At the end of a screening at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) a lady took the microphone and invited people to buy plastic bottles which were for sale right at the exit of the theatre. It was an initiative of an NGO working in the field of improving access to drinking water in Africa. The goal was to raise money to supply a village in South Sudan with clean water. I try to imagine the reaction of the audience. Some must have thought: yet another charity for our poor friends in Africa. Isn't it enough that the government pays millions every year from our taxes helping aid to the third world countries? Others probably thought it would be a noble deed to let wealthy Europeans pay a few Euros and give hundreds of families access to the liquid of life. In the end the first ones will walk away indifferently and the second will buy some bottles. And this happens a lot at festivals. But whether it will really bring any change to the world or to what extent that change may be, nobody knows.
You could see this on the occasion of the screening of Hinterland, a documentary made by the Dutch director Albert Elings. He followed a former Sudanese child soldier, who came to the Netherlands 11 years ago as an asylum seeker, visiting his home country. Hence the full title of the film, Hinterland-A Child Soldier's Road back to South Sudan. The production properly began in 2002. Kon Kelei was then starring in Tussenland (Between countries) a feature film by Dutch filmmaker Eugenie Jansen who won one of the three Tiger Awards at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. At that time, documentary maker Albert Elings started to follow the expatriate. After the the country's independence and the peace agreement between Khartoum and Juba, Kon Kelei returns home. The film follows him on this first trip to his birthplace where he has plans to open a school and insure drinking water for his community. It tells one of those stories we hear more and more in our time and which are the dream of millions of young people in the South, but at the same time they are a nightmare to the Western world.
Kon fled the Sudan more than a decade ago when he was recruited by the rebels as a child soldier. After a long journey on a containership he ended up in the harbour of Rotterdam. From that moment on his life would never be the same again. As a refugee in one of the asylum camps in the Netherlands, he could go to school and graduate in international law. Now he is back with a master in his pocket and a lot of dreams and plans to develop his new independent country South Sudan. The documentary follows the metamorphosis of the young man during almost ten years, from the moment he enters the asylum camp until he returns to his motherland. The film shows Kon Kelei in the camp, then during his graduating ceremony at the university of law in Nijmegen, and finally when he goes back to his family and his village in the deep inlands of South Sudan. It is nothing more than the story of a young refugee who grabbed the chance of success.
However, unconsciously, the film points out the gap between two worlds. Following Kon on his journey you see two ways of life; on the one hand there is the life he lived all those years in exile and on the other hand there is the life his family lives, which is, of course, the life he would have lived if he had not run away. This is when you see how absurd difference is in chance and unjustice between two worlds. This feeling is felt much deeper in the Netherlands, where the naive and optimistic message of the film is in complete contrast with the actual debate about the policy regarding underdeveloped countries. European countries are indeed facing a terrible economic crisis. In addition to budget cuts in fields such as culture and public services, they find the solution in reducing budgets for international development, which means retrenchment in the policy of sustaining the weak economies.
At the same time the recent case of the young Angolan Mauro Manuel, opened a highly animated debate about the decision to send him back to Luanda after ten years of exile, even though he has no more family in the African city. The fact is that Mauro is a very special case and far too complex for an emigration law that reduces human beings to numbers. The eighteen year old man came to the Netherlands as an eight year old boy. His mother put him on an airplane to save him from poverty, misery and civil war. In the Netherlands he was taken in by a family who tried to adopt him twice, without success. Still, the kid grew up in Dutch society quite like any other young boy: going to school, playing in the courtyards and hanging around in the parks. Now that he is and adult, this very rational society wants him to fit in somewhere. A case like this cannot be predicted by law. The boy went through the Dutch school system for ten years, he speaks the Dutch language like his mother tongue, he has Dutch friends and dreams of making a living in the only society he knows.
Whereas Mauro Manuel is still young (only eighteen), Kon Kelei is more grown up. He finished his master's degree, and the young expert in international law has a brilliant future ahead of him. He is teaching at the newly founded university of law and will probably embrace a political career. The film shows many other south Sudanese young people like him, who are still in the process of getting their degrees. They are the incarnation of the dream of many young African men: go to the North, learn, make money and go back to serve the family, the tribe and the country. This brings us back to the sixties and seventies when African students were sent to Europe to graduate in different fields and take care of their people, once they got back home. Can we ever forget that this strategy led to all kinds of post-colonial regimes? The dictators that the people of Tunisia, Egypt and other African countries are now struggling against, are all well educated and graduated in Europe and the USA. All African ruling elite learned how to govern their people in Europe whether they physically went there or not.
From that point of view there is a very naive idea about the way the North is giving back something to Africa. One could not watch this film without thinking about the political and economic background of the refugee phenomenon. Such a film, even when it is clearly made with all good intentions, is then part of a widespread practice in the western world, which aims to ease people's conscience: As you leave the film, you can buy a plastic bottle from a humanitarian organization which is raising money to develop drinking water in South Sudan. For a few Euros, people get the opportunity to ease their conscience and feel spiritually at peace. At the same time they let their governments send asylum seekers and immigrants back to the misery which they create with their unfair policy.
Worse still is that there is a huge dilemma in these kinds of situations. If you participate in the humanitarian effort you are an accomplice to a certain neo-capitalist system which you support indirectly. If you do nothing, you will not help the situation of millions of people improve or, at least, not worsen. That is how the neo-liberalist rulers of the world, by a perverse effect, use humanist values of solidarity and trap citizens in order to use their need for spiritual peace and mercifulness to save themselves from the obligation to fulfil their duty.
In these kinds of situations the nice mythical figure of Robin Hood comes to mind. The NGO is taking money from the rich to give to the poor. That is not a bad thing, one could say. But there are two counterarguments to this naive configuration. Firstly, NGOs are not steeling. Secondly, the people buying the plastic bottles are mostly not really the rich of the western world. Those who are steeling and the modern aristocrats profiting from the privileges of the neo-liberalism are the multinationals and the banks. At least one could see in the young former refugee an incarnation of the modern Robin Hood for whom the wealth he made thanks to his exile, could be seen, by way of a very subtle metaphor as a tax imposed on the rich, which he uses to help his poor people. The latter were robbed by the imperialist western companies and rulers.
Unfortunately this idea cannot be found in this film, nor in another, The Sacrifice (Yoole). This is a documentary by Moussa Sene Absa from Senegal, who points out the illegal migration on the coast of the Atlantic ocean. Asylum seekers or illegal migrants may be seen as the Robin Hoods of our time. Their plan is in fact to take the money from the rich and give it to the poor. But it in the legend of Robin Hood, the hero is of aristocratic blood. That is why I see more of the legend of the good thief in these European filmmakers who make a stand against the injustice of the neo-liberal machine crushing everybody and everything in its path; the poor would then be the Asian and the African peasants as well as the workers and the petit bourgeois in the wealthy European societies. But the workings of this kind of rollercoaster are more obvious on continents like Africa, where the absurd contradictions can be easily verified. That is why even if African cinema is not well represented at western festivals, African subjects are the subject ofmany documentaries made by directors in the North.
Hassouna Mansouri
First published on From the South on 12/08/2011 02:45:00 AM
http://baobabwritings.blogspot.com/2011/12/waiting-for-robin-hood.html