Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda was born 1957 in Kinshasa, he studied sociology, history and philosophy in Brussels, Belgium. He was trained in cinema in France, United Kingdom and United States. As a writer and a poet, he signed some analysis on African Cinema. He’s also teaching cinema and has been invited by the New York University to profess in the NYU-Ghana campus in Accra. He made his first documentary, DIX MILES ANS DE CINEMA (1991), and returned two years later with THOMAS SANKARA (1993). THE DRAUGHTSMEN CLASH (1996) is his first fiction film. 10 years later he finished JUJU FACTORY, his first long fiction film. The text below was written for a scheduled retrospective which unfortunately was cancelled in the last moment. “JUJU FACTORY” invites us to read a dense net of references and allusions, names and phantoms, memories and nightmares; but the film is not just about decoding signs. “Juju Factory” itself is about reading. It’s a story about a neighbourhood; a neighbourhood connected to distant places, culture and politics; evoking images that need to be read. The question is how? We often see people reading – in bars, in bed, in tramways. Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda leads us through Matongo, a district in the South of Brussels, renamed after the marketplace and the commercial district with the same name in Kinshasa, with the help of the writer Congo Kongo and his despotic editor Joseph Desiré. As we might know from the documentary by Raoul Peck, “Lumumba: Death of a Prophet” (1992), the spirit of the first Congolese Prime minister (assassinated by a wide international conglomerate, and, finally, the Belgians) roams from time to time through the streets of Brussels.
In “Juju Factory”, the face of Pactrice Lumumba cross-fades beyond the surface. His face is connected to the rhymes of young rappers. It looks back from the wall of the writers apartment. His photograph is framed as a precious souvenir inspiring poetic and thoughtful writing. Then the montage switches to an extract from the documentary by Thomas Giefer “Mord im Kolonialstil”. We see Gerard Soete; the man who finished off the conglomerate’s dirty work. He laughs while holding two teeth in his hands two teeth dislodged from Patrice Lumumba’s head. Finally, these transfers of remembrance lead to the whispered question: What have we made of ourselves?
The strategies of the two filmmakers re-creating the presence of Lumumba differ on a quite intersting and symptomatic level. With “Juju Factory”, his first long fiction film, Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda creates an inhomogeneous narrative. It is difficult to define and certainly easier to say what it is not. He refuses the category “theme”; prefering to think in phases. So, instead of following threads woven throughout all of his films, it might be more productive to examine and emphasize Bakupa-Kanyinda’s attitude of “becoming minor”.
When he shot his second film “Thomas Sankara” in 1991 he also had a long version in mind; but financing was impossible. The twenty-four minutes of “Thomas Sankara” are far from being heroic. The tone is intimate; affectionate without investigative gestures. Again and again there are close ups of eys; a mouth; hands; film-excerpts of Thomas Sankara, who gave Burkina Faso its name, “The Land of Upright People”. But Bakupa-Kayinda is not interested in glamourous rhetoric; footage which can be easily found now on Youtube. His montage builds silent interactions of complicity, an illusion of sitting around the same table even though Sankara isn’t there anymore. The aestetic reminds one of his “Dix Mille Ans de Cinema”, also shot in 1991 in Ouagadougou. “Dix Mille Ans de Cinema” and “Thomas Sankara” are two shorts presented for the FESPACO and its audience four years after the assassination of Thomas Sankara. It is a film “no Burkinan could have made at the time”.
Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda starts things right in the middle. He doesn’t explain — if there was something to explain it could be found in the eye of the other. This is possibly an adaption of an idea of Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambety — one of the protagonists in Dix Mille Ans de Cinema. With acute sensitivity, Mambety insists cinema begins by looking in someones eyes and that images and narrative structure evolve after closing them.
There is someting courageous in the decision to start a filmmaking career with two pieces devoted to friends; friends in politics as well as in cinema. Bakupa-Kanyinda is part of a new generation. Born in the same year as John Akomfrah and Spike Lee, he more likely refers to Djibril Diop Mambety then to Ousmane Sembene. “Becoming minor” doesn’t mean to retire from virulent matter rather it describes an aesthetic relation to its subject. He won’t play the educator. In an extensive interview published on the Thomas Sankara website Bakupa-Kayninda draws another link between his first two short films; between Thomas Sankara and cinema. “Since 1987, after the death of Thomas Sankara, the franophone africain cinema lost its politic contemporaneity. It could have made the choice, as in the film by the Burkinabe master Idrissa Ouedraogo, to choose the sustenance of the village instead of dying of the misery in the city.”
Unlike Raoul Peck who didn’t retire after his essayistic approach “Death of a Prophet” until eight years later, he succeeded in realizing the long feature version of “Lumumba” — a detailed reconstruction of the steps towards independence, conspiracy and the circumstances of Lumumbas death. He maintained his distance by kind of “writing history” through film. A similar project about Thomas Sankara would have certainly been a tremendous exertion. Bakupa-Kanyinda follows another narrative desire. It will be six years before his highly commended “The Draughtmen Clash” is out in the world. The film is a bitter satire about a charcter named Mobutu Sese Seko, formerly known as Joseph-Désiré (!) Mobutu. It’s an intimate play about playing checkers and a dangerous play withthe dictatorial regime doesn’t come frome a superior point of view but from asides. The picture begins with the guards playing checkers while insulting each other with explicit verbal barbs. Later, when the peoples’ champion plays checkers with the dictator, and, somehow stoned, not only starts winning but insulting “Papa National”. On walkie talkies outside, the same guards comment on the game that the peoples’ champion is going way to far. A middleman reminds his collegues that talking harshly against an opponent is part of the game. With an internalised belief in the “righteousness” of the reigning powers, the other guards insists that speaking against authority is not permitted. Completely identified as servants of the regime they verbally abuse each others’ mothers as bitches and won’t stand for impertinant speech — which is just speaking out loud what the people are thinking. They know all too well that this kind of speech can only be punished by death. The slapstick and the comic would be just too dangerous.
Only two years later Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda realizes three short features, “Bongo Libre”, “Article 15bis” and “Watt”. While “Bongo Libre” connects to “Thomas Sankara” not only formally because it’s a documentary and portrait of the president of Gabon El Hadji Omar Bongo, but also on a more personal level. During the shooting of “Thomas Sankara” Bakupa-Kanyinda learned Omar Bongo did care about Thomas Sankaras’ wife and children after his death. His concern enabled them, to stay in Gabun for some time. “Article 15bis” connects somehow to “The Draughtmen Clash”. We stay with the guards and humor. With just few positions of the camera, some street in a rich suburb of some larger city, the radius of perception follows the gaze of the guards. Again an intimate play about downplaying… in a literal sense as well as in a more abstract one.
Bakupa-Kanyinda achieved a very elaborated expertise in finding the right tone – in gestures and speech: mockery, irony, insult, subjection. A fifteen-minute microcosm of playing power and powerplay. What fiction allows; work with actors and speech, a subversive accent or overdone habits which can be played and shown as such – all that needs another strategy in documentary filmmaking. A repetitive voice whispering from the off structure “Bongo Libre…!”: okumé, manganese, uranium, petrol, dollar. The battle around resources happens beyond the rhetoric of liberty.
“Bongo Libre…!” (1997) is a portrait of El Hadji Omar Bongo, who became president of Gabun in 1967 in the age of 31. He has managed to stay in office until now; becoming the world’s longest serving ruler. He survived Gnassingbé Eyadéma from Togo, Mobutu Sese Seko, Malawi’s Kamuzu Banda – and Fidel Castro. There is hardly anything excentric about the country nor the president. Making a film about Gabun and Omar Bongo is, probably, making a film about a possible african normality. Somehow, it is the opposite of the spectacular investigative documentaries about child soldiers, tilapia, diamants, smuggling of arms or food scandals. Bakupa-Kanyindas montage evolves around a precise use of official fotography, international meetings, handshakes, signing contracts, and negotiating, juxtaposed with official privacy, peculiar extensive shoots of the presidents daughter wedding ceremony, a tiring ritualised society dance inter-cut with interview scences with the president himself. The filmmaker doesn’t position himself in the role of some kind of notably clever journalist; his questions evolve more as a suggestive commentary; knowing too well that such an experienced politician won’t say anything wrong but praising youth and liberty.
As in his following documentary, the UNESCO financed “Afro@Digital” (1999), Bakupa-Kanyinda won’t have any interest in using images as illustrative material, as proove or antithesis; but neither he trusts the image as such. Still it remains difficult to describe the slight differences. Explaining his montage in an interview with Olivier Barlet he refers to kasala, the language of the Kasaï griots: “The kasala are very moving to listen to, especially when you understand how they function – not through emotions, but through images that the narrator conjures in you, the images of a brave past, of the present and future. Unlike the Malian griots, kasala performers do not glorify a person. They position him in a lineage, or a territory in a lineage. I thus wrote my texts starting out from a sculpture that is very close to the intertwined structures of the kasala. I applied this to my film “Dix mille ans de cinéma”. I first of all wrote it as you would a kasala, by trying, on a visual level, to weave what is said into what is filmed. Within the narrative sphere, I constantly tried to create this weave, which appears unstructured, but which becomes structured because that is how it’s meant to be. John Akomfrah from Ghana manages to create this same weave.”
The Kasala language seems to fit perfectly in the digital mindset of “Afro@Digital”. It reflects an Africa which is in between and everywhere, the most profitable place for wireless operators, the origin of mathematics as the ishango bone might proove . The film dazzles of digital euphoria. It also reflects on new possibilities of filmmaking: Bakupa-Kanyinda uses a digital camera for the first time. In the end, he shot sixty hours of film from eight African countries with thirty different interviews. Yet, from the abundance of footage, he’ll wrestle only a single image.
“Juju Factory” also profits from these new possibilities of the DVcam. At the end of his long struggle, the writer Congo Kongo indeed has a book with a fancy cover: simple white with a red banderole. The design of a non-place enters the cultural machine. The muddleheaded and nightmarish images are gone, their concreteness is given away to the imagination of the reader. Young Belgian students and journalists are fascinated. They read passages and want to know about a new philosophy and if the writer did really fuck in a museum… The productiveness of misunderstanding is on its way. Maybe that’s “Juju Factory”. —Annett Busch
