Three Nights at Botswana's Human Rights Film Festival

Logo of the Ditshwanelo Human Rights Film Festival in Botswana

We were fortunate to have the opportunity to attend the first three evenings of the Ditshwanelo Human Rights Film Festival. Ditshwanelo is the Botswana Centre for Human Rights and this is the sixth year they have held their festival. Unfortunately, it does not seem to have been gathering momentum. Nowhere in any of the city's major malls, on its university campus, or in its bars did I once see a poster, a pamphlet, or other promotional material. This might account for the dismally small audience. On each of the first three nights, fewer than thirty people sparsely populated the comfortable screening room of a very fancy hotel and casino. The audience was almost entirely white—embassy types—and most of them were well over forty. It is safe to say that citizens of Botswana were poorly represented and that its young people were nearly invisible. This kept things on the comatose side of festive.

Over the course of eight nights, the festival screened sixteen movies touching on divergent themes such as genocide, gender, music of resistance, indigenous peoples, and wartime. Most of the films deserved a significantly larger audience; all of them were thought-provoking, and the strongest were crushing in their revelations.

The festival opened with a speech from a government minister who urged the Batswana to produce films, to seek out Botswana's oral historians and capture their knowledge before it fades. He jested, "I hope that it is a lack of human rights abuse in Botwswana that has kept Botswana films out of this festival." He then urged people to consult him for some of the valuable and undisclosed oral history before saying his thank yous and taking his seat. The event coordinator thanked the minister, listed a raft of sponsors including famed human rights defenders Shell Oil and the U.S. government, and then encouraged everyone to sign a petition to close the illegal prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay. The first movie began and the minister slipped out the door.

The first screening was Homecoming, a South African film focusing on three black men who had violently opposed the apartheid government as MK freedom fighters. The film begins as they return from exile or come out of hiding to reunite in Johannesburg.

One of these men becomes the chief researcher for a high-level commission that investigates the abuses of the apartheid government and the strategies of those who fought them. This man digs up the past, which haunts all three men, destroying their happiness and relationships with revelations about betrayals within their own troop of fighters. It is peppered with repetitive flashback sequences and features several smoky rooms of conspiratorial old men and a fully demonized porky and disgusting Afrikaans man who takes sadistic pleasure in his duties as an intelligence officer cum torture specialist.

The producer of the film, twenty-nine-year-old Dumisani Dlamini, was shot dead during a robbery while the filming of his work, which was originally intended to be a television mini-series, was still in progress. Without his guidance, a dubious decision was made to condense the entire thing into a ninety-five-minute feature film. The resulting choppiness, rushing plot, and shallow character treatment are lamentable. Entirely too many scenes fade out, as if to commercial, and the audience is left with a skeleton of a complicated, intrigue-ridden downer.

At best, the film is an adequate frame for one character's musing, "I wonder what would have happened if I were tortured." It encourages us to understand the transformation of revolutionaries into civil servants, the rapidity with which ideologies fade, and the foolishness of thinking that history "owes" you something.

Front side of the Ditshwanelo film festival program (click to see larger image)

The festival changed its tune on the second evening with short works from two former Portuguese colonies, Mozambique and Angola—both of which have recently emerged from dreadful and protracted warfare.

Richard Pakleppa's Angola Saudades from the One Who Loves You begins, appropriately, with a narrative voice that cautions, "Don't expect a full account: I offer only fragments." If it had been Mr. Pakleppa's intention to present a more unified work, he must have been frustrated by the enormous restrictions that the government of Angola placed on his filming. The sixty-five-minute film took the better part of two and a half years to pull together and includes footage from all across the devastated, sprawling mass of Angola. Given the sharpness of Mr. Pakleppa's criticisms, one doubts that he will be permitted to film a sequel.

The film is a composite of brief interviews with a cross-section of the Angolan underclasses and gritty handheld documentary-style footage. Draped around these often discouraging episodes are tranquil, nearly meditative stills and slow videos of Angola's exceptional and varied natural beauty. These are accompanied by a soft female voice reading "letters" of semi-poetry with a wistful and tragic tendency that is further amplified by the emotive and minimalist guitar work of Paulo Flores, whose own lyrics would have been a more poignant ingredient.

The most memorable section of the film focuses on the street children of Luanda, Angola's glitzy, filth-surrounded capital city. These pre-teens permit the cameraman to enter their decayed squats, to see how and what they eat, to witness their efforts to win money by washing obnoxiously expensive cars and to enjoy life by sniffing fuel. A narrator informs the audience that half of Angola's children do not have the opportunity to attend school and that one third of them die before the age of five. We see the children curled up next to one another, shivering on the street, recounting the most recent time that they were beaten by the city's police force, who are not given flattering treatment.

This connects with the footage of young MC Polong Pongo, a native hip hop artist with overtly political lyrics. Recently, one young street child was beaten to death for singing one of Pongo's songs, "Techniques, Causes and Consequences," in the presence of some police officers who did not appreciate the accusations in the music.

The visceral grit of Luanda is well contrasted with the footage of Angolans living in the southern cities that were ravaged by U.S.-funded warlord Joseph Savimbi. People are "living out of windows opened by bullets," playing wheelchair basketball within spitting distance of a minefield, and remembering "the shovels at night as the dead were buried." The composure of those who have lived through Angola's nightmare and the dedication of struggling mothers, controversial musicians, and inspired social workers are the film's only encouraging moments.

Saudades is not a brutal experience—it is not an especially coherent film—but it offers a clearer picture of Angola than anyone could acquire without spending months in the country, and the way that Richard Pakleppa juxtaposes the country's scars, wealth, impoverishment, elders, and youth is powerful enough to make the film more than worthwhile.

Marrabento, The Stories My Guitar Sings, a Mozambican offering from director Karen Boswell, was considerably more light-hearted. It casually follows around two "Marrabenta" musicians, Dilon Djinji and Antonio Marcos. If Dilon Djinji was not a proud and party-loving man, the backdrop of the film might have proven more sobering. As it is, he and his friends reminisce about dreadful working conditions in South African mines, foul treatment at the hands of white cops, and the turmoil of warfare in an almost jocular fashion.

When Mr. Djinji says, "It is always those from the countryside who suffer," "eight members of my family were lost during the war," or "we lived, worked, and grunted like pigs," or when he relates that he was suspected and spat upon for being the only black man around town in a new suit, his happiness with being on camera, his sense of self-importance, and his tendency to burst into song or start making music remove the teeth from his misfortunes. His refusal to sing about politics compounds this effect—actually, the most powerful song in the film is composed and performed by his own musically involved son, who is more invested in tackling difficult social issues with his music.

The consistent emphasis of the film is that the Mozambican people are fun-loving and generally cheerful (although the cagey discomfort displayed by Mr. Djinji's enormous extended family when he arrives with the cinema circus in their rural compound seems to conflict with this image).

The music was generally catchy, foot-stomping stuff, without particular virtuosity or grace, and Mozambique could surely have offered more memorable settings for the film's storytelling than the series of drab interiors and crowded streets.

Back side of the Ditshwanelo film festival program (click to see larger image)

The third night of the film festival—Saturday's six-hour marathon—was exceptionally grim. It began with Genocide and the Second Reich, a documentary directed by David Olusoga of the BBC, who sets out to prove that the twentieth century's first genocide was perpetrated by the German military against the Herero and Nama, indigenous peoples of Namibia. The documentary is superbly produced; the narrative is seamless and damning, and the connections drawn between this genocide and the ones that follow it are fascinating. It is one of those excellent works of history that leave you feeling as if your prior conception of the time period in question was totally inadequate and perhaps engineered to be so.

The point of departure for the film is the only bit of familiar history in the whole sixty minutes. The German theory of Lebensraum, or living space, was prompting top officials to search for lands where the German people could multiply and prosper. The notorious scramble for Africa gave the claustrophobic German government the perfect opportunity to gain space. By the beginning of the 1900s, there were thousands of German settlers in German Southwest Africa, which would later be named Namibia.

Their relationship with the locals was strained. Skirmishes over land and cattle generated hostilities. The Herero, who were being squeezed away from the coastal areas where the Germans first established themselves, reacted to the German killings of unarmed Herero civilians by rebelling in late 1903. In a surprise offensive, they massacred hundreds of settlers and ransacked their establishments.

The Germans recruited soldiers and quickly supplied their colonists with reinforcements and the latest military technology. General Von Trotter led the counterattack. Olusoga elucidates this conflict by explaining that the Herero had a very different way of interpreting battle and honor. He claims that their rebellion was, in all likelihood, a one-time offensive designed to demonstrate their willingness to defend themselves and the importance of their boundaries. That they withdrew after their offensive, to settle quietly farther away from their chosen lands, is offered as proof of this interpretation. But the opportunity that their violence offered the Germans seems to have proven too tempting: "what had started as a rebellion was becoming a war," even though "the rebellion that Von Trotter had come to crush was essentially over." The bloodshed to come might have been averted, but "for Von Trotter, negotiation was a form of weakness."

On the tenth of January, 1904, Von Trotter issued an "Annihilation Order" that sparked protests across his motherland. The Herero were then hunted like animals and tricked, with news of a false pardon, into surrendering themselves to German settlers. Then comes the sinister bit. In the cheery beach town of Swakopmund (where the African AIDS Awareness Campaign spent two pleasant days oblivious to the contents of the soil beneath their feet and the history of the well-touristed beach community), the Germans opened the world’s first concentration camps.

Herero and Nama people of all ages and both genders were imprisoned by the thousands and worked to death. Between 1904 and 1913, the German government was actually pre-printing death certificates stating "Death by Exhaustion" to account for the dwindling population of its death camps. As the extermination progressed, the Germans analyzed Herero and Nama bone structure and physiognomy in a precursor to the twisted science they practiced during World War II. Mr. Olusaga points out the brutal irony: "the racial theories that were now being used by the genocide were advanced by the remains of its victims." The most outright claim of the film comes near its conclusion: "Nazi ideas were born in Swakopmund." And when the credits roll, the claim seems believable.

In the Name of God explores another embarrassment to Western culture. Directors Maria and Peter Rinaldo painstakingly document the role of the church in the recent Rwandan genocide. Anyone who enjoyed Hotel Rwanda or any of the other dramatizations of the East African conflict should seek out this revealing film. There are numerous interviews with both Hutus and Tutsis that explore how the Bible was used to make people kill. One young Hutu man explained why he and others like him joined the murderous gangs: "It is hard for a lone man to deny armed soldiers, especially when they claim to be on a mission from God."

The most scandalous material pertains to officials in Brussels with the power to influence affairs in Rwanda who, though fully aware of the accelerating atrocities, refused to do anything about them. "Dozens of sources had informed the international community that genocide was on the way," but the film reveals that Hutus, far from being discouraged in their efforts, were given free reign and the powerful silent consent of the West. This film includes some nauseating footage of executions by machete and other violent images difficult to chase out of the brain.

The final film of Saturday night was Academy Award-nominated Palestinian film Paradise Lost, which Westerners can easily rent at the more prominent video rental establishments. I linger on the other films because I suspect that, for many of our readers, they will prove difficult to obtain or to borrow.


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