Transcript of lecture by Haile Gerima, given at Mount Holyoke College on March 30, 1995

Basically I just want to talk about the politics of African cinema. I know we are going to go into also African American cinema, because I think it's inseparable in my life, in my practice. I would just like to start with Africa. The documentary film mentioned that I shot in Ethiopia, I wanted you to know that initially when I started going back to Ethiopia since the change, and I'm still doing a lot of pre-production within the context of African reality. I think sometimes the abstraction may not help but I want to speak about my own experience as an African film maker on this planet. And not make it a general rule, but it may sound like that, because that is the actual reality. But, what's very interesting is that I have an uncle, I've lost my parents, unrecorded, except just some footages of my father. An African film maker looks for accidental time and space. When you see a film done its like a cooked food and especially those of you who don't cut onions and do all the pre-production to cook, but you eat a shipped meal from servants and slaves, but culturally speaking, movies when it comes it's just like a food that you never cooked, but the process is the place of the actual battle ground of human beings trying to say, "I am. This is me. This is my face. This is my mother. This is my grandmother. This is my people. This is how I think. This is what is inside my head." To say that, the absence of right, the illegalness of an African, and African's declaration of wanting to be a film maker becomes the actual battle ground. So the movie really does not represent the background in the making of the movie.

I have this uncle that I wanted to record. He's about 83 years old. He has a lot of information that I want to get transmitted to me. Information when I was actually decadent and abrasive and young and stupid and silly, didn't inherit it when I was supposed to inherit it because inheritance of legacy and culture depends on one's ripeness. When you are not ripe. It's international. It's universal. It's not just African, it's universal. Most generations don't wake up when they are supposed to wake up. Then when they wake up they squinch their brain and they say, "Who was my grandmother?" This is a sad, sad commentary about life. I try to teach my students to just really record their parents first. Film makers should just keep recording their parents, their neighbors, their villages, before they go around thinking about making a film with their notion of film with Cary Grant's clone and Doris Day's clone. You say to them, "Just record now." Make a library of recording of all this passing generations because it's your reference point.

Equipment, when I got a brief freedom in Ethiopia, which is always the case, when I did Harvest 3000 Years, it was a brief window that is very magical. It was Haile Sallasi government being challenged by a new junta, and all insecured and none of them in charge. I just walked in and made a movie and got out. And the empire just collapsed when I hit London airport. People would say, well, they tried to say, you know with this film, that film, but to me that whole period of that window can never come back again. This film couldn't be done again in different circumstances, et cetera, pre or after. I always look for those brief moments.

I went to Ethiopia to quickly record as I was doing pre-production for BBC, the documentary film I did for BBC called Imperfect Journey. And here I was with this Niagara, not a new Niagara recorder and I felt I should record my uncle with good equipment instead of what this brother is trying to record with. I felt it was important archival material. When I got to Ethiopia the customs office, they were all this privileged European people with their privileged white trust fund skin in front of me. They went through with all their computers and cameras and here I was with my -- you know, Ethiopian citizen but illegal still in the actual context of transactions in airports. I'm illegal in every airport. I'm not complaining. It makes you connect. That's when you know you're like the Pakistanian, the Indian, because in London you look around, you're kept -- you know where you belong and language is not important, just you know where you are on this planet. And it's educational. But, any how, here I was, excited with this equipment going to go through this customs and I was stopped. Also an Ethiopian guy with me was also a filmmaker, his machine was taken and mine was taken. Here I was, when I was supposed to go to the village for the time period I have, I'm at the Custom's office stranded trying to liberate the equipment. I stayed there trying to fight for a whole week, two weeks doing nothing and my relatives are all in Ghanda. So, I just left it and visited friends and took some pictures and got back in the airport and then they handed me my Niagara to take it out. Now, that is not explainable in any logic. I just want you to keep that in mind. It will connect somewhere. That's why most people don't know how to follow my movie. My thought processes is a very primitive and organized thought process. So, here again, I come back to Ethiopia with now what we call the `White Visa'. I had my white people from England. I made sure I had three white people in front of me, and I went through the visa and immigration and customs, straight without any problem through their power. I went through every check point in Ethiopia just fronting them in the Land Rover. I made them look like they were the boss, though they were my employees. And the driver always has to have a white person in front of him at every check point. The driver has to quickly point "_________, ________," the new World Bank AMF power. And the government has told everybody, don't stop (foreigners) don't mistreat them, give them everything, don't stop them. So here I am going any where I wanted to go with this power, armed with this power. Went to every dungeon and made my film. I recorded people who are afraid for their life, hidden in a covert way. And left. We tried in Ethiopia and that is to interview the president. The president refused to be interviewed by me although he is accessible to every beginning white filmmaker that I met who were there from Germany, Holland and. They always say, "We like your film. And I hope I can work with you." But they are in charge of my country. And I always them to do me a favor, to get me around.

Here, they refused to give me access to interview my own president. BBC can call him by phone and make him really dance and do all the tap dancing. So I left and another Ethiopian intellectual went and they were disappointed with my film. I reported to the film viewers that this guy didn't want to be interviewed, so you will see that it's an imperfect journey of my own perspective. They felt so disappointed and angry they said, "Haile is no more independent. He's now with the opposition." So, this guy asked (______________), "Why didn't you grant him an interview?" This big official said, "Well, he had all this underground people covered up interviewed." So this Ethiopian asked, "How did you actually see this movie? How did you know he was interviewing these covered up people?" This is Africa. This is African cinema. And it's not logical. They saw the movie and made up their mind. The reason they didn't get interviews is because I had people who were complaining there's no democracy covered up. Now how did they know there was this covered up Ethiopians? I did it underground. Are they that sophisticated? Do they follow me that close? They went through my hotel room and just checked everything and scared me to death. So, what has this got to do with the politics of African cinema? This is everything that African cinema is all about. In fact, I am just a spoiled African filmmaker because I run to America and hide in the bosom of African Americans in Northeast Washington, DC. But there are some Africans who go to prison, who are in airport prisons in Europe and in Africa, in Latin America there were filmmakers who were shot and killed. And so, I'm not complaining. I'm just trying to show you the perspective of, I wanting to record my history, my legacy, and the absence of freedom. Not only from the economic perspective but just the logistics, the freedom to film my own history is not accessible to me. And I read a lot of film reviewers and critics and one time an African film critic called me and said to me, "Haile" (he's like me, hiding abroad) "We're really wondering, when are you going to make a film about Ethiopia, man? It's been ten years since you film about Ethiopia." So, I just said to him, "When are you going to pay my ticket to Ethiopia? When are you going to let me through the customs office? When are you going to free the immigration office? And all the obstacles for African filmmakers?"

Sitting in a university and just expecting film from filmmakers that literally make films out of miracle. The situation is just so oppressive. Sometimes you say, "Well, it's like the slaves who cook and the masters who didn't know how long it took to cook. Just complained about the taste." So, African cinema for me is fundamentally a battle ground. Here you are, you have a government, a government that is in cahoots with Western culture to be the diet of a people as an unquestionable diet, a diet that disfigures the sensitivity, the perspective and the thought process of Africans. You have no single African country who has proposed a serious vision on a cultural level about cinema. A cinema policy for African filmmakers. Most African filmmakers are, what I call, (foolanies) earlier I was talking about it. I call them foolanies jokingly but it's really a serious title. Foolanies are those nomads in Africa. And out of the intellectuals who write books and who do all other kinds of intellectual endeavor, filmmakers are foolanies. They go all over the world begging money, because without Fuji, without Kodak, they can't make movies. They don't descend out of the Kodak family, they don't come out owning Fuji or Agfa, and they don't own no laboratories, they are just baseless, foundationless, filmmakers who are trying to make a movie in a period when they were not supposed to make movies. And that's why I call those movies "miracle movies". For me African films have to be first praised for their "miracle" existence, for the fact that they do exist. And then, critically be looked at. I'm for film criticism but I think the perspective of what African filmmakers have to go through to produce a movie is a very, very profound problem. The other problem is also the fact that African's have to go for science, technology, for economics outside their country to produce a film about their grandmother.

For a minute suppose you are the Minister of Culture in France. And you do like African films, for many reasons. Now, you are the new producer of African films. What is your selective process? Now, suppose you are a Japanese, making your movie and your producer is a Japanese, so the producer automatically looks at your story that resembles his grandmother's story and endorses it. Here you are, an alien, a French person trying to extend to get your story to produce the story and says, "This film shouldn't be made. I prefer so-and-so movie. So-and-so as the filmmaker." So now what we have here is the power, the technology and the finance brings automatically makes African filmmakers commit miscarriage of their idea. That is without even the creative process, just the birth of idea is now being hijacked by Europe. A whole intellectual African filmmakers are sitting around and saying, "Who should I get pregnant for? What movies does she or he like?" So this artificial insemination is now in cultural terms taking place in Africa. I'm sitting as a little kid in the middle of (Dakarh), Agra, Addis Abba, and I said, "Well, this is what France is into now. They don't go no more for this old guard filmmakers who made movies about antique colonialism. What do they now produce? Oh, now they like this thing, they have coined it, called "Bush Cinema"." It's a new concept, it's out of Paris, Bush Cinema, now is the new cinema. What is Bush Cinema? It's African's going in and out of huts and grass huts demonstrating how they walk into their hut and come out of their hut, how they go to bed and how they wake up, and how they kiss their cattle and how they broom their house. Then, before you even pass that test, the new film is now Calabash Cinema. A new concept now comes out of Paris. A new concept is actually coined in Paris and Calabash Cinema now has to live up to it. Now what is Calabash Cinema? Well, it's people going around with gore, cut gore and claim only African's carry water with gourds, like plastic boards, walking in and out of screens, demonstrating physical movements. What is happening here? It's hijacking the creative process. African film is being affected because I'm baking bread for Paris. There is no more baking bread for my consumption. I am culturally producing for Europe to eat. So what do I do? I fashion my cultural products to nurture that societies expectation of me, which means I postpone my ideas in my head. I go into my brain and postpone every pregnancy. Waiting for some day that I will do a film about my grandfather and his story, someday when I gain the resources. And so what is happening? A whole intellectual genocide of creative power is taking place as far as I'm concerned. Because, to me, I think all human beings should express from their cultural point of view a given art work or product and all human beings try to nibble it and try to get to see how other people looked at love, hate, good, evil, all this context have to be put in perspective of our cultural origin. And so African filmmakers now then have another boss. In Africa they have governments. Governments only want African filmmakers to take their pictures going into airports and coming out of the airports. African governments think films are only, those films that come from Europe and America to keep the people passive. In fact, African filmmakers are dangerous because they reflect society. They speak about governments. Injustices. Social issues. And therefore why finance them? Why make it a priority? In fact, Africans they will say, false politicians, politics being an art of lying, skilled by the whole school of Europe in this lying political culture, they will say, "Well the people need food and shelter, agriculture is more important. Airport is more important. Television is more important." But, whose plane is landing in this airport? And what country are the airports facing? Whose economic interest is shipped out and shipped in to whose advantage? How come Africans can't commerce with each other, across borders the way they did it before colonialism? How come all of a sudden we regionalistically can't talk? When we had, in fact, language to communicate? Movie houses and television stations too show what? What is produced? Whose production? Paris? U.S.? England? So, we're good at buying television stations but we don't have our image on it. And so we have a whole African continent staring in front of the television not seeing itself, but just looking and saying, I wish I was that person, I wish I was that girl, I wish I was that boy, I wish I was that father, I wish I was that man, I wish I had that hair and those lips, I wish I had those noses. And so the replacement of cultural essence takes place. Human beings are at gun point of a culture that is body snatching culture. It's not equal exchange of culture, Europe seeing Africa, and Africa seeing Europe. It's just Europe being worshipped as new gods. What has this got to do with the other things? Because I don't think human beings can be good pilots if they are not culturally anchored. I know many Europeans who grow up in Africa and write how the airports don't work. The office don't work. How the television station doesn't work. Yes. Because if you don't have your right head in it how can you be anything? And in this country, how can black people be anything if they are not culturally anchored? If one doesn't have cultural peace with ones self, does not respect one's origin, one's soul, one's spirit, one's physical appearance, how can they succeed in anything? And so Africa is judged in the context of this whole battle where culturally Africans don't nurture themselves. Children across Africa this very minute are in small theaters, they are called video theaters, no rating, no grading, little kids are watching from Ghana to Ethiopia to South Africa in small theaters, video tapes, from pornographic movies to violent films.

When I was doing BBCs documentary film I went into the Nile Valley, the cradle of human life, and came up, it was night when I got to this hotel, little kids were in this outdoor theater watching the most obscene television at night, in the dark, in an outdoor theater.

And so, you have this African filmmakers in this situation of being born at a time and place ejects ones legitimacy. As a proposal to you, you have governments, for their own interests, European governments and the United States for their interests, and their repositioning of the world, and I don't want to mystify that but I think to me, I have noticed something in my personal life going from Jamaica to Africa I find Third World people being converted into cooks, into tourist crops for the West. I've seen my people, who look like me, in Jamaica waking up at 4:00 expecting American Airlines is going to drop more Americans today. And these are the very people who did plant, did cut the ground, did plant mangos, did have relationship with land, now have a whole national standing position looking towards American skys for airplanes to drop to bring business. Human beings who had a human communications with earth, soil, and planting. All the way to Africa everybody is prepared and repositioned to be the slave of the summer vacations and the winter vacations of the western and northern planet. Cooks, exotic foods, for Europeans to come. So tourism. I can go to specific dehumanization aspect of it, but it can come in through our discussions. But in the end, what is taking place here is a whole disfiguring of a society, little kids at early age being disfigured into culturally denouncing who they are. And to wish and to dream and to fantasize to be somebody else, to come to grips with this better life they see culturally glorified in front of them.

And so, to me, the politics of African cinema is basically choicelessly leaves African film makers to go towards a combative posture. Internal combativeness and external combativeness. African filmmakers cannot just be passive films but they have to be aggressive films. African filmmakers have to come into the audience to also battle conceptions that have been transplanted, transgrafted into the minds of black people. In their context of beauty, ugliness, evil, and good, we have literally come and make new contractual relationship to communicate our essence. Because if an African audience is expecting a European film, in a European film a love making scene of the European style and all the things have to have those things, then none of our parents our mothers, our fathers, I would never see my mother in movies. And what a loss to the planet. For society not to enable me, afford me, create the conditions to imperfectly paint my mother, my father. And in the end it inherits the world of violence, in the end a disfigured planet will go after each other. And those who we thought are in charge of us, who snatched our body, become our ultimate enemies to go blow them up wherever we can get them. Fundamentalistically speaking. When one is culturally entrenched and as I see it, most parents in Africa, and they are classified by academicians and scholars as fundamentalists now, well these are black people and our people we just don't know how to defend their children, they just retreating, because the articulaters, the intellectuals have abandoned the battle ground. In the cultural plane. Most of the elite is saying, "we just need the tractor." I think, "Who's driving the tractor? What is the head?" Even for eating, feeding, sheltering.

You know, I have kids, my own kids, I will not feed my kids if they are alien to my life style. I don't care what the standard is. That I would want my kids to read books about my history, my life. As they read theirs also. I would like them to know where I've come from. I don't want them to hate me and hate themselves and still make me serve them to feed them, to work daily. So especially non-intellectually, I mean speaking in terms of people who didn't go to school, universities who didn't have their degrees from Paris to New York, are totally, helplessly against the wall. They don't know how to fight. Because the intelligentsia has failed them. In filmmaking in African cinema, the intelligentsia, the leadership, if it is a cinema that propagates a propaganda to their government, then it's a cinema. And the sad part of it is, they don't even sit to see it through. Most African intellectuals can't see through a movie. I really know in Africa who really takes film seriously but they drive and park their family in this western cinemas, and then they go to play card or something. And so to me, at least my opinion, the African cinema has to be a struggling cinema when ever it gets to opportunity. Even to say all these slogan wouldn't work. Whenever we have the opportunity that is the time we have to resurrect our memory. Our parents, our ancestors, on screen. To occupy the screen and say, "I am." The grandfather of this kid who made this movie. At least get a piece of my human history.

Now, in African cinema I personally feel, and it's very hard sometimes for me to speak about African films because I am a filmmaker, I've never felt I've made perfect film, but sometimes I dialog has stopped. I'm longing for African film. I was earlier talking about _______________. African filmmakers are no more interesting to me now, I just, within my family I try to just survive, because what has happened is the earlier African filmmakers came out of the (Nukumra), the (Cabral), the fighting intelligentsia and the early older black filmmakers from Africa (Methondos & Ben) they just don't know inside out the role of colonialism, and it's role int he minds of people. They don't judge the symptomatic gestures of people. They go into the motor you know that moves those dangling hands and decisions and sense of desires from sexual desire to everything. We're tempered. Blonde hair. One time I was told was gold dust. Let's face it. Blonde hair is gold dust. In an African country. This woman said to me she could go straight to the president if she wants to, that's my visa -- blonde hair is gold dust. Another British woman said it to me in Jamaica.

And so our sense of aesthetic, what is a beautiful hair is already taken shape. In African cinema my whole longing was to go to these old black filmmakers of (_____________) to sit around them, and then hear them talk about their movies, what they tried, what failed, what succeeded. Because that's how I was told about how they met and (Walgadugu) started the (Festbachle) film festival. When I began to go into the (Festbachle) festival it was French controlled festival. The new, young (I'm not young but the group that is in my age bracket, are all just desperate filmmakers, young, desperate filmmakers). It is an amazing thing to see a French cultural minister woman walk into a place and see African filmmakers just lose their whole sense of human dignity. Maybe it's the Ethiopian in me, I just feel, what kind of cultural output is going to come from a dehumanized person who has no pride, who's not fighting. What kind of cultural outputs are coming out. To me, I see this crops of new, young filmmakers from Africa are just living up to the expectation of Europe's assignment, subconsciously or consciously. Now, the tragic aspect of it is that, economically speaking none of these African films have a reciprocal business relationship in Europe. Outside some (___________) film in distribution, most African filmmakers are not distributed. They are usually cannibally consumed in festivals and universities and cultural events presented as exotic side dish, not the steak. You see the little leaf that comes with the steak in these restaurants in American. That's how African films are presented. The don't return any economic benefit to actors, to directors, so they would at least come back and make the postponed story come out alive. Even from a business perspective, I'm the last person to talk about business, but just the common sense of it, it is mind boggling to just prepare a work in cotton fields, make all the African actors under paid. To begin with we are under paying each other, using each others movie houses. Bribing every customs officer. Unpaying ourselves. Most African filmmakers have no salary. They finish this movie, it goes to Europe and America, it doesn't bring a dollar back. It's so new old colonial in cultural transaction it is unacceptable. But people do it.

Beyond names being mentioned and studied, it has no concrete reciprocal relationship with African cinema in Africa. Now, for me, African cinema for me has always been divided in two for me. One is, I think African cinema is innovative when you think about (___________), (__________) and (________________), I feel that is innovative cinema for me. That is that initiated me. Those are the cinemas that I saw as a student and was really impressed by. Then you have other kinds of cinemas. Cinemas that are reflexes of programmed new old colonial command post. Knee jerk cinema that comes out to just imitate, not innovate, but imitate cinema. In the way cinema has been in the West, even then, doing it mediocrely. And, within that context is also the exotic, or exoticization of African culture. Just depending and alienating everybody. I've sat with filmmakers with Tokyo to India, if there is a criticism, which I feel is constructive and it helps filmmakers improve, most of the young African filmmakers have cultural justification of saying, "you didn't understand my culture. You've missed the point. You missed the allegory. You missed the symbolism. The metaphor." And we do claim a great deal, concepts does not exist in the actual work. And we always do have also, patronizing colonial sponsorships. To coin exotic concepts endorsing our deficiency, which in return, decapitates the development of African cinema. Because, unchallenged cinema becomes like Hollywood. Hollywood is the most unchallenged cinema.

...it has now reached the stage where the audience and Hollywood are just complimentary, by and large. Outside those who have defected and don't go to movies at all. What I know across America is that most people say, "I don't go to movies no more." But then there's this very attached breast fed whole population that has reciprocal relationship of all this triteness. Coexists finally, and it's very hard to criticize it, you can killed in some places, and I hope it wouldn't happen here, but I've been in situations where people will take it actually as you just have cursed their mother or father. To just attack any of this foster parents that are foster cultural diets and parents that have been coming through the pipeline of Hollywood.

The African cinema has now reached a stage where there is no discussion that is innovative and challenging and critical. We go unchallenged doing anything we want to do. Not in Africa. In Europe and America. In Africa the audience doesn't even know we exist. In (____________) when was (_______________) opened in Senegal? Two months ago. I saw his movie in 1970 as a student, in the 70's as a student in California. With white students who walked away angry because they didn't like it, they didn't think it was a movie and they walked away. I was angry. This is a movie, why are they walking out? The cultural sensibility and the first film that made me say, "Speak in your language." I was sitting at that time before (__________) I was writing my script in English because I thought Ethiopian's couldn't speak, in one screen it was illegal for Africans to speak their language, so I was writing script, thinking, and I don't know how many of you know how to think in your language and talk. I mean, you're not getting what I'm saying. Whatever you think of it, because the thought processes is so amazingly different. Most of it is untranslatable. You just learn how to negotiate with language by learning. So here in his own country, two months ago, a giant, that I think he is, just showed to months ago. So what is African cinema? A cinema whose people, whose grandparents can't see their own son's and daughter's work. So why play? What is the game?

To me the politics of African cinema just outright puts it in the struggle that filmmakers, intellectuals, the intelligentsia, all not this nomadic insignificant filmmaker, but the whole intelligentsia in Africa has to really begin to say, "Yes, food is important. Yes, shelter is important. But, yes, culture is equally as important." Otherwise we're making Africa a continent for donors to bring space raised wheat. African will not raise their own food. In the year 2000 something we will be waiting for Mars to come, the wheat to come. All Ethiopian African seeds are being transgrafted and taken into food camps and food banks all over Europe and America. Which means someday Ethiopian (_____________) will be made in Ohio, or Oklahoma which is starting already. And Ethiopians wouldn't be able to plant it. I think it can only grow in Ethiopia. It will not be found in Ethiopia. It will be gone. Because Ethiopians culturally will not, and I'll tell you this, Ethiopians especially I'll tell you this, is one arrogant country, in a very positive way sometimes, sometimes in a negative way. Very arrogant country that in a very interesting way, defeated an Italian power in 1886. And so we always grew up as people who defeated the Italians. Every Ethiopian cultural event always is bragging how good they beat up Italians. Unlike some African countries we have just said, "We defeated them before (_______________)." And so there was certain moral and cultural posture that was very arrogant. That the sun set and rose on Ethiopia. My father thought like that. Every time you did his plays and dramatized things it will be gone in Ethiopia as far he's concerned. It's my generation that was tempered from Kennedy all the way up here, that craved for American culture. It was my generation, through Peace Corps, and I'm not speaking about it negatively only there is a positive aspect to it. I don't want to get shot again. Former Peace Corps get very emotional. They can not pragmatically discuss the colonial aspect of a 21 year old American kid teaching you about (_______________) and George Washington and cherry trees in the middle of Ethiopia! An Ethiopian who's not studying his own culture because he felt his own history is really a backward history, it's only underground now. In my generation we made Ethiopian culture and underground closet culture. Unlike my father. And my father all his plays were about resistance. And when the Italians were about the come the second round, my father was staging a play. What a nice father to have, when Mussolini was going like this in Rome on the balcony saying, "Those African's are going to get it." And my father was just doing a play. What a civilized juxtaposition. One just, you know, military one a cultural person. Here I am now, not proud of that history, just trying to get John Wayne and Doris Day preoccupy me without (_________) bullet hating Indians and all those cultural manifestations that those movies push.

In Ethiopia, what was the most saddest thing to me just going to Ethiopia, and I've been going several times, is that Ethiopians who are proud, are now losing it underneath them. Churches that used to have this paintings pre-birth of Europe as far as I'm concerned, is now being replaced by Anglo-Saxon god image and Mary's image. Young Ethiopian's reference of God, and so I was doing a film in an art museum where this deeply intellectual Ethiopian, young kids, high school kids, discussing a painting, and there were grown ups amongst them. We were looking at a painting that has a crucifixion idea in it and ended up, after a series of discussions, we ended up at a point where one person said, "No she couldn't be Mary." And I said, "Ho. Let's back up here. Why?" "She's like an Ethiopian, she couldn't be Mary." "What do you think Mary looks like?" I asked. He searched around, there was this woman from BBC, he located her and he said, "She would look like her." Now I never grew up under Ethiopians like that. I grew up Ethiopians who made God in their image. The image of God in Ethiopia, when I grew up, was in the image of themselves. Which, I think, is very important to all human beings if they are religious. Some of you may not care. I don't care. Even if the devil is going to receive me when I leave, I really don't care about they -- I will not kill anybody for the image, but my kids, if they believe in God, it should look like them.

Now, I am Catholic, I am so shaky on Catholicism, so we have to watch out for it. In Ethiopia I was raised Catholic and my knee buckles, you might think I'm a strong person, but if Catholics walked I'd just be all over the place. In fact, my sisters will see a scene in San Kofa and when a scene comes, oh, my sisters bow. And they pray for me that God won't take me to hell.

Koreans that I met, who are Catholics, have God and Mary in their image. What a reclamation. I don't put down anybody's religion, but if you are worshiping, why is that whole Africa is worshiping an Anglo Saxon, blonde hair, blue eyed God and Mary?

How many people are from Ghana here? Anybody? Oh, it is not good that I should talk behind them, but... Go to Agra. How many people have been to Agra? Good. You guys can talk. The trucks, the paintings, the taxi drivers. I have taken pictures after pictures of God's image of what African's...in fact, one time when I was doing the film there was a T-shirt popular in Akra, in the front is an Anglo Saxon God, in the back is black, and it say's, "Get away from me devil" in the back. Now maybe you'll say, "So what?" Well, there's consequences. I don't think you'd drive the taxi right after you are not normal inside, because the governing power of human beings is their head. And I think people have to accept themselves first. If you live to become to want to be somebody underneath you are on shaky ground. And I think those of you who are very aware of race and its implication and complications could be sympathetic to that. And can see how dangerous this direction is.

So basically if we can go to question and answer I would be more relevant to you but this is in any case encapsulates to you the political battle in African cinema. As we talk with questions, some of you saying your ideas and views about it might help us more put light to the issue that I raised.

Question: This might be personal but how did you finance your films?

Well, I tried the lottery first. (Laughter) A lot of people in Europe said to me, "Hi, there I'll be in New York with a filmmaker." I say, "Let's stop. I want to buy a lottery." They say, "Hi, I'm ashamed of you. How can you buy a lottery?" I said to him, "All the grants I got or didn't get is a lottery." I don't think you can, all the judgement and panel, however serious they take themselves, I don't. When you get it, it's a lottery. When you lose it, it's a lottery. It's a better psychological position. Otherwise when you get it you get bigger and above everybody and when you don't get it, you collapse back to a point where you can't get up. And so basically my position is, "It's lottery, if it happens take it." And I have always been fortunate. Things have happened for me. It takes time, but it does happen. Now this new film, "_____________" asking me, what I did was I tried in this country for 9 years, back and forth, all grants from American Playhouse to PBS, CBB, et cetera. Then I got Germany, German television, British television, Italian non-commercial outfit, and Ghana and (Brookinfaso) equipment, money, resources. We put a very creative package together. It took us a long time but that's how we did the movie. But you should always try a lottery. Don't put down a lottery. Because if you get $5 million you could do five African films. (Laughter)

Question: Could you speak a little bit more about ________________ and the _______________ _______________________. Speaking about cultural significance and the innovation of African ______________________.

Well you know when I first came, I was earlier at lunch telling people that I was shocked to find the African race here. I say now, progressively African race, at that time it was Negro-Americans. These people were presented in my subconscious or conscious level as people that were bred in this continent as slaves. So I had this whole idea of a slave race. And didn't come from Africa, basically. Now that could be the shame, the denial _______________, the psychological trip, but that is my fortress. When I first came, I said this people are not Africans. And I was quick to say I'm African and denounce them not Africans. I used all the tricks that every African used to intimidate African Americans in Chicago. But as I went into, you know, first I wanted to study acting. Here I am, it is very dangerous when you bring a cultural person, you know, when you wake up it's a different situation. Here I am, in a theater department where it had African students and African Americans and we were for white students in the theater, we were spear carriers. And some of us felt -- I mean the black Americans should carry spears but, you know, I'm Ethiopian. I've been playing parts in Ethiopia, in my father's play. Even if you did Shakespeare you had a better tradition, you're not a background but let's face it, Native Americans and African Americans are backgrounds of American theater, by and large. And here I was confronted, denying them, because I don't want to be in their position. I have to be separate nation. In parties, and the loneliness time, in the theater I went to the Goodman School of Drama, there were black actors that I still befriended them, one of them is the guy who is in Ashes and Embers, another is Sister _______________, she is in Dallas now, and Lenard and two Nigerians. The two Nigerians and me just, even though Ethiopians and Nigerians can't get it together, at least against African Americans we got a united front going. So we African's we don't play slaves and things. So, it was all this battle psychological, social battle going on and now fundamentally in the theater being just a background challenged me. Here I was writing plays at home for my high school or my pre-high school, I was in my father's plays and here I am now a background. And it creates certain alienation in me.

All the false propaganda, USIS, Peace Corps America, just start slapping left and right. Then, because I'm not from the nobility like some of friends maybe, I'm kidding they are not, but I was doing gardening to go to school and in gardening I get also some slappings. Because it's a racially textured country. And I never knew apartheid and here it is. I couldn't take some of the things I experienced. So, the more I was slapped around the more I gravitated to this earlier slapped people. And just the affinity after, we just pulled toward to each other. Then we talked about white people together. I start to talk like this from them now. Then the whole Black Power Movement is going, and I have my hair everywhere. (Laughter) Basically it is just like a kid. Attacked and now I'm out to defend myself to say I'm human. I think that connected me to Black America. Then I said, "Ah, this is what's happening, they are just saying historically as they are badgered by being Africans. They always said, "I'm human."" "No, I'm human." They are a closed society. From the years of badgering they have closed. So I gravitated towards that camp because that camp was capable of defending me. Then in their defense, I started to develop as I utttered my first poems in film, they embraced me. When I made the movie, I just made for school exercise, but Black people were so hungry -- in Oakland they saw my movie and they thought it was a miracle movie and hugged me and cried and wrote poems about me. And I said, "They are claiming me. They are claiming me. They are claiming me." Basically, this is a very important background for me. And _________________ has a lot to do with everything I'm telling you now. Because that is when I started working. As I was doing other movies I was really reflexing my cinematic muscle to attack this larger monster out of me. An obsession of sort. That's when I started connecting -- I said, "Ah," I'm a volunteer, I took TWA, but really, and I started to try, "How about if I was taken? The way they have come." And I wanted to study. "How about if they smashed my memory? At least attempted?" "How about if they took my name, my religion, my local place? How come if I couldn't say I'm from Ethiopia?" All these things are just the stream imaginations that just erupted within my system. And so, from there going to UCLA -- I know a lot of people, you know and you talk about multiculturalism and all this, but I'll tell you something, when I went to film school initially also added more fuel, and I looked to the left, a Native American, I looked to the right it's African American, there's all these third world people trying to hold hands in a very hostile, it's not an aggressive white hostility, the environment as we walked tip-toeing into the film school said to us, "You illegal alien filmmaker, what you doing here?" Nobody said it. It's not spoken. Nothing. But you start to have all this delusion in you. And you so, you hold hands to survive because you have this state of mind. I'm not going to attribute it towards blame. I'm just saying. Then we start to create a third world film huddling corner. Because of the hostility. How does the hostility come about? You take a film history class, at UCLA especially, the American film history class from silent to talking. You take Horror Film History class, you take Cowboy Film History class, you take all the different genre of classes, European, Russian, French, you take a single actor class, you take a single director class, and every time you looking trying to find reference because all human beings, it's very complex, like Israeli's, Jews about Israel, that's a very powerful reference of years ago. Israel next year to Israel is no joke. It's a very profound anchor. That is part and parcel of being human. You can't belittle it, you can't discourage it, you can't close your eye and make it evaporate. It is there. And here I am now looking for a black person in movies. May West will be there, and then I'll see the African descendent looking for rabbit feet for May West to have her love life go right. Then I turn right, I see Casablanca and white kids are looking at this, Ingrid Bergman, Bogart and then we say, "Play it again Sam. Play it again Sam." What is he all about? Want to defend him. But what is he? Who does he love? Does he have sex? Why is he in the story? Is it just to carry his piano all the way to Africa? And not even skate once he got to Africa? So you have all this fantasy and confrontation with western cinema. And then, it's silently said to you, "you had no history, you had no background, you never made a movie, that's why you are illegal. That's why you are illegitimate. That's why you have to apologize. That's why you have to posture. With broken back, apologizing every minute as you bumped, the legitimate entitled filmmakers in the hallways and lobbies." And it was understood. When we were in competition white kids didn't take us seriously as competition. When we won they cried. They cried bad, "How could you win? This Ethiopian crazy guy, how could he win?" They all cried together. One time in acting class, acting school when I wouldn't say the name of the award, but when I won this award, they just cried and the whole class, I felt so legitimate, they all cried and the teacher was going around hugging them and saying, "Yeah, this foreigner took it! The most illegal alien of all comes and takes it." So, you have all this environmental race polluted texts. Intended, unintended it's not my job, but I'm not going to say I created it. It's there with a poster with the glorification of -- you know, you go walk plantation owners streets named after, you got to react - this is Jefferson, where is Harriet Tubman? To me is not multiculturalism, it's true history is to put her next to him. Then you get the mortgage and mortgaged. At not time in this seriously respectable university, at no time did they teach us that there was a black cinema movement from 1910 to 1948. By Americans. African Americans. Now, people would wonder, "Why do you call yourself African American?" Well, listen if the teacher felt you are not American, when he or she taught American film history class and neglected a major chapter in independent filmmaking, 1910 to 1948, doing what I am doing now, did it better then, with less resources, yet they are not in history class. And you always have been. And one day you made a mistake, did the wrong turn, you found and saw (__________________) movie. From then on all the teachers are liars. That teacher betrayed me. That teacher lied to me. He didn't teach me about black people. Well, he doesn't consider them Americans because they are Africans. What is the point? And so you go into this betrayed person. The school betrayed you, the university betrayed you, it glorifies itself, it's objective, it's still objective, it's still standard. It's a universal truth. It's beauty, esthetics and ugliness is a universal thing. What we have to all adapt all the planet has to adapt, their narrative, the ______________ narrative and also the three-act things that is killing cinema is universal and standard. Even the French are memorizing it now. And you know your retreating, working again as creatively trying to not destroy yourself but to come up with. And __________________ was evolving out of this betrayal. Wanting to anchor yourself from a past, discovering past knowledge, even as the film Betrayal all the books I read at the time by well meaningful writers, there was no mention of African rebelling against slavery except Nat Turner which is court case they couldn't burn down. Then Mark Vessy, _______________, and Gabriel. And here I am I made another left turn and I found the history of Maroons from North Carolina, independent African warring, anti-slave movements, pre-progressive whites waking up to the fact. Fighting for their freedom, which negated free me concepts that __________ would always pushed on black people. Please free me. Yo, I can't free myself, please free me. The key, always that somebody Lincoln or a Quaker. Lies. Something that challenged me. How can all this population submit? And I was initially deformed myself and I was writing about bad white people. Trying to show how evil they were. Because when you think in victim concept you try to find the evil.

To find Maroons from South Carolina, North Carolina, in some place joined up with Native Americans, from Florida, Louisiana, joined the Spanish, made a treaty. A white archeologist woman is digging a castle now in San________, Florida. What is this castle. This Maroons was called Fort Negro, it was on a map, nobody knew where the place was, now they are digging it out of the earth. All the materials they used. Archaeologists are digging all these artifacts out of Maroons who fought like hell and Maroons that later scattered to Surinam, Cuba, Martinque, even joined as soldiers with Bolivar for the freedom of Latin America. I went all the way to Venezuela to see this village where they all -- who descended from this history, live. So, what you do here is -- here I was writing a script to show how evil white people were in slaving black people, but I discovered the resistance that was more a healing. That the fact that black people fought back was important. And eleven year old kid in Baltimore came up to me, hugged me and said, "Thank you for making a film and showing me my people at least fought back." And I said to him, "Well, your parents should start it in front of the cereal boxes with the shackle being placed, located there." Because history of this type only is a boost for forward movement, it's not something to be ashamed of, its not something to deny, its not something to trip guilt over, it has it's healing value as more important than postponing it. And so this is the landscape that ______________ was made under.

Question: Could you speak a little bit of ______________ and the role it has played or has not played in the advancement of African cinema?

Well, the problem with _____________ initially was an idea invented by filmmakers which was very important, but gradually it outlived its initial conceptual power. Where it is now really just pepper tiger. I don't think it is relevant as far as I'm concerned. Because any African cinema organization that is not directly involved on concrete distribution, production, including challenging African governments to establish cinema policy is not an African film organization. It's like a trade union that doesn't speak for the workers. For me it is just as good to parade all over Europe, to speak. Now the new president is my friend. I fought for him to be president. My good friend, my closest friend, he helped me do a lot of things. But my position in 1985 was that they be housed at the OEU budgets that African's after South Africa need to fight, to coin a platform on cultural battle. Where now the new colonial battle is not gun but culturally. That if Africans now from armed struggle to cultural struggle do not enter, and if cinema can not play a leadership role we've lost the war. It doesn't matter if Mozambique is free, if Zimbabwe is free, even South Africa will be a tragic future because without cultural revolution all this earned freedom is at stake as far as I'm concerned. So the role of OAU should have been now converting towards advancing the battle on the cultural fronts. No African countries need guns now. Nobody needs guns in African. African countries need more cultural nurturing across the board. The schools to be re-examined. The fact that we mis-educate, we transgrafted American educational system and French educational system, British educational system, dump it on our cultural psyche is a tragic commentary on education. So culturally, holistic cultural revolution should be our new platform. But no, we still, effectively like OAU and __________ is really ineffectively talking about something that is not tangible to me as a practicing filmmaker. For me, I want my voice to be on a higher platform, to fight. Because African filmmakers if they are weak in each country then OAU will be our base to attack all the African countries from oppressing and not coming up with a serious platform on cinema. And, you know, and giving us the equal screen time with Hollywood films and Indian films. Let's have all of us be there and let African's decide what movie speaks about themselves, their own essence.

Question: This regards a question about the movies I saw in my class, _______ ______________.

You know I have my handlers have brought me here to do. I'll do any work I'm asked to do.

Question: Where the actual site in the movie like location, where a slave was brought from there to America?

Oh, yes. Where I shot the film is called Cape Cos Castle. Fifteen minutes from Cope Cos Castle you see it in a distance, Elmina Castle. Elmina is the first castle the Portuguese put in place. The Castle where I shot is where I told you 8 Africans will die, 8 out of 10 will die before a ship comes to take them away. In a very airless, little holes, self defecating place. Now if you walked there now, you will not come out alive. You will go through changes. The stench is still existing. More people are affected going there. We shot from them. In fact I didn't want to shoot in Elmina because it was so over-poweringly scary. I couldn't just, however many times I went back, I couldn't command, I couldn't just control the anatomy of the place. I just was overpowered. So, I went to Cape Cos where I felt I overpowered it, to shoot it. And I did a series of just anatomist, just to say where can I shoot this place? Cape Cos was better.

Now actors, he asked about actors didn't you?

Q. Inaudible.

First I want to ____________. Again, the role of black filmmakers is not really to just go around saying, "I'm a filmmaker." But there are booby traps for black filmmakers. It's not only white people who are going to make stereotype movies. We have now internalized it so much, we are now the best hosts of this virus and the stereotype. Whites don't have, in fact they are really scared to touch movies about blacks. "If I do this they complain." "I'll just got your own people to make your own movie." And that's what you have this bizarre hoodlum movies all over the place.

What you have here is the virus is now within black people. It's now in my system. And so, in every placement of camera, back and front, everywhere, you have to understand the booby trap history of stereotype cinema. And the way you illustrate characters. In the way you cast people. You have to constantly remind yourself, you are in the midst of a booby trap, a cultural booby trap legacy.

When I looked for actors, I said, I want actors who are not stars. That was number one. Everybody will tell you that is against Hollywood's formula. Forget the story. First, who is in it is the question in Hollywood. In fact an HBO woman, said to me, "So who is in it?" I say, "Nobody. People like me." Fly people. Flies make movies too. And the reason is this. I'll tell you this, because I feel any black person, I met many, many of them. Being in film, you always sit next to these guys. They go around, walking around saying they are stars, and there is some mental problem here, for me. One, from just a business pragmatic producing point of view, anybody that is a star is going to cost you more, not of their salary, just their ego trip. You have to have the biggest crane to bring them to life, to play parts. And I felt an actor who goes around worrying about their position and their waistline, cannot play slavery. That's one. I could not find an actor, in fact there are many who knew me, who seemed to like Bush MaMa and other films who said, "I hope I can be in your movie." I just felt that there's more baggage to it. Yes, people want to be in exotically independent filmmaking, but they bring also the virus. And the virus is stardom. Yet, they don't even have the legitimacy to be stars. How many black people can really say they are stars, but they say they are stars. And they are mentioned when nine white actors are mentioned, they get mentioned. One would be, number three will be picked up. Not even name is important. Not even his skill is important. In a racially texted place I don't think talent is in question. So the baggage is what my fear is, and so I didn't think they had the rage and anger. You know who I was looking for? I was looking for actors who are rejected from practicing their profession, like me. Outsiders.

When you are lonely, lonely people can get you out of a situation that the one's who are not lonely were really having it fun. They don't really know what lonely is, they've forgotten loneliness. You always have to know who can play slavery? Some people are too distant for it. But I think you can start from the personal oppression first, to understand slavery. When you can't connect to it.

So you go from your personal as a gender or whatever situation you have you bring that to the character as a seed to work from. So, I wanted rejected, outsider, talented black actors. But who are rejected or are not allowed to practice their profession by law. Those are my targets. And I looked for them. This was the basic prerequisite for me.

The other one is quilting black people. The booby trap of black, so-called black speaking patterns -- for a generation of yours now and I don't know how old you are but my Howard kids they would reincarnate Steph and Fetchit as something negative. Because they all feel now black people spoke like that all the time then. It's like white kids going to movies and archaeologically thinking that was life then and making it factual departing point. Which is happening. Professors are writing books grafting historical information from filmmakers. Filmmakers, where if some of them were in cocaine trip, really when they made the movie. And they are taken now as historical reference points. So black people do have this reference Steph and Fetch as a departing point as how to direct the melody of that period.

In my research, Africans came quilting from different parts of the African origin, including West Indians, who doing rebellion for example I discovered. West Indian rebellions will be banished to the Americas, instead of destroying property, you can't lynch all of them, for punishment you lynch ten, for example during Denmark __________ uprising, and then they banished in South Carolina, they banished the rest that suspected involved. Out of the state including the West Indies. I have met people who from banished Maroons in Cuba who are from America, descended from Americans. In fact, one of them, I wanted him to play the part but I couldn't just economically pull it. And so, the Blue Field Black People in Nicaragua are banished Maroons once upon a time who are speaking English in the middle of a Spanish place. To me these are like, it shows you the quilt of black people. The humanization comes from not pigeon holing them in the Steph and Fetchit tradition. That was the prerequisites of the kind of actors I'm looking for, the kind of quilt I wanted to quilt from the speaking to the physical appearance. And also what they bring. The other department. _________________ will know him. He didn't act before. So I'm fortunate only two people like this, you guys. He is a philosopher. I mean this is a philosopher. After Bob Marley, he is it. A barefoot philosopher. And what happens. Now this guy, I just need to direct him and there. But most of the time he identified with the part. Waited for me over four years as I -- he cancelled many summer concerts to play the part, because he knew there was something in this movie for all of us.

Question: I think the question I want to ask is kind of theoretical but you can answer it using your imagination if you don't mind. That is, how do you see Africans in the Diaspora improving their communication across borders beyond cinema, yet cinema but also, radio, television, theater. How do you see us being able to escalate and improve the quality of the communication that we're able to share across these borders?

Let me start from the particular of like inner cities. Basically, for black people, once upon a time, up to 1948 who owned over a 1000 theaters across the country out of rage, not self segregation, but forced insulting circumstances forced black people from Philadelphia, Baltimore to California to own theaters of their own where they had race movies. Independent filmmakers over 300 came and died and _______________ the longest, till '48. Lincoln Motion Picture, Nobel Johnson, George Johnson, from California. When you think about who is dying in black community now? What are these kids? What are their particular, specific, particularities of kids dying in the black community? Most of them are hyper. To be in the creative world and hyper is normal as far as I'm concerned, otherwise you got to take me out and shoot me. I can't be even sitting if you want, I have to move around and I'm like any hyper kid condemned in South Chicago to be hyper and dysfunctional. Energy. And when you contain the energy of a people, when the energy of a people has no cultural outlet, self destruction is the next motion. That's what we see in the black communities. From my own personal experience I see kids who can't be turned around by the traditional success of a saxophone player, who was maybe a nuisance to some elderly people but deflected a kid from something to wanting to be a trumpet player or saxophone player, a drummer, a poet, a dramatist. And now a filmmaker. Since Spike Lee a lot of black kids want to be filmmakers. I see at Howard. But what is waiting for them is going to be shocking to their system and they will have to face that. What I'm trying to say here, the absence, the boarded up theaters, boarded up cultural centers, the fact the little kid, Peanut, my next door neighbor, has no play to go to, to be part. Is not hearing as a drummer. When I even came to this country, in Chicago you would go to the black community, you would hear a musician, everywhere, who was practicing. They don't exist now in the community. There's nothing culturally that will embrace me and you are normal, come this way. Your poetry is good, write one more time. This nurturing cultural extended family is destructed, as far as I'm concerned and it systematically has happened to a point where now, it's a total disfiguration of life, where parents feel hopeless about what's happening.

So, to me culture has it's healing aspect of it. It's where you find yourself. The other part of it is the most fundamental one is the fact that black people int his country, for example, are share croppers culturally speaking in culture. Black people in America are cultural cotton pickers in America. They do not own the copyright of anything including their uttered voice as a result of the whip they were whipped. All the scream and uttering and poetry and tap dance and cultural activity is owned by the dominant ethnic group, white people. I'm not saying to say there's any thing but to show you how abnormal it is for a people not own their cultural output. Now, when people talk about reparation I say to black people at Howard, I say the first thing should be black people buying back all the copyrights of ____________ and Billy Holiday, as..

I buy Billy Holiday records, all of a sudden I'm into CD, I have like. You can put just my Billy Holiday to be $1,000. For me to want to use the scream of our little Franklin in ________ _________ and still I'm paying arms and legs when she is uttering a memory transmitted from the whip through the gospel, blues into jazz. I can't use it and I'm paying to this day is obscene. It's obscene and unacceptable and has some curse with it, in a sense of black people. Once you mortgage your culture and pass it to your next generation you have a dead generation coming up. And I call the coming generations are going to be ashes because no cultural resistance struggle is passed down from generation to generation at least on the cultural level. And the Maroons have passed, even jazz is a Maroon cultural expression is now owned in the plantation system.

On one hand Nike has black people, you know black people in America they feed, they shelter, but they don't nurture the minds of their children, intellectually or culturally. Now, what is happening. Gap there. Black parents think by feeding, by buying all this Nike plantation shoe...