African Video Movies and Global Desires. Carmela Garritano

eye of the camera, here a metaphor for modernity. This is perhaps best illustrated in a staged reenactment of Uncle Faiwoo and a group of fishermen casting and pulling in their nets to the accompaniment of African drums. Seen through medium and long focal lengths and shots of extended duration, the men seem far away. They resemble a moving, primitive exhibit. Kumasenu, frequently presented in a panoramic long shot as a solitary figure on the beach, seems as if he, too, were a feature of the village landscape. Reproducing several of the archetypal images of African safari and adventure films, the feature captures the boy as he frolics in the waves of the ocean, climbs a coconut tree, walks along the shore, and sits on the beach, dreaming of the city. After his uncle refuses to let him leave the village, Kumasenu, seen through an extreme long shot, walks against a vast cloudy sky (see figure 1.1). The threatening sky and Kumasenu’s isolation are meant to express his unhappiness and restlessness; in this, the film translates and externalizes his interiority for the spectator, producing physical and psychological distance between the spectator and the African subject.

      As Kumasenu moves from the changeless time and space of the village to the “outside world,” the camera repositions the spectator, moving inward and creating the illusion of closeness. Long takes and slow pans of the village landscape give way to close-ups, mid-takes, and shot-reverse-shot sequences as ethnographic realism gives way to narrative realism. As Phil Rosen notes in his reading of Sembene’s Ceddo, such a shift in scale signifies “movement into a scene normalized as physical closeness” (2001, 274). In presenting Kumasenu at work in the store where, the voice-over remarks, he “first met the twentieth century,” the frame of the camera narrows considerably, replacing the expansive village landscape at which the spectator looked from a distance, with the intimate and immediate interior of the store, which is focalized through Kumasenu’s point of view. The spectator enters the time and space of the narrative of the film, where the act of looking is concealed by continuity editing that simulates “real” time and creates what Teresa de Lauretis refers to as “the achieved coherence of a ‘narrative space’ which holds, binds, entertains the spectator at the apex of the representational triangle as the subject of vision” (de Lauretis 1984, 27). The first close-up in the film appears here, as Kumasenu discovers the joy of listening to a record on the gramophone while the men who have come to the store to buy beer dance (see figure 1.2). The scene recalls a similar, iconic moment in Flaherty’s Nanook of the North in which the primitive subject marvels at what is to him a strange and wonderful European technology. This shot, however, expresses Kumasenu’s interiority, the pleasure he derives from listening to music. It humanizes and passes narrative authority to him. From this moment forward, point-of-view shots and eyeline matching position Kumasenu as a subject of sight, and although his is not the only perspective from which the remainder of the film is focalized, his is the foremost point of view from which the spectator sees.

      The film’s soundtrack, a layering of extra-diegetic narration and music, ambient sounds, including music and speech, and character dialogue inflects space as rural and urban.24 In the opening segments of the film, almost imperceptible ambient sounds are veiled by the voice-over narration, which addresses the audience in British English. The narrator and extra-diegetic music speak for and silence the sounds of the village. The audience sees the mouths of characters moving but hears only the narrator’s summary and explication of their speech. This extra-diegetic interpreter addresses the spectator throughout the village sequence, translating Akan or Ewe into English, explaining customs and behaviors, and interpreting the actions and thoughts of characters. As Kumasenu moves toward the city, the soundtrack changes. The narrative voice-over yields to the voices of people speaking Akan and Pidgin English, a language the narrator describes as “a blend of the old and the new.” In the city, characters speak for themselves and the narrative voice-over, although still present, is no longer dominant. Its purpose becomes primarily pedagogical, highlighting significant moments in the plot, but no longer narrating them.

      The colonial teleology that structures Kumasenu’s journey is underscored by the alignment of each space with a different construction of the family: the “traditional” family or kin network is located in the space/time of the village, and the modern nuclear or conjugal family is found in the modern city. In a historical context marked by conflicting discourses of marriage and family, the film asserts the primacy of the conjugal companionate model of marriage and family. A great deal of scholarship documents the dramatic shift in the meaning of marriage and family that occurred in Ghana as a result of missionary activity, colonialism, the imposition of a cash economy, the increase of private property ownership, and the expanding cocoa market.25 Jean Allman and Victoria Tashjian, in “I Will Not Eat Stone”: A Women’s History of Colonial Asante (2000), argue convincingly that the dramatic changes initiated by British colonialism produced “nothing short of widespread gender chaos” (75), which intensified during the last decades of colonialism. In very general language, one can say that prior to the rupture brought about by colonialism, marriage among several Ghanaian ethnic groups, but most notably among the Asante, the largest ethnic group in present-day Ghana, was not understood as a static and monolithic state-of-being, but a process that varied considerably among families and kin networks and that afforded women a high degree of autonomy and independence. Marriage was “open to the interpretations of the parties involved at a particular moment in time,” and it was couples and their families, not the state, that “retained the power to define the status of any known conjugal relationship” (Allman and Tashjian 2000, 57).

      During the colonial period, the British and the native courts sought to rein in and control what they regarded as perplexing and unwieldy “traditional” marriage forms by enforcing legislation “aimed at clearly defining and strengthening the marital bond in opposition to the lineage bond” (Vellenga 1983, 145). Colonial discourse, in effect, transformed flexible and heterogeneous marriage forms into the static and monolithic entity of the traditional or customary marriage. The texts of cultural producers, such as writers and filmmakers, enter into this ideological and discursive contest over family, marriage, and proper gender roles. In her study of Ghanaian popular fiction, Stephanie Newell argues that during the colonial period Ghanaian writers “seem to be conscious of their status as generators of narratives that will help to stabilize and codify a ‘modern’ marriage ideology” (2000, 61). Likewise, colonial film production in the Gold Coast, as exemplified by The Boy Kumasenu, sets out to normalize the conjugal family by defining it against the more “traditional” extended family form.

      The film casts the nuclear family as the foundation of the nation, and Kumasenu’s journey to modernity is achieved when he enters its fold. While in the village, the narrator emphasizes that Kumasenu is “an orphan,” alone, without a mother, and left under the supervision of his uncle and aunt, who are portrayed as little more than figurines in the exotic village. Uncle Faiwoo, the audience is told, clings to the “old ways” and is fearful of the anger of the ancestors, and although he speaks directly to his nephew in the diegesis, the soundtrack includes only very faint traces of the sound of his voice. The narrator’s voice-over translation of Faiwoo’s words effectively enacts an aural erasure of Faiwoo. It seems more like an overdub of his speech than a commentary on or translation of it. Predictably, the narrator’s performance of Faiwoo’s lines, originally delivered in Ewe, adopts, in English, a broken syntax and crude diction, marking Faiwoo as an unintelligent and primitive African. Faiwoo’s wife, nameless and completely silent, appears only once in the film. In this scene, she visits the hut of the village fetish priest, whose counsel she seeks, the narrator derisively explains, because she, too, is worried about her nephew’s restlessness.

      The village uncle and aunt stand in sharp contrast to the articulate, urban, and modern man of science and his equally articulate and dutiful wife. Dr. and Mrs. Tamakloe exemplify the elite class of Ghanaians charged with running the country after the end of colonial rule and are portrayed as models of fatherhood, motherhood, and citizenship. The doctor is “a man trained to take his place in the complicated life of the city,” a gentleman, educated in science and art, and charitable, the benevolent patriarch of his nuclear household. His academic prowess is emphasized as the camera pauses at the sign posted