Books by Kalamu ya Salaam

The Magic of JuJu: An Appreciation of the Black Arts Movement  /   360: A Revolution of Black Poets

Everywhere Is Someplace Else: A Literary Anthology  /  From A Bend in the River: 100 New Orleans Poets

Our Music Is No Accident   /  What Is Life: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self

My Story My Song (CD)

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Films by Haile Gerima

Adwa: An African Victory /  Sankofa / Ashes and Embers

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Haile Gerima in Ghana 

By Kalamu ya Salaam

USA based, Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima is also staying at the Marnico Guest House in Cape Coast. He jokes that he has a room on the first floor in the back while Nia and I are in the front building on the second floor. Usually Haile is very intense, but, he feels at ease in Ghana. He is smiling and joking. Even though he is somewhat relaxed here, his sarcasm remains intensely funny and intensely cutting.

We begin exchanging jokes. I say, "someone told me that there are 40 million people in Nigeria and all of them are at the airport."

Haile laughs, that's like Jamaica where they stand looking into the sky waiting for American Airlines to descend with tourists.

Then Haile tells us a Cuban joke: A socialist tragedy is a girlfriend but no house to take her to. A socialist comedy is to have a house but your girl friend leaves you. Socialist realism is you have a house and you have a girlfriend, but the whole central committee is in the bedroom.

Haile is a trickster, but he is also very, very serious and deeply concerned about the direction, or lack thereof, of the African world. At one point he took on a Jamaican dance troupe who objected to some statements he made about Jamaica during a question and answer session. "When I finished, they backed off. I told them how they make their whole country into a bedroom for White tourists. People go there just to fuck. That's all. And they spend their days and nights preparing a place for these tourists to have fun with them. I was there. I said do you want me to make a film about your country. About how the women dance topless and let men feel all over their breasts and slap their behinds. How they oil up the skin of Black men and have them dance in bikini briefs with White  women shoving money down the front of the bikini and feeling on the man's organ. Everywhere you go in Jamaica that's all you see. What kind of culture is that?"

Gerima's relationship with Ghana is different. He despairs about the problems of Ghana but retains some hope that change is possible. In Ghana, a few people have been very helpful to him, but the higher-ups have generally, at best, only given lip service in the development of Gerima's important film Sankofa as well as in the shooting of a follow-up documentary by Sharikiana Gerima, Haile's African American wife. In her documentary she interviews African Americans living in Ghana and describes the repatriation process that has been going on since Nkrumah days.

"Every minute in Africa is explosive. Everything can change in just one minute."

In one minute a coup.

In one minute an official rescinds a contract.

In one minute a flight with necessary equipment doesn't enter the country.

In one minute, the individual you need to see is no longer here and no one knows where that person has gone.

In one minute, the currency is devalued and your on ground support budget is suddenly deficient.

In one minute a piece of equipment can break and its nearest replacement is two thousand miles (and who knows how many dollars) away.

In one minute. Everything changes.

The beauty is that change is a constant and, in one minute, everything can also get better. Africa's very instability is an asset to those of us seeking to bring about structural change.

Yes, everything can change in one minute and that magnifies the power of individuals who challenge and change the course of events. Individuals in the right place at the right time.

In Africa, every minute and every individual is important.

For Haile and Sharikiana Gerima, while filming in Ghana, the individual lever of history is Dr. Ben-Abdallah who is currently a professor  in the school of performing arts at the University of Ghana, Legon.

Dr. Ben-Abdallah is a former minister of culture, and also a former minister of information. He is no longer in the government but remains supportive of the Rawlings administration albeit critically so.

At one point during the making of Sankofa, Dr. Ben-Abdallah had engineered a  shooting contract for Gerima to film in Ghana at the historic Cape Coast slave castle. Shortly after Gerima returned to the States with his signed contract, he received a letter from a ranking government official rescinding the contract. Dr. Ben-Abdallah had been replaced. Gerima tried writing and calling, but was unable to get a response. When Sharikiana Gerima was in Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) for a meeting of film makers, she decided to make an impromptu journey to Accra, Ghana. Burkina Faso is the country directly north of Ghana. Fortunately, she was able to contact Dr. Ben-Abdallah.

The letters the Gerimas had sent were never forwarded to Dr. Ben-Abdallah. He was under the impression that everything had gone OK. Finally, they decided that they would try again under the auspices of Dr. Ben-Abdallah's new post. Haile was required to return to Ghana. Contracts were renegotiated. Of course, more money was required.

"But you see if it were not for one individual, I would not have been able to shoot the scenes at the castle." Every minute in Africa is explosive. 

So, on the one hand, while Gerima lambasts and critiques bureaucrats and inept government officials, at the same time Gerima remains hopeful about the future. "It may not be here in Ghana, and I may never see it, but the idea of Pan Africanism will not die. It will emerge."

To me the odds are, Pan African reemergence will first come to fruition in Ghana. After all, Ghana, the first sub-Saharan African country to attain independence, is the home of Pan Africanism. Padmore and DuBois are buried here. There are streets, and centers and libraries named for diaspora heroes of African unity and struggle. Nkrumah was certainly a visionary, and though he had his problems, he has left Ghana marching upward on a road of embracing worldwide Pan African development.

True there has been debate and struggle within Ghana about the relevance of and Ghana's role in propagating Pan Africanism. Part of the struggle revolves around a Ghanaian assessment of the positives and negatives of Nkrumah and his legacy. Ghanaian poet Kofi Anyidoho wrote a series of poems focusing on this debate. One of the poems frankly reveals both the attraction of Pan Africanism in bringing the diaspora to Ghana as well as the thorn on the rose: the rejection of Pan Africanism by some continental Africans who came to power after the Nkrumah years.

The occasion is that of the death in exile of Kwame Nkrumah, the deposed first President of Ghana. There is an imaginary trial going on in Ghana to decide whether he deserves to be brought back home for a hero's burial. Lolita Jones is the final and uninvited witness, testifying to Nkrumah's Pan African legacy. See "In the High Court of Cosmic Justice", in my earlier collection Earthchild (Accra: Woeli Publishing Services, 1985).

Source: Kalamu ya Salaam. Tarzan Can Not Return to Africa, But I Can -- PanaFest 1994

posted 21 December 2005

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updated 6 November 2007

Born in Gondor, Ethiopia in 1946, Haile Gerima is the fourth child of ten children. His father was a writer and his mother a teacher. As a youth Gerima performed in his father's theater troupe, which presented original and often historical drama, always submersed in the genuine culture of Ethiopia.  

Gerima came to the U.S. in 1967 to study at the Goodman School of Drama. He slowly realized that "with cinema I could control many more things than in the theatre." Gerima went on to receive his MFA from UCLA in 1976 and to produce several films. Hour Glass, and Child of Resistance were his first films, Bushmama and Harvest 3,000 Years followed, all produced during his years at UCLA. http://www.sankofa.com/haile_gerima.shtml 

Sankofa Review/Film; Reliving a Past of Slavery