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Books by Marvin X
Love and War: Poems /
In the Crazy House Called America /
Woman: Man's Best Friend /
Beyond Religion Toward Spirituality
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* * * * Maangamizi
(the Ancient One) Maangamizi
(the Ancient One) a film by Martin Mhando, Ron Mulvihill and
the Ancestors
Featuring Andina Lihambra, BarbaraO, Mwanajuma
Ali Hassan, Thecla Mjatta, Waigwa Wachira
Review by Marvin
X (El Muhajir)
Maangamizi is a film in the genre of
Daughters
of the Dust and Sankofa, it even stars Babrara O from
Daughters of the Dust. So let's get to point of this film
that has won awards at several international film festivals,
though few have heard about it.
I have long maintained that before African
Americans can heal the trauma of White Supremacy they must make
peace with their southern roots, the pain of slavery in all its
vicissitudes. This film justifies my thesis that we must indeed
come to peace with the terror of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia,
and the rest of the south before we can truly be healed.
Whatever the south meant to us or means to us now, we must come
to grips with it before we can deal with Mother Africa.
In the film the African American
psychiatrist (Barabra O) goes to Tanzania to work in a mental
hospital, but she cannot heal the Africans until the Africans
come to terms with who she is as long lost daughter and she
cannot deal with Africans until she is woman enough to confront
the terror of African American oppression, there is a leitmotif
of lynching to allow us to see her suffering, even though she is
a doctor on a mission to heal her African brothers and sisters.
But she cannot heal her primary patient
until the patient understands that the doctor from America is
her salvation, not in a medical sense but in a spiritual sense.
After the African sister is traumatized by
seeing her father burn her mother to death in a hut, the child
refuses to speak until the wise woman Manzamizi (also
grandmother) entreats her to connect with her African American
sister, that is her salvation.
But as I said above, the African American
must heal from the terror of America, not their disconnection
with Africa as we are usually told. Supposedly, we cannot
heal until we come to terms with our Africanity, but this film
flips the script as many revolutionaries and radicals have
discovered: we must come to terms with our Americanity in all
its vicissitudes. Afterwards, we will have no problem with
Africa.
With their attitude of jealousy and envy as
expressed in the film, clearly, it is Africans who must adjust
to African Americans. The film showed our African brothers and
sisters as the playa haters of African Americans, and certainly
the star patient had reservations about reconnecting with her
African American sister, but this was the point of the film:
that until Africans come to terms with African Americans, no
healing can come to Africa, even though she has her neo-colonial
problems with religion, Western religion, Christianity, the
father being so dogmatic and savage that he burns his wife alive
because her daughter is supposedly under witchcraft when it is
clear the father is a devil under the power of a pseudo-Jesus.
What Jesus told him to burn his wife alive in the granary hut?
The most powerful scene is the father in
hell begging his daughter for forgiveness. And she forgives him,
thus transcending the pseudo-Christianity of her father, to the
objection of her wise woman, grandmother, Maanzimizi, who said
to hell with the father, let him burn in hell for dissing the
ancestors in favor of Christianity.
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update 1 July 2008 |
