We want to take copies

Letting chance dictate my reading of African books has often paid off, but rarely so well as when I picked up This Earth, My Brother… (1971) by Kofi Awoonor in a London charity shop. I had not heard of him and the cover (below) was not particularly inspiring. The first few paragraphs were dense and uninviting, but the rules of the game are that I must read any African book I find amongst the Ian McEwans and EL James. So it came with me.

And it is a remarkable book. The rather elaborate style of the first chapter runs through the novel but alternates with more grounded accounts of life in Ghana from the colonial period, through WW2 and on to independence. Some of these stories are digressive, delving into the histories and reflections of incidental characters, while others follow the thoughts of Amamu, a foreign-educated lawyer who feels ill at ease in urban society.

This unease is not the pressure of corruption so skilfully rendered a few years earlier by Ayi Kwei Armah in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Instead Amamu is troubled by a combination of lost love, social alienation and the echoes of a deeply religious education.

Awoonor’s two narrative voices often draw on the same events, memories and observations, so complement one another. The direct passages become a key to unlock the poetic, the poetic a commentary on the direct. He is a skilled writer in both registers, and I’m keen to read more of his work. There is only one other novel, Comes the Voyager at Last (1992), but several volumes of poetry and essays.

With my interest in African cinema I was also intrigued to read that Awoonor was involved in film production in Ghana in the mid-1960s and briefly head of the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC). But it was harder to find out just what this meant. The Gold Coast Film Unit is often discussed as an example of Britain’s approach to film-making in its colonies, but post-independence cinema in Ghana barely seems to exist at all.

I finally found some answers in Perished Diamonds, a short documentary about Ghana’s cinema, made in 2013 by Anita Afonu. After independence in 1957 president Kwame Nkrumah nationalised film production, creating the Ghana Film Unit, which in turn took on responsibility for distribution and exhibition to become GFIC a few years later.

Awoonor, barely in his thirties, was a fellow at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, Legon when he was asked to take over. “I was invited […] to go in there, to take care of the creative angle, because the programme was to let the corporation begin to produce films,” he recalls.

It is harder to say what kind of films GFIC produced under his leadership. Biographies tend to say that Awoonor became manager in 1965, but in the documentary he says that he was involved for between two and two-and-a-half years, until the coup that brought down Nkrumah in February 1966.

Hamile: The Tongo Hamlet

That lines up with his credit (as George Awoonor-Williams) as production adviser on Hamile: The Tongo Hamlet, a 1964 film transplanting Shakespeare’s play to a village in northern Ghana. Originally a university theatre performance, the film was directed by Terry Bishop and runs to nearly two hours. A fragment (left) appears in the documentary.

Another hint comes in a book on Nkrumah’s cultural policy by Kwame Botwe-Asamoah. Awoonor told the author that he was involved in producing a script called Across the Parapet, which took its inspiration from line in one of Nkrumah’s speeches.

“And across the parapet, I see the vision of African unity and independence, her body besmeared with the blood of her sons and daughters, in their struggle to set her free from the shackles of imperialism.”

Unesco’s 1967 catalogue of African films dates the 54-minute documentary to 1964, and explains that it covers the history of Ghana, Nkrumah’s role in independence, the renewal of the country and its aspirations for the future. It was directed by Brooks and T Ahene Daniels.

The catalogue can add no other titles from 1964-66, and only a few public service films from the earlier post-independence period. However, it seems likely that No Tears For Ananse, generally cited as the first Ghanaian feature film, was made while Awoonor was running GFIC. Dating of the film is erratic, but director Sam Aryeetey said in a 1978 interview that it was made in 1965.

As a Nkrumah appointee, Awoonor lost his position after the coup in February 1966. He left the country, first to study English literature at the University of London, then comparative literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. After getting his PhD he stayed on in the USA to teach.

It was during this period of exile that he changed his name and wrote This Earth, My Brother. He returned to Ghana in 1975 to teach and write. He was imprisoned for a time, and then became a diplomat. He seems not to have been involved in film-making again.

The invisibility of the films he helped make may be down to a general purge of materials once Nkrumah fell, as noted by film scholar Manthia Diawara in Jump-Cut:

“When Nkrumah was overthrown, the new regime confiscated all the films produced between 1957 and 1966, giving as a reason that the films fed the ‘personality cult of Nkrumah’.”

But Perished Diamonds gives a further reason, with wider implications. In 1997 the Ghanaian government ‘divested’ the Ghana Film Industry Corporation and its archive to a Malaysian company which proceeded to strip the assets, discarding many of the films in the process.

Kofi Awoonor in Perished Diamonds

However distant his own involvement, Awoonor’s opinion is damning. “The sale of the Ghana Film Industry Corporation is a tragedy for Ghanaian culture and African civilisation. It’s a betrayal of the Kwame Nkrumah dream [that] we ourselves must be able to tell our own story.”

Returning to This Earth, My Brother it is intriguing to see how Awoonor makes use of the cinema. This begins with the mobile cinema vans that showed films around the country during WW2.

“The mobile cinema vans came regularly. They showed films of smart British soldiers marching to martial music and queueing for hot steaming food grinning from ear to ear. That was war. Quick montages of battle action, smoke and confusion. And a few British soldiers would be leading towards camera a long line of captive Germans.”

Then in the following chapter, which takes a more oblique view on the war years, this expands to cover the films made at the time.

“Hitler had only one ball. That was the song. Floated through our mornings and noons in palm groves as mobile cinema vans came and the Gold Coast film units came and shot films of kernel gatherers. Elders asked, When are you coming back to show it to us, we want to take copies, I will take five copies.”

A cache of copies in a village somewhere would be a treasure trove now.

Later the cinema features in the account of Ibrahim, a young man turned bad.

“He was a bright-eyed lad of eighteen, if anyone could tell his age. His brother apprenticed him to a tailor who made Hausa gowns near the first refuse dump. Ibrahim did not stay to learn the trade. He hired himself out as a commissionaire to Opera Cinema, a big dark cinema in the heart of the city with a large urchin clientele. Here he made the acquaintance of some of the tough northern boys of Cow Lane, the home of every jockey in the city. Then he started coming home late.”

And there was indeed an Opera Cinema, which Jennifer Blaylock tracked down in 2011. Her blog on the cinema in Ghana is well worth checking out for details of the cinema vans and the state of the film archives.

A final tragic note is that Kofi Awoonor is no longer with us. In September 2013 he died in the terrorist attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi.

text © Ian Mundell 2016