreigner. He is falsely accused of being
one with the evil eye, a horse thief, and a rapist. His foreignness, which
makes him a permanent suspect, is a persistent theme that challenges our
understanding of difference and the identity of individuals and collectivities.
2
Buud Yam, as Kabores earlier Wend Kuuni and Zan Boko, has won accolades
primarily for its aesthetic and ethnographic sensibilities about the images of
rural Africa. More than that, however, his lms provide us with the oppor-
tunity to unravel the ambiguities involved in locating identity.
3
A political
reading of Kabores lms enables us to come to terms with a number of
difcult questions about representation, identity, and agency. Do Kabores
lms speak for others or are they simply portrayals of certain African
ISSN 1350-4630 print/ISSN 1363-0296 online/00/030285-19 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd
286 Girma Negash
conditions?
4
What are the ideological contexts of these representations? Can we
tease out different ways of better understanding the concept of identity from
a discourse analysis of a cinematic text? Finally, how does the lm and director
engage the issue of subjectivity?
As was the case of colonial literature before it, the cinematic misrepresen-
tation of Africa was strikingly evident until the recent re-appropriation of
images of Africa by African lmmakers such as Gaston Kabore. African
cinema, on its own merit, has now given rise to new scholarship and new
discourses which spread across postcolonial, cultural and lm studies with the
advantages and disadvantages of advancing knowledge about African ideas
and realities.
5
Postcolonial scholars are eclectic in their approaches witness
the subaltern studies group, Edward Saids Orientalism and Homi Bhabhas
works. Whether fashioned as theory, strategy or condition, postcolonial studies
are lacking in contributing towards a better understanding of contemporary
African realities and prescriptions for change. Most postcolonial critics reduce
projects of decolonisation to discursive and textual discourse. The traditional
focus of postcolonial discourse has been oppositional and a dominant form of
analysis of the relations between Euro-America and the rest of the world. At
the same time,
questions of identity and culture prevalent in contemporary African
cinema are often mistaken as, essentially, a contest between tradition
and modernity. (Akudinobi, 1995, p. 25)
Yet more sophisticated and reexive approaches are emerging which explore
connectedness and focus on relations. Among the most original of these is
Shohat and Stams Unthinking Eurocentrism that addresses overlapping multi-
plicities of identity and afliation (Shohat and Stam, 1994, p. 6).
While critical literatures on African cinema have appeared under the rubric
of postcolonial studies, the aesthetics and politics of African cinema are being
treated separately in cultural and lm studies. These cultural and lm dis-
courses on African cinema do not accommodate critical methodologies that
take into consideration the inuences of social forces, ideologies and political
change. Critical of postcolonial scholars, who give primacy to text, one author
suggests:
Perhaps it is better not to seek an either/or position in postcolonialism,
but rather to work for projects of decolonisation that include self-
reexivity not based on discursive terms, but which occur with an
acknowledgement that while, for example, colonialism can be a discur-
sive form, discursive forms are also inuenced by classes, genders and
ethnicities, which despite their heterogeneous constructions and histor-
ies can still have force as structures and institutions. (Goss, 1996, p. 9)
A political and inter-textual reading of Kabores three lms however, brings
into focus a postcolonial cultural strategy that is more like a decolonisation
project than a discursive analysis of the so-called postcolonial condition (Goss,
1996).
6
The approach adopted here brings politics and the ideology of resist-
ance back, however subtle, into postcolonial discourse. The purpose of this
Politics and Facets of Identity: Changing Lenses in Gaston Kabores Cinema 287
paper is to explore the multiple layers of identity. Four political locations of
subjectivity and agency the global, the cultural, the ideological/political and
the individual are congured through ideological and discourse analyses of
the three cinematic texts and the declared political intentions of the artist.
7
I
will rst propose a scheme of typical locations of identity in a postcolonial
setting; then I will present a critical reading of each of Kabores three lms; and
nally, draw some conclusions on how identities are shaped at the four
different levels discursively and imaginatively.
Locating Multiple Identities
The recent academic interest in the re-examination of the notion of identity
following the end of the Cold War, rising nationalisms, and the politics of
difference, has not been necessarily complemented with methodologies which
address complex identities. Cultural studies of the post-modern and postcolo-
nial varieties, have generated new ideas on representation, nationalism, hybrid-
ity, ethnicity and indigeneity, but their focus, as several critics have observed,
has been dis-located in the sense that postcoloniality remains at a cultural
juncture, de-territorialised so to speak (Radhakrishnan, 1993, pp. 75052). Rad-
hakrishnan uses the phrase boundaries of identity to describe plural forms of
identity, a modication of which I will suggest below. As he conceptualises it:
At the very outset the objection might be made that identities are
monolithic and non-hyphenated by nature and therefore can have only
single boundaries, each identity entrenched within its own single time.
My point here is to multiply time by spaces to suggest a) that the
concept of identity is in fact a normative measure that totalises heteroge-
neous selves and subjectivities and b) that the normative citizenship
of any identity within its own legitimate time or history is an ideological
effect that secures the regime of a full and undivided Identity.
(Radhakrishnan 1993, p. 752)
The multiple identities I propose here in schematic form would be less
bounded, more permeable and dynamic, allowing movement across those
boundaries. The sets of identities I outline are also tentative, to be observed and
claried from several disciplinary perspectives. While larger associations and
identities have been conceptualised in the accumulated knowledge of the social
sciences, personal identities and consciousness are probed, among other disci-
plines, by cognitive science, philosophy and psychology. An interdisciplinary
approach that would include the arts, literature and narrative theory can
facilitate theorising about multiple identities.
8
I propose here four locations in
the politics of multiple identities.
The rst location of subjectivity and agency is at the global level. The
identication with the universal and the cosmopolitan, as inscribed in these
lms and Kabores pronouncements, can be ascertained in three different ways.
One way is to determine cultural universals. Although the universality of
things is contested, persuasive arguments have been made that human prob-
lems and foibles, and certain values, are at least inter-culturally intelligible.
288 Girma Negash
Kwasi Weridu, who makes such a case, concludes: when we cannot as yet
speak of actual universals we can at least anticipate potential universals
(Weridu, 1995, p. 9). Julia Kristeva advances another intriguing idea of univer-
salism or cosmopolitanism. Oddly enough, her notion of a new sort of
cosmopolitanism arises from the recognition of estrangement and alienation
within us. Through the reconciliation with our estranged selves, in other
words, we will be able to transcend bonds and boundaries. As she puts it so
cogently:
The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises,
and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners,
unamenable to bonds and communities. (Kristeva, 1991, p. 1)
One other approach of perceiving a global identity is through the recognition
of moral universalism that is best articulated by Immanuel Kant. He imagined
the achievement of a universal civil society and formulated, as Kristeva puts it,
the internationalist spirit of the Enlightenment in political, legal, and philo-
sophical terms (Krisetva, 1991, p. 170). Closely associated with the develop-
ment of such universalism is the advance of capitalism and modernisation in
cultures and traditions. Thus, identication with the global is part of the
globalisation process which is driven by the nature of the global economy.
Simon During best describes the impact of globalisation upon cultural agents:
So the question is less, are cultures converging under globalisation?,
than under what structures and pressures are cultural agents all around
the world making choices what to communicate or export, what to
import and graft, when to shift cross-border allegiances and target
markets/audiences, and when to reshufe their own cultural repertoire
to exploit, bolster, shrink or transform their traditions and heritages?.
(During, 1998, p. 33)
The second location of identity is at the cultural level in which the artist, in this
case Kabore, describes through webs of narrative the distinctiveness of the
locales and lives of his people, making their stories intelligible to cinematic
audiences everywhere. Identity is thus achieved discursively, as a byproduct of
narrative (Gergen, 1997, p. 9). This social constructionist approach to cultural
identity accommodates the mode of narrative the lmmaker adopts, his inter-
vention as a cultural agent, and the manner in which he chooses to dene the
African past and the present. The most noted aspect of Kabores work is his
appropriation of cinema for the tradition of oral and visual culture (Goldfarb,
1995, p. 18). Goldfarb is referring to Wend Kuuni, but he could have easily
extended that observation to Zan Boko and Buud Yam, both of which employ
oral narrative techniques. Although the appreciation of auteurship is out of
fashion, it would be ludicrous to ignore the agency of the artist, even when our
reading of meaning is based on the cinematic text. While auteurship tradition-
ally denoted the stamp of personality and artistic style on a lm, in the case of
African cinema auteurship may also be dened by low budget lming. As
Kabore recently pointed out in an interview, lmmakers often nd themselves
working alone.
9
Also, the artists role in his social milieu and his interpretation
Politics and Facets of Identity: Changing Lenses in Gaston Kabores Cinema 289
of the realities of his time and place become part of the matrix of the cultural
identity, closely related to the ideological and political layer of identity
make-up.
The ideological/political location of identity is made up of the subjectivities
and identications created under postcolonial and present conditions. The
concerns and commitments of the lmmaker are ideologically inscribed in the
cinematic texts providing understanding and mediating meaning. The artist
also happens to be the product of his culture, class, and gender background,
and as such, inuences the representation of his images. This is all the more
important when we accept and apply auteurship to an African lmmaker such
as Gaston Kabore.
It is not far down the road to move from the ideological/political location
to that of personal identity. How do we dene the personal self as opposed
to the political self? Once again, the social constructionist approach is instruc-
tive. The narrative or webs of stories bestow identity on the individual. As
Gergen explains:
To paraphrase Wittgenstein, the limits of our narrative tradition serve as
the limits of our identity. In this context it is useful to consider the
process of personal memory ones means of identifying oneself
through the reports of personal history. (Gergen, 1997, pp. 910)
In order to draw some conclusions on the shaping of identities I will employ
a multiperspectival approach to lm reading, as Douglas Kellner suggests.
10
Such a methodological strategy as one would cut facets into a diamond to
draw out its brilliance renders a combination of perspectival readings that
may yield insights into the nexus between the cinematic works and the
formation of complex ideas such as identities.
Wend Kuuni: Subaltern Voices and Artistic Subversion
The rst lm, Wend Kuuni (1982), is the story of a young boy with a strange
destiny who loses one family and nds another. The lm opens with a scene
in a hut where a mother is kneeling over her half-asleep son, crying. We soon
discover that her husband, who is a hunter, has been missing for some thirteen
months and presumed to be dead. By custom she is expected to marry again
without delay. Consequently in order to avoid a forced marriage she chooses
to run away with her son. The next sequence of shots shows a trader who
discovers the boy in the bush and takes him to the next village for shelter until
his parents claim him. The villagers discover that he is mute, and when they
realise nobody is coming after him, they entrust him to a family who eventu-
ally adopts him. The new parents give him a name Wend Kuuni, meaning
the Gift of God. They also have a daughter of the same age, Poghneere. Even
though they have separate duties she, helping her mother with domestic
chores, while he tends cattle with his father sisterly and brotherly affection
grow between the two children. The mystery of Wend Kuuni is resolved when
one day, he stumbles into the body of a neighbour hanging from a tree. He is
290 Girma Negash
so traumatised by the event that he utters his rst word and proceeds to tell
his own story.
Wend Kuuni, like the two other lms by Gaston Kabore to be analysed here,
is scripted in Mossi, the language most widely used in Burkina Faso. It also
offers a glance at Mossi culture before the arrival of the Europeans. The nature
and order of things are depicted in calculated structural rhythm and objective
camera point of view, establishing relationships between husband and wife,
mother and daughter in the domestic scenes; and public exchanges between the
chief and elders, traders and buyers and villagers at an open court. Marie-
Madeleine Chirol (1995) determines three types of scenes in Wend Kuuni:
domestic scenes, scenes of exchanges and scenes in the bush; the scenes of
exchange being an intermediary between the domestic scenes and the space
of the bush. She points out that the scenes of exchange act as a contretemps
compared with the well-balanced organisation of the domestic scenes.
11
Order and moral authority are also depicted as part of the social reality
behind which the story unfolds. After the trader discovers Wend Kuuni, the
process of nding parents to adopt him becomes an elaborate system of
investigation, consultation and decision-making. The village chief and counsel-
lors shoulder the responsibility to live up to the communitarian value of being
their brothers keepers. A similar obligation to ones neighbour, however, fails
when a man intercedes to save a marriage in which a wife is estranged as the
result of her husbands impotence.
The seeming incongruities in the lives of ordinary villagers and the ques-
tioning of moral authority may be signs of deeper contradictions in a society
which, at the time and place depicted in the lm, make Mossi life appear far
from idyllic. Thus Kabores Wend Kuuni is not a retreat to the past nor is it a
medium of opposition to the colonial. His counter-imaging with ethnographic
details is not an ideological contestation but a subversive commentary on the
social realities of a community in the past.
12
Two incidents illustrate this point.
Wend Kuunis mother is told at the opening scene that she will have to remarry
as dictated by custom. The loss of her husband is perceived as a misfortune not
brought about by destiny but by an evil source. The villagers accuse her of
being a witch. The ugly scene of her accusers torching her hut to drive her
away, manifests an oppressive act, just as her escape denotes liberation. By the
same token, the dramatic recovery of voice by Wend Kuuni, in a deconstructive
reection, suggests a recovery of autonomy and identity freed from his
condition of being narrated by the Other (Chirol, 1995, pp. 5354). An ideologi-
cal reading of the recovery of voice would take into account the circumstances
of Wend Kuunis utterance and the audience involved. It is signicant that
when Kuuni is excitedly telling his foster parents about the hanged man he had
discovered in the bush, they do not seem to notice his recovery of speech
only his sister Poghneere does. It is also to his sister that he tells his own story.
Thus the liberating process is completed in the complicit knowledge of the two
children.
An ideological reading of Wend Kuuni also reveals Kabores concerns for an
honest depiction of the social realities of the land of his ancestors and his way
of coming to terms with his roots in a search for authenticity. Aside from this
Politics and Facets of Identity: Changing Lenses in Gaston Kabores Cinema 291
ideological interpretation, it is also important to appreciate the artists aesthetic
strategy in the type of cinematic language and form he employs self-
consciously. The most salient aspects of the critiques of Kabores work are on
his choice of using oral narrative techniques to recount the story of Wend
Kuuni, modifying both Western cinematic language and oral narrative to suit
his aesthetic agenda. As Goldfarb puts it:
This appropriation of the visual technology of western culture for
African pedagogical tradition subverts its implementation within the
western colonial project. The cinema remains a pedagogical medium,
but its narrow construction as an emblem of western culture is chal-
lenged. In effect, Kabore constructs an alternative and non-western
(pre)history for the cinema. (Goldfarb, 1997, pp. 1920)
What makes the lm akin to oral literature is the narrative elements of a tale
and the use of an off-camera narrator. Yet Manthia Diawara argues that the
lm achieves closure in a different ideological order than the oral tradition
might have (Diawara, 1987, p. 39). Oral tradition is employed by Kabore,
according to Diawara
less to achieve a traditional/nostalgic closure and more to enumerate a
new narrative posing the conditions of resistance to traditional order
and the creation of a new one. (p. 44)
Thus, African directors like Kabore are distinguished from the traditional griots
whose narratives are concerned with disorder and the restoration of traditional
order.
14
A neostructuralist reading of the cinematic text of Wend Kuuni is instructive
in that it situates the lm in its historical, artistic and cultural context, but it
falls short of an expanded ideological criticism. While a political reading of
Wend Kuuni cannot ignore the binary oppositions of voicelessness to voice, old
order to new order, and orality to narrativity, the artistic and pedagogical
intervention by the lmmaker makes up for the rest of the cinematic discourse.
In his cinematic approach, Kabore manipulates time and space to reect
African realities. Aside from wide-angle shots framing scenes of daily activities,
long takes, and sparse editing, cinematic time is modied by sociological time
in Kabores lms. This is not unlike Teshome Gabriels earlier observation that
Third World lms grow from folk tradition where communication is a
slow-paced phenomenon and time is not rushed but has its own pace.
(Gabriel, 1985, pp. 8385)
Kabore says he uses sociological time or real time in documentary fashion as
a means of entering the fundamental reality of what people have experienced
socially (Kabore, 1994). The ethnographic descriptions of African greetings and
interpersonal communication are part of his aesthetic considerations. Whether
his attention to such details is consciously posited against Western cinematic
images of Africa, or set merely as backdrops for other ideologically relevant
292 Girma Negash
themes, it is hard to say. Francoise Pfaff for one concludes that Kabores lms
(along with those of his compatriot, Ouedraogo)
were not made with specic ethnographic intentions, yet their authors
concern to present accurate facets of their society made these works
valuable tools for exploring components of Burkanibe culture, especially
rural lifestyles. (Pfaff, 1996, p. 237)
Wend Kuuni gives voice to the marginalised such as women, children and those
ostracised by archaic customs and traditions and as such is distinctive as an
evocative tale of empowerment. This ideological strategy is complemented by
a subversive use of cinematic language that marries Western convention with
African narrative forms.
Zan Boko: Social Realism and Dening the Political Self
In the second lm Zan Boko, Kabore tells a dramatic story about the encroach-
ment of modernisation on traditional life. A village man, Tinga Yerbanga, is
being forced off the land of his ancestors by urban expansion, at the same time
a wealthy urbanite wants to buy him off in order to build a swimming pool.
Consequently a young journalist takes up Tingas cause by trying to expose the
injustice publicly on television, until his televisual expose is literally unplugged
by the state censors. Zan Boko represents a bold criticism of the exclusion of
rural people and state censorship as well as an ideological position that
valorises African traditions. This representation is portrayed through images
of village order contrasted with intrusions of modernity. Kabores social
criticism is accentuated by his choice of cinematic language and discourse.
During most of the rst half of Zan Boko, Kabore depicts traditional African
village life in ethnographic detail as it carries on unsuspectingly in the face of
the new urban encroachment. The conscious use of camera and sociological
time articulates how things were, as in Wend Kuuni, but also how those things
are falling apart. The lm juxtaposes point-of-view camera angles to gain
spectators sympathetic identication with the elders. Tingas father admon-
ishes his son to pay attention to his wife, who is in labour, reminding him that
he should seek the advice of the elders and the midwives. In the same manner,
several sequences of shots establish Tingas wife as dutiful, as she maintains a
respectful distance from her troubled husband. These images are comple-
mented with dialogues that predictably reect situational reactions from indi-
vidual characters assuming traditional roles. When the father reminds his son
that he should worry about his wife, the son replies, I know father. I have faith
in the ancestors. One of his friends consoles him: Dont worry about her
(wife), just trust the midwives and the elders. Such dialogues and images
allude to how the integrity and the moral authority of the ancestors, traditional
leaders, and healers have remained intact prior to the intrusion of urban sprawl
into Tingas village.
The audience is drawn into complicity with Tinga who falls victim to the
surreptitious invasion of his homestead. Crosscutting brings to relief
the ideological collision between the two.
15
Engineers from the city arrive to
Politics and Facets of Identity: Changing Lenses in Gaston Kabores Cinema 293
survey the land, to conduct a census, and plan new constructions. A well-to-do
neighbour sends his guard to coax Tinga into selling his land. Sequences of
shots expose bulldozers ploughing the earth. A villager counsels Tinga to enrol
his children in the newly opened school. Another neighbour has succumbed to
the temptation of selling part of his land to buy a cart and a donkey. Chalked
numbers appear on the walls of the huts following the census. Modernity has
taken over and Tingas homestead has been circumscribed. Two cinematic
images stand out in this process of intrusion. The chief engineer and the
surveyors who are introduced unexpectedly, are made to look in attire and
language (they speak French) more like European adventurers in colonial
Africa than members of the same society. The chalked numbers on the huts are
as equally alien and extraneous as the engineers. In a scene in which Tinga is
hosting his neighbours for dinner, one of them remarks: After a meal like this
I would have liked to sleep but these white numbers haunt our walls and chase
our sleep away. The chalked numbers become symbolic purveyors of things to
come as rationality rattles the ghosts of the ancestors, shakes up faith and trust
in the traditional order, and ironically brings uncertainty into the lives of the
villagers.
16
In the second half of the lm, the villagers express marked concern about
their fate and that of their village. In one scene a villager asks pensively: who
can say what tomorrow will hold? His neighbour replies: I am apprehensive.
The dialogues openly express the beginning of the end of their village life.
Towards the conclusion of the lm an obituary of village life is sung by a griot
at the village bar:
Ours is a sad story
What has become of us?
Our land is dead
Killed by the big city
Our ancestors are without a home
The monster has triumphed
Kabores intent in Zan Boko is not so much to recount the story of the
disappearance of an idyllic village life but to condemn the new brazen values
while valorising some of the old. Traditional predictability is replaced by new
uncertainties. A single shot of Tingas father sitting pensively in front of a hut
chalk-marked with the number 327 juxtaposes contradicting images. The com-
munitarian language of managing together, giving each other a hand,
contrasts with a neighbours confession of selling half of his land that dees the
taboo of selling or exchanging communal land. The new value of private
property is taking hold. Even the reciprocity value of gift exchange is ques-
tioned. When Tingas young son offers his toy car to the rich boy next door, the
boys response is If I cant buy it I wont take it. These contradictions of values
go beyond mere description as the contrast between the rst half of the lm
and the second is ideologically evident.
The title of the lm, Zan Boko, and its symbolic use in the lm, is the most
direct commentary on the question of cultural identity, however. Zan Boko
(meaning literally where the placenta is buried) refers to the communal
294 Girma Negash
homestead of Tinga which is being contested in this lm. When Tinga laments
that he and the rest of the villagers are being treated like strangers on the land
of our ancestors, and the griot sings our ancestors are without a home, one
reads signs of alienation from a particular place of birth. Attachment to land
can also be associated with the earth in which the placenta is customarily
buried in Africa (Negash, 1982, pp. 28192).
17
Closely associated with this sense
of primordial attachment is the belief that land is considered ancestral
extending the right of birth to the right of inheritance. The traditional African
religious belief of the closeness of the ancestors to the elders, and the spirits of
the recently dead to the living, reinforces this essentialist and foundational
myth. Critical attention to Zan Boko has so far concentrated on this social realist
criticism of modernisation, the repression of dissent by the state, and the
exclusion of the peasantry by the privileged classes (see Manthia Diawara,
1992, and Dickson Eyoh, 1998). However, a political reading of Zan Boko can
throw light on the meaning of identity as perceived by the lmmaker. Kabore
engages in social criticism on one hand, and the valorisation of traditional
values on the other. In so doing, he acts as a witness to the disappearances of
village life, and along with that, the collective memory of a people (interview,
1994). To what extent then does Kabores art inform our understanding of the
shared meaning of identity in the African setting?
The relevance of the notion of identity can be evaluated in the imaginary
communities created by the artist, as well as his identication with and his
perceived role in those communities. Beyond the vagaries of modernisation,
class and state oppressions, Zan Boko reects the artists immediate concerns
such as the rural-urban gap, the disappearance of village life, the preservation
of the collective memory of a people, to all of which he says he is a witness.
It is these identications, both conscious and unconscious, with his imagined
community that make up his political self. As Kabore puts it in his own words:
You have to nd a way of reconnecting with who you are, taking
everything into consideration The problem is that there is a sort of
competition between the source of your so-called modern education and
all this heritage that you often lose touch with. When you have lived in
the town, you no longer possess the initiation rites, which were a means
of enabling you to comprehend the universe through the canons and the
frame of reference of your society. You dont have that. So you are often
oating between two universes completely different and very often,
somewhere, you are lacking in identity. (interview, 1994)
Buud Yam: Universalism and Transcending Estrangement
Buud Yam (1997), Kabores most recent lm, is a sequel to Wend Kuuni and a
further exploration of identity and self-discovery. When the story picks up
some 12 years later, Wend Kuuni is a strong young man living in a loving
environment with his adopted parents and sister, Poghneere. As in Wend
Kuuni, Kabore begins Buud Yam with studied establishing shots of Wend Kuuni
showing off his equestrian skills while Poghneere and her girlfriend are
Politics and Facets of Identity: Changing Lenses in Gaston Kabores Cinema 295
looking on admiringly, of children at play, and of mothers carrying out
domestic tasks, painting a cinematic fresco of a serene village life. Underneath
this virtual harmony, however, fault lines appear in the community, which
Kabore had already situated in Wend Kuuni.
The event that sent Wend Kuunis mother to her death and his exile is
picked up in Buud Yam, where Wend Kuuni is still held with suspicion and
distrust. Young men in the village are gossiping about him. Then his sister
Poghneere has an ominous dream which she relates to him:
I had one of those dreams last night! A long one long and strange. I
was afraid for you, and for me. That snake That young man who
disappears like a ghost, the trip you make that seems endless, that
bottomless hole in which I fall and that man whos following you
Some of those visions turn into reality. One of Wend Kuunis friends in the
village dies after being bitten by a snake. Poghneere succumbs to a mysterious
illness. Consequently Wendi Kuuni has to leave on a long journey to nd a
healer to cure his sister.
The arduous trek on horseback in search of the healer constitutes the bulk
of the story line and serves as a prop to determine the spatial, temporal, and
supernatural dimensions of the narrative. Spatially the journey takes him
through forests, savannah grasslands and desert. He comes across several
market places, which, in Africa, are crossroads between different peoples and
landscapes. In the desert, traders in a caravan, who speak a different language,
rescue him. Wend Kuunis journey takes him from the village to the frontier
and back, dening the ethnography of Burkinabe locality.
The banishing of his mother and her eventual death, the loss and recovery
of his voice, and his childhood intimacy with his adopted sister are retold in
skilfully edited ashbacks. After the rescue by the desert traders, his identity
is conrmed in a dramatic encounter with the very same trader who discov-
ered him as a child after his mothers death in the forest (in Wend Kuuni). The
trader becomes a vital link to Wend Kuunis past by setting him on the right
course to nd the healer in Buud Yam.
While the spatial and the temporal dimensions are physically limited, the
third aspect of the journey dees time and space. It is magical and spiritual,
depicted in other-worldly voice-overs, ashbacks and juxtapositions of images.
Wend Kuunis trek brings him to encounter tokens of goodness and evil. An
old woman gives him shelter for the night, but he has to attend to her because
she is sick; he keeps the re burning to keep her warm through the night. His
care earns him her gratitude, her blessings, and a gift of yarn that will later
save his life. The spirit of his sister guards over him throughout the travel. In
her dreams she seems to know exactly where he is.
At one point, he is able to avoid the temptations of the devil (in the form
of a beautiful woman at a river crossing) thanks to a forewarning and his
sisters omnipresence.
18
Altogether, the audience can perceive that certain
guardian spirits have protected Wend Kuuni at every step of the trek.
There is yet another transcendal level of reading of Buud Yam which goes
beyond the spatio-temporal and spiritual dimensions discussed so far. The
296 Girma Negash
journey represents a larger quest for truth seeking an allegorical pilgrimage.
In this case, Wend Kuunis epic travel and search is for self-discovery.
19
His
subjectivity is afrmed not only by his sister who believes in him, even when
he is branded as an outsider and an Other, but also by the sick old woman and
the trader who saved him when he was a boy. The healer whom Wend Kuuni
manages to bring back to the village, heals not only his sister but extends his
healing hands to all the villagers, bringing the community together once again.
The healers blessing is complemented by the repentance of those who sus-
pected him of having the evil eye. Intolerance is in retreat even if Wend
Kuunis self-discovery is not quite complete at the end of Buud Yam, when he
still wonders about the whereabouts of his father who never returned from
hunting when he was a child.
If audiences, even those far removed from Burkina Faso, see the universal-
ity of communal bond, the power of healing, the ugliness of bigotry and
estrangement from ones community in the images of Buud Yam, their
identications with the universal are based on many grounds. Kabore wants to
reach audiences around the world not because he prefers to universalise
African cinema but because he believes in the universals that are inscribed in
his lms of African specicity. In a recent interview with Jude G. Akudinobi,
Kabore asserts:
universalism is an illusion invented by Hollywood, to subdue the
cinematic expressions of the rest of the world. As long as you speak to
the human condition, to fear, illusions, dreams, you will be understood
by audiences from the South Pole to North. So, we must continue to
plant this tree of specicity. (Akudinobi 1999, p. 36)
Recognising differences and then transcending them may be philosophi-
cally understood, but Julia Kristevas notion of nding the foreign within us
is instructive in recognising the universals in Buud Yam even when the
peculiarities are inscribed contextually in an African setting.
Postcolonial Resistance and Multiple Identities
These three cinematic works can be regarded, in themes and content, as
postcolonial nationalist responses to the contested idea of the African past.
20
In
the traditional African village depicted in Wend Kuuni and the rural Africans
circumscribed by the encroaching of urbanisation in Zan Boko, identity is
afrmed by the unquestioned assumption that the individual is part of a
communal whole bound by kinship and custom. On the surface Wend Kuuni
reects the individuals place in a moral and social order. As in other artistic
works in postcolonial societies, the concept of the individual or personal self
is undermined. The rst half of Zan Boko also seems to suggest that there is no
separation between the social identication factor and the self. A closer look at
Kabores works, however, reveals the beginning of a breakdown in identity
factors. In Wend Kuuni, the mothers escape from patriarchal oppression and
the complicity between the children, Wend Kunni and his adopted sister, in
the face of the deafness of their parents are instructive of this incipient
Politics and Facets of Identity: Changing Lenses in Gaston Kabores Cinema 297
individualism. Similarly, in Zan Boko the irreversible march of modernisation,
as exemplied by the selling of the ancestral land, is an attack on the old
identication factors of ancestral (read territorial) and communal (read ethnic)
land. Furthermore, a reading of these two lms can be seen as a projection of
the lmmakers individual search for identity.
Gaston Kabore, like many other postcolonial artists and intellectuals, has
reacted to the past in order to dene the present. He responds to a recon-
structed past (as he himself becomes complicit with that construction) as
generations of intellectuals in Africa have done. African artists used their
talents to recreate communities to identify with. This is evident in the political
nature of their work and the representational techniques they adopted. What
Ali Mazrui observed about the African writer applies to Gaston Kabore as well:
The matters that affected the community assumed extra importance to
the artist. And so the modern pen responding to an ancestral urge
analysed social forces rather than personal, individual concerns.
(Mazrui, 1982, p. 8)
Thus Kabores works reect this concern for the community in the themes
he highlights colonial impact, alienation from the ancestral land,
modernisation, oppressive traditions and the like.
Kabores ideological position and his social criticism locates the artists role
in society as he broadly identies with the political man shaped by historical
circumstances and existential choices. The political man can be both an
African traditionalist and a critic of both present and past social conditions. It
will be fruitful to look into both the conscious and the unconscious dimensions
of the artists creativity by recognising the former in his activism and the latter
in the collective unconscious.
21
The political self gives voice to the powerless,
to those subject to patriarchal domination in Wend Kuuni, and to the excluded
rural people in Zan Boko. At the same time his identication with the political
inuences the substance and content of his work, the form and techniques of
his art, as well as his potential audience. Thus, Kabore reminds us of the urgent
responsibilities of the lmmaker in Africa:
if African lmmakers dont play their role as consciousness awakeners
(sic), maybe tomorrow Africa will be a culturally condemned continent,
with citizens who bodily live in Africa but are mentally displaced
because they will have been showered with images conceived and
thought by other people. (Givanni and Bakari, 2000, p. 188)
In Wend Kuuni and Zan Boko, Kabore employs the imaginative use of abstrac-
tion and recreation. In his ctional return he creates images and narratives
informed by folklore, customs and memories. Zan Boko is an elaboration of an
allegory representing the ties to ancestral land (Boehmer, 1995, pp. 19499).
Kabore uses oral tradition in Wend Kuuni not in search of authenticity but to
full his ideological agenda. He also modies lm language (i.e. the use of
documentary form and sociological time) for a purpose. Yet there is a hair-split
distinction between the political man and the social man in the given and
expected roles Gaston Kabore lls.
298 Girma Negash
In order to ascertain Kabores tie with the modern identication factors such
as class, gender, generation and ethnicity, it is best to appraise his personal
statements about these perceived roles. Akin to early postcolonial African
writers, Kabores social identication is strong. As he puts it:
I try, using images as my means of expression to rst of all give my
vision of the world, to use my imagination also, and nally I try, this
way, to communicate to my people, with whom I share the same
cultural heritage, the same history and probably the same fundamental
aspirations. (interview, 1994)
Kabore warns, however, that there are many more artists than those who
have been given the social status of artist (interview). In spite of this modest
posture the artist in African societies is part of the intellectual class and among
the educated few. Hence the peculiar position he holds, his knowledge, and the
conditions of these fast-changing societies at once make the person and his art
identify with the political. Being a witness to this change and the social
conditions of his people becomes a political act. As Kabore himself puts it:
a Third World artist has a much more concrete function within society,
he cant simply be there without becoming its as if there is electricity
and he is continuously plugged in. Hence he vibrates with the reality
surrounding him. So, because of this the artists place in such a world is
so much more perceptible where urgency is at its greatest in a way.
(interview, 1994)
Conclusion
Gaston Kabores art and his personal reections reveal the complexity and
ambiguity involved in the denition of the personal self when that denition
is layered and there is a uidity of movement between those layers. We can,
however, draw certain conclusions from examining Kabores artistic expres-
sions and stated positions. The rst is a universal one to which Kabore alludes
in his works and in his own words:
I consider myself both citizen of the world and of my country. Hence,
all that affects the survival of humanity, which involves the blossoming
of the individual, concerns me. (interview, 1994)
The second level is the cultural in which he establishes modes of identication
to the social realities of the subjects of his work and at the same time valorises
the traditional past in a mixture of historicism and neotraditionalism. The third
level is the unavoidable political present, which the themes of his lms reect.
Finally, at the individual level, the signicant aspect of Kabores self is bound
to the choices he makes in the uid motions between all these layers in his
awareness of himself and the position he assumes.
A political reading of Kabores artistic expressions and pronouncements
reveal some hints about the evolution of this increasingly politicised concept
of identity. The rst generalisation one can make is about the construction of
Politics and Facets of Identity: Changing Lenses in Gaston Kabores Cinema 299
loyalty to a collectivity. When Kabore claims that he uses his imagination to
communicate to my people, this constructive element becomes transparent. By
the same token what and how to communicate to his audience and critics could
also demonstrate this type of subjectivity. In spite of the potential of mass
audience for cinema in Burkina Faso, the distribution problem limits the extent
to which Kabore will be inuenced or will react to how the majority (to whom
he refers as my people) denes his works. This leaves in the main the elites,
who are both the critics and audience, and the foreign audience as those who
could possibly dene the contours of his artistic expression. Kabore does not
proclaim a distinctly African cinema in form and content making his
identication to his people, his work and audience politically dynamic. In a
relatively stable Burkina Faso where he is not swept by political currents,
Kabores activism is in his role as critic and in advancing the cause of cinema
in the receptive environments of the lm festivals of Ouagadougou and other
forums of the Third Cinema.
Gaston Kabore proclaims he is on a long journey of reappropriation of the
self in the postcolonial conditions of his society and of his place in it. That
journey is uncertain, although he points out the necessity of retrieving his own
roots. In what he considers to be his responsibility as a man towards your (his)
own life and towards the life of others, he has a certain number of choices of
relationships and identities corresponding to his vision of life and artistic
sensibilities as represented in the three lms analysed here.
Girma Negash may be contacted at the Department of History, Political Science and
Philosophy, University of South Carolina-Aiken, 471 University Parkway, Aiken,
S.C. 29801, USA, e-mail: girman@aiken.sc.edu.
Notes
1. I am grateful to Gaston Kabore who consented to be interviewed during
the Seventh Regional Film Conference on African Cinema held at Loudun,
France, 713 February 1994. My thanks also go to Sara Gueret for her
transcription of the interview in French and her helpful comments.
2. The quotation in the rst epigraph is from Julia Kristevas Strangers to
Ourselves (1991) in which she presents an intriguing examination of the self.
After giving credit to generations of thought from early Stoicism to
Christianity, from the Enlightenment to Kantian internationalism, Kristeva
raises the rhetorical question Might not universality be our own foreign-
ness? as an alternative examination of what we call universal. I adopt this
novel conceptual prop to identify one of the locations of identity I discuss
in this paper.
3. Buud Yam (1997) received the Etalon de Yennega at FESPACO (the
Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou), the largest
festival on the African continent. It was also projected at Cannes in 1997
300 Girma Negash
(Quinzaine des Realisateurs). While Wend Kuuni (1982), Zan Boko (1988)
and Buud Yam (1997) are the three lms treated in this paper he has also
directed Rabi, Un arbre nomme karite, Nuit africaine, Tour du Faso and Madame
Hado.
4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivaks distinction between Vertretung and Darstel-
lung is instructive. She denes Vertretung as stepping in someones
place to tread in someones shoes. Representation here means speaking
for the desires and needs of somebody or some cause. It is a political
representation. Darstelllung, on the other hand, is re-presentation or por-
trayal. Re-presenting or placing there is therefore either proxy or portrait,
in Spivaks conception.
5. IRIS is a journal on lm theory and the relation of image to sound. It
devotes each issue to a different aspect of lm theory or history. IRIS no.
18 (1995) was devoted to new discourses of African cinema.
6. I am indebted to Jasper Goss for reinforcing my overall concern about the
depoliticisation of postcolonial discourse. Jasper Goss (1996) brings this
argument home by concluding that postcolonialism has brought forth a
complete and thorough reduction of discursive activity so that all social
and cultural forces are denuded of anything but self-referential context and
are completely depoliticised (p. 7).
7. To summarise Douglas Kellner (1993), an ideology critique presumes that
lm is not an innocent entertainment but a political artifact tied to ideol-
ogy, agenda and such; that you can read lm politically to decode what it
communicates; and that it should be conceptualised as a contested terrain
of ideas and culture. Discourse analysis is used here as Susan Hayward
(1984) describes it. She takes lm as a language in and of itself in which,
for example, a basic unit in lm is the image, and its functional role is the
same as that of speech acts, p. 277.
8. Shaun Gallagher maintains Concepts of Person, Self, Personal
Identity: Bibliography and texts, an on-line research source at:
http://www.carnisius.edu/. The site includes on-line bibliographies and
texts on the subject from various disciplines.
9. It is the lack of resources in this case that forces the African lmmaker to
go it alone. Kabore says, its true that African cinema has been, and will
continue to be for very much longer, an author cinema (Speciale, 1997,
pp. 611).
10. Douglas Kellner (1993) claims that a multiperspectival method will pro-
vide an arsenal of weapons of critique, a full range of perspectives to focus
on cultural artifacts, p 83.
11. Chirols reading in this particular case does not do justice to the overall
intent of normality in which both balance and incongruity should be the
natural order of things, even in pre-colonial Africa.
12. This is in reference to Kabores statement, in an interview with Francoise
Pfaff in Twenty-ve Black African Filmmakers, where he establishes the fact
that he was not depicting an ideal African society.
13. Chirols analysis of the missing narrative is an excellent example of a
deconstructionist scholarship (Chirol, 1995, pp. 5354).
Politics and Facets of Identity: Changing Lenses in Gaston Kabores Cinema 301
14. Manthia Diawara, in short, argues that African lmmakers like Kabore
strike out into new directions of lmmaking, even though they are
standing on the shoulder s of the oral tradition of storytelling.
15. See Teshome Gabriel (1985) for a pioneering work that advocated a critical
theory of Third World Cinema that would serve development and
liberation.
16. The intrusive and creeping nature of modernity is best described by
Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart (1959), where the purveyors of technol-
ogy, alien religion, and commerce appear one at a time.
17. See Girma Negash, Language and Politics (Ph.D. thesis), in which I examine
the reinforcement of nationalist myths through the use of organic
metaphors and imageries by regime leaders and contenders during the
Ethiopian Revolution.
18. The evil temptress has an exotic look about her that differentiates her from
the depiction of the other women in the lm, leaving unanswered the
question of representation from a feminist critical point of view.
19. Elleke Boehmer (1995) elaborates on the metanarrative of journey and
return by postcolonial writers. The journey in Buud Yam is not unlike what
Boehmer describes as the pilgrimage into a spiritual reality obscure to
Europe. The pilgrimage is for self-discovery, in Boehmers words: Incor-
porating indigenous cultural material, deant of Western authority, the
postcolonial quest seeks mastery not in the rst instance over land or other
peoples, but of history and self (pp. 2012).
20. Keesings and Tonkinson (1982), Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) and others
since then have advanced ideas on the exibility of interpreting tradition
and the conscious invention by elites to serve political ends. For a good
assessment of the invention-of-tradition literature and a critic see James
West Turner (1997) who argues that contributors to the invention-of
tradition literature have chosen not to emphasize that societies, like
persons, are embedded in determinate pasts that limit and explain the
process of self-identity (p. 10).
21. For an imaginative approach of a political reading of the novel, see Gugin
(1993), The Politics of the Unconscious. Gugin argues that Carl Jung
blended with Herbert Marcuse offer an oppositional aesthetic politics.
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