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African Cinema: an interview with Rahmatou Keita

Written by Solange Moffi
Sunday, 13 April 2008 14:00

International Women’s Month has come to an end after a number of excellent cultural programmes celebrating and considering the female gender. Among the many were the Gathering Festival presented by north London’s Bernie Grant Arts Centre, the Asian women film festival Tongues on Fire, and its Afro-Caribbean equivalent, the Images of Black Women Festival. I was delighted to attend the latter, particularly as I had the opportunity to become acquainted with with Niger-born director Rahmatou Keita’s work, whose documentary Al’leessi...An African Actress retraces the birth of African cinema through the life of Zalika Souley, the first professional African actress who operated from the late 1960s through to the mid-1980s.

Her projects have been well received (the documentary was selected at Cannes, Berlin and Vienna Film festivals in 2005), and Rahmatou Keita is positive about the future of African cinema.

How long have you been directing?

As a journalist and TV reporter, I can’t exactly recall when I made the jump into directing. Back then, my news reports already took the shape of short films and I remember French TV programmers nagging me about giving them too much of an artistic approach. If I remember well, it all started about 10 years ago.

What were your motives for wanting to direct?

Firstly, French TV programming was operating under a very narrow-minded and racist policy (which is even more the case today). Secondly, I felt artistically/creatively/culturally choked in the Paris arena. I’m from Sahel and my world is immense: it spans Mauritania, Somalia and the Sahara, via the Atlantic and Indian oceans, which are all deeply anchored in me. Like all these brothers and sisters inhabiting the globe, I felt emotionally restrained. Having been exiled from my own country to a westernised society, I wanted the world to know my and my peers’ history.

What prompted you to retrace the birth of African cinema through the career of Zalika Souley?

I had been thinking about it for a long time, way before I started directing. I had been hearing of the Nigerien cinematic pioneers (Oumarou Ganda, Moustapha Alassane, Mahamane Bakabé, Inoussa Ousseini and Moustapha Diop) since I was a little girl, as nationally infamous filmmakers who fully embraced western culture. I got to watch their films at college and was wondering what they had become. No one in the country either remembered or acknowledged them, which I thought was unfair given that they had been essential figures of the 1960s and 1970s Golden Age of Nigerien cinema, which had since sunk back into obscurity. I wanted them to be celebrated and recognised for their contribution to African cinema.

I chose to pay them tribute through a retrospective of Zalika Souley’s career, which I thought was a metaphor of our cinema’s history: meteoric, misunderstood but memorable. Zalika was ill-perceived by her people for being a Muslim woman who was hanging with all these men, and accepted to act in their films. She was misunderstood by her own family and the entire people of Niger for portraying extreme characters, ranging from a horse-riding desperado to a hard-edged prostitute. [Once a legendary onscreen “bad girl”, Souley, who worked with celebrated directors including Niger’s Oumarou Ganda and Moustapha Alassane, has now been relegated to being employed as a maid at an unknown location in Europe.] I found a symbolic meaning in her story.

What made her special aside from being the first professional African actress?

To say I admired her wouldn’t be quite right: she intrigued me more than anything else. I had never grasped how she’d coped with and endured all this hostility, so I was eager to understand her motives for doing what she did at a time when Niger had been battling western colonisation for nearly a century. Neither Zalika nor I understand to this day why she was the target of such animosity, but both she and the filmmakers persisted in their passion for film. I guess her courage and strength should be saluted.

Is there a circle of female directors, actresses, producers whom you affiliate with or feel close to?

I do have what I would call a “cinematic family”, who are very generous and encouraging friends, both men and women. I do not endorse ostracism, or to feel isolated or segregated as a woman director in Africa. To belong to a designed circle would mean feeling excluded, which I don’t in my own country. On the contrary, at risk of causing disappointment, I trust that male directors have always been one step ahead from women directors and that they are very supportive and caring towards their female peers. I can sense this very African urge for transmitting one’s knowledge to another, as if it were a mission.

What really caught my attention at the Images of Black Women Festival is when you stated that “the future of cinema is in Africa”. Could you expand on this? If so, what place do you feel women occupy in this future?

I definitely believe that the future of cinema lies in the hands of oppressed countries, who do have untold stories to share with the whole world. We tell stories in a way that no other part of the world could ever do. And mine and my peers’ work is only the beginning of things to come: I am convinced that cinematic treasure resides on our continent. And in this future, regardless of gender, we as filmmakers are all walking in the same direction.

What is your next project about?

It will be a fiction, a love story. I would like to unveil Africa’s most precious to the entire planet. I hope I will succeed in my purpose.