Mali film puts West's blueprint for Africa on trial
By Nick Tattersall Fri Jan 12, 8:29 AM ET
DAKAR (Reuters) - Africa's poorest are even worse off than they were a quarter of a century ago and despite years of debt relief, humanitarian aid and the goodwill of fund-raising rock stars, the West is to blame.
So say the witnesses who line up to testify against Western financial institutions in "Bamako," a scathing film by Mauritanian-born director Abderrahmane Sissako, due to be released in Britain and the United States next month.
The plot is simple. Mostly poor Africans who have had no say in how their economies are run plead their case against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, accusing them of imposing rules that have kept their nations mired in misery.
Set in the dusty courtyard of his father's family compound in Mali's capital Bamako, Sissako's fantasy trial gives a voice to the voiceless, those who have felt the effects of measures imposed by Western economists but have had no easy way to reply.
"It's not so much about identifying who is guilty as denouncing the fact that the fate of hundreds of millions of people has been sealed by policies decided outside their universe," Sissako says on the Website
http://www.bamako-film.com.
It would be easy to dismiss this as a theatrical gesture by an intellectual blaming his continent's ills on outsiders.
But what makes Sissako's film compelling is that his roll-call of witnesses are not actors but real local people, including a would-be illegal migrant, an elderly villager and a former minister.
One of the first, Madou Keita, is among thousands of young Africans who have undertaken epic journeys across desert and sea to try to get into "fortress Europe" and find work. Keita's bid failed when he was shot at by Algerian guards in the Sahara.
Former Malian culture minister Aminata Traore also takes the stand, a local hero in Bamako after she employed Malian craftsmen to renovate one of the sprawling city's dirt-strewn neighborhoods in a bid to demonstrate Africa could help itself.
"The world is certainly open to whites but it is not open to blacks," she says in her impassioned, unscripted testimony.
WHO'S TO BLAME?
The film, which opened in West Africa this month after premiering at the 2006 Cannes film festival, takes its broadest swipe at the "structural adjustment programmes" championed by the World Bank and IMF during the world recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The programmes set conditions such as cutting social expenditure and privatising state-owned enterprises in return for more loans.
Critics say such measures cost badly needed jobs, profited only Western companies and left education and public health sorely underfunded.
It may only be a fictional trial, but the arguments highlight a fatalistic sense felt by many Africans that the continent is a perpetual victim, once of the slave trade and colonisation, then of the Cold War and now globalisation.
It is a debate which arouses strong emotions.
Robert Calderisi, a development expert who spent much of his 30-year career at the World Bank and professes a passion for Africa, argues that a "spiral of pride, anger, poverty and self pity" has kept it behind the rest of the world.
"Africa has been making its own history since independence and has been largely free of foreign domination since the end of the Cold War," he wrote in his 2006 book, "The Trouble With Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn't Working."
"Adjustment did not fail in Africa; it was never given a fighting chance. Africa was bleeding to death, but instead of worrying about the haemorrhaging, African leaders complained about the pain from the tourniquet," Calderisi wrote.
DIALOGUE OF THE DEAF
"Bamako" steers clear of self pity and its criticism is often good-humoured. The trial is punctuated by wry snippets of Malian daily life: at one point a French lawyer defending the West is ripped off as he buys a pair of fake Gucci sunglasses from a street vendor.
In another scene, the family sits around the TV in their compound to watch the evening film. It is a Western and one of the most ruthless cowboys is black, an attempt to show that "the West alone is not responsible for Africa's ills," Sissako says.
The IMF has taken the criticism on the chin, inviting some of those involved in the film to a recent reception in Bamako when its deputy head, John Lipsky, was in town.
"The movie does give us a strong appreciation of the communication challenges the IMF faces," spokeswoman Gita Bhatt said, adding the Fund was now backing programmes in many African nations designed around their own poverty-reduction strategies.
"We've listened to what donors and NGOs have said. And above all we've listened to what the governments and populations of our low-income member countries have said," IMF managing director Rodrigo Rato said in a visit to Gabon this month.
The film's collaborators do not expect "Bamako" to bring about immediate change. But they hope audiences will realize the world's poor are not blind to what they see as the malign hand the West has dealt them.
"At least they will know we know," one of the witnesses told Sissako during filming.
