“The West got free labour, off the back of Africa, yet the West hasn’t
paid anything for it. Now some African and Caribbean countries are calling for
repatriation for the fact that we gave you 400 years of free labour. When the
era of enslavement ended, the west continues to get free natural resources. The
natural resources we have again such as the oil, gold, diamond. We are talking
about blood diamonds in Sierra-Leone; we are talking about oil in Nigeria.”
Niyi Coker’s film “Pennies for the Boatman” took center stage at the
Madrid International Film Festival by beating out the competition and taking
home the prize for best film script.
“Pennies for the Boatman” was set and shot in St. Louis. The dramatic
film takes place in north St. Louis during the summer of 1958. It’s about the
stormy relationship between two sisters. The movie is an adaptation of St.
Louis playwright Mario Farwell’s “The Seamstress of St. Francis Street.”
The film was originally up for four awards at the Madrid festival:
best film of the festival, best director, best feature film and best film
script.
On the heels of his festival win, Coker learned that his film has
secured a distribution deal in Europe. A1 Pictures in England has picked up
“Pennies for the Boatman” for European theater releases and eventually
worldwide DVD distribution.
Coker’s directing credits include “Black Studies USA” and “The Black
14,” as well as more than 50 major stage productions.
In a chat with Africa Walking Magazine, the cerebral scholar believes,
the art of documentary filmmaking, promotes human knowledge, life and culture
and commends the role and intervention of iREP film festival in Nigeria that is
now in its 7th season.
A festival that has within a short period, being able to remove the
notion, that African cinema and films don’t have a place in history. The
festival has covered the majority of issues affecting Africa through
documentary films such as corruption, drug addiction, poverty, politics,
environmental issues and archives. Also there have being film expositions on
womanism, child labour and abuse, human rights, dance and spirituality, music
and hip-hop, African religions and more.
What would
you make of iREP film festival in Nigeria?
I think what iREP has done, is actually opening up an area that has
not been focus on at all in documentary film making. Africa and Africans don’t
actually tell their stories; rather, other people have defined us by telling
our stories. Over 20 years or more now, we have had a big boom of Nollywood
film industry and of course the whole Nollywood, we have had feature stories
but not really documentary historical analyses. Rather, Nollywood has come more
of entertainment. Documentaries are edutainment, they educate you while
entertaining you and we are defining ourselves through documentaries and
telling our own historical truths, our own cosmological views, which we are,
since early days, what has happened to us, how did we come to this impasse and
this road we found ourselves on this journey as Africans. I think that is the
beauty of documentaries films, as they open up stories and many more to be told
that have never been told until we get onto the road of that self-definition
and actualisation. The irony is only at that point, the next generation will
have a story of who they are and where they are coming from. Otherwise, we
would be defining ourselves to other peoples’ definitions of who we are.
Changing
the mindset of the next generation against borrowed culture, how do we start?
There is always the youth and the youth never ends. If you say the
youth, presently are on borrowed culture, fine, but you still have a lot people
coming up. iREP and documentary films are laying the ground for those people
and maybe those people will look at those people we call the youth today, as a
generation that got lost. They will have a definition of themselves at that
time when that time comes, but the truth is somebody must start laying the
ground work.
I use to make a joke, that when I was in elementary school and high
school in the 70s, we were always told we are the leaders of the next
generation and the irony about it is, the same people who told me we were the
leaders of the next generation are still in power in this country today. They
never made rooms for the next generation. So when you say this present
generation is lost, I believe things will turn around quickly, especially with
the inclusion and the fusion of digital media in this country.
That is one step you are going to get documentary at your fingertips.
Education at your fingertips. You are going to be able to create your own story
very quickly which is a big advancement. I remember in this country, a time
when telephones were pretty hard to come by, only certain affluent people like
some of my classmates, I mean, I knew those of them who had phones and we would
call one another from home staying right up, calling home to home, then it was
for the privileged. Later, they introduced the corner-phones, phone-booths like
we used to see in London and those phone booths sometimes, they work and
sometimes, they don’t. It got to a point, when the whole world went digital and
Nigeria was still on analogue phone, it was very difficult.
I remember when I went to the States for my studies, to call Nigeria
was always tough and phone was still a big deal, when everywhere in the west,
phone was already happening. Guess what happened all of a sudden? By the 90s,
everybody had a cell phone, we too had cell phones, now communication is
everywhere and everybody is connected.
What do we
have to give to the west?
The West always needs Africa to survive. The west did not become the
west overnight. The west was built on the back of Africa. The advancement in
the west was built on the transatlantic slave trade. It was the people of
Africa who went outside to make the west what it is today. Let me ask you a
question, you started a business right now and for 400 to 500 years, you got
free labour for your company, for your farms, and you didn’t have to pay them
salary for anything for 500 years, wouldn’t you be the richest man in the
world? If you had to have labour on your industry and you don’t pay a penny for
it, you will be the richest person in the world. The West got free labour, off
the back of Africa, yet the West hasn’t paid anything for it. Now some African
and Caribbean countries are calling for repatriation for the fact that we gave
you 400 years of free labour. When the era of enslavement ended, the west
continues to get free natural resources. The natural resources we have again
such as the oil, gold, diamond. We are talking about blood diamonds in
Sierra-Leone; we are talking about oil in Nigeria.
Look at cell phones and laptops, the minerals resources that produce
these are from Africa, the land of the Congo to be precise. It is high time
Africa and Africans renegotiated what we are giving. We can’t continue to live
in this strangulation of economic and mental poverty where all our resources
are being exploited. We saw a documentary about the women of the Niger-Delta.
How could people in a region that is making all of that oil, still, remain so poor?
It will never happen in the west!
Documentary
filmmaking can be cumbersome. We talk of funding and the technicalities such as
accuracy. How are we getting the young ones involved?
The Nollywood industry, who is funding it? It’s tough, it’s not easy.
In the beginning, people said Africa or rather Nigeria will not catch up the
big league like Hollywood and Bollywood in the film industry. Once there is a
will, there is a way. People are making films right now. I remember way back,
we used to line up at the cinemas and the kind of films we would watch were
mainly from the west. Today a lot of people are now watching their own films.
The stories in Nollywood are not the best stories. The stories in Nollywood, when
we watch them in New York are very embarrassing, but do you know why Nollywood
has succeeded, I mean the concept? It’s simple, because Nigerians and Africans
are seeing themselves through films.
Mirroring
on two documentary films shown at the festival so far, ‘Fuelling Poverty’ and
‘Miners shot Down’. Africans against Africans?
One of our problems in Africa is leadership. Our leaders have not
learnt to love their own people. They don’t give back in terms of service to
the trust repose in them by the people. They only marginalise and negotiate the
people away.
The African
filmmakers?
The African filmmakers are heroes! One of the filmmakers said it took
her two years to make one film. That is two years of someone’s life but the
film is going to last forever.
Interview by Ireho Aito
AFRICA WAKE UP- Article written by Aito Ireho
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