It’s not cinema-going that caught my eye in Chinua Achebe’s 1987 novel Anthills of the Savanah, but a reference to an African film. That is very rare in my reading so far.
The reference appears in a chapter narrated by Beatrice Okoh, one of three linked characters the narrative follows through the treacherous political water of a fictional African dictatorship. The others are Chris Oriko, a government minister, and journalist Ikem Osodi.
Beatrice recalls meeting Ikem while she was studying English literature at a London university. She admired his brilliant and original ideas, but found that he had no clear role for women in his political thinking. She concedes this hurt his feelings, since he had celebrated the role of women in a novel and a play on the Women’s War of 1929, an uprising against the British administration in Nigeria. However laudable this foregrounding of women, Beatrice objects that it is not sufficiently progressive.
“The way I see it is that giving women today the same role which traditional society gave them of intervening only when everything else has failed is not enough, you know, like the women in the Sembène film who pick up the spears abandoned by their defeated menfolk. It is not enough that women should be the court of last resort because the last resort is a damn sight too far and too late.”
The film in question is Emitai (1971) by Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène. It dramatises a stand-off towards the end of WWII between villagers in the Casamance region of West Africa and French colonial forces, who want the village’s rice harvest. When the men eventually cave in and hand over the rice to the French, the women continue to resist. Or at least they take up the discarded spears, and we see no more, since this is where the film ends.
Emitai (1971)
In addition to being a rare reference to an African film in African literature, this comment on Emitai is unusual for challenging Sembène’s position regarding women. The conventional view is that he is a champion of African women and a progressive in gender relations, whereas Beatrice (and by implication Achebe) is more critical.
Emitai seems to have made an impression on Achebe, since he returns to the subject in a Paris Review interview of 1994. Again he is talking about Beatrice, with whom he says he identifies, but this time he puts himself in the firing line rather than Sembène.
“There is a certain increase in the importance I assign to women in getting us out of the mess that we are in, which is a reflection of the role of women in my traditional culture—that they do not interfere in politics until men really make such a mess that the society is unable to go backward or forward. Then women will move in… this is the way the stories have been constructed, and this is what I have tried to say.”
As an aside, it is interesting to note that Sembène wrote a book with a similar setting to Anthills of the Savanah, anticipating Achebe’s novel by several years. Le Dernier de l’Empire (1981) explores the relationships of a group of people close to an African dictator who has mysteriously disappeared. The main characters include old government colleagues of the dictator, a journalist and a businessman with an interest in politics. Wives and lovers appear, but not in the foreground. Traditional roles, once again.
Finally, there’s another passing cinematic reference to note in Anthills of the Savannah, which is even more unexpected than the mention of Emitai. It appears in a tirade about official photographs, spoken by His Excellency the president.
“I don’t find it funny, people shaking hands like this…while their neck is turned away at right angles, like that girl in The Exorcist, and grinning into the camera.”
text © Ian Mundell 2015
mundellian 