Washington, DC — This week, public television's New York Channel 13/WNET began airing an eight-part series called "Africa" produced in partnership with National Geographic Television. The series - filmed in wide-screen super 16mm format - offers an intimate look at the African continent through African eyes. The programs combine the natural history of eight different regions on the African continent with the stories drawn from the lives of people living there. "From a natural history point of view, this is a fascinating project," says series co-producer Fred Kaufman. "With 'Africa' we take that idea a step further as we look at people across an entire continent and discover from their stories, how their environment influences their lives as individuals and societies." Adds Jennifer Lawson, former programming chief for PBS, who conceived the idea for the series and is co-executive producer, "With this series we have set out to do something different - to look beyond the statistics and the calamities to find the human pulse of Africa." AllAfrica.com's Charles Cobb Jr. spoke with Ms. Lawson about the series. Excerpts:
Why did you do this film?
From 1970 to 1972 I lived in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and while I was there I met a remarkable number of brilliant writers, intellectuals, historians - a group that included people like Walter Rodney, Walter Bgoya, Grant Kimenju, Phillip Ochieng, Ayi Kwei Armah. I was very impressed by their stories and by what they were attempting to do in telling Africa's story. We had this whole little group and we were all going to write these novels. Walter Rodney was the historian of the group. And I get thinking, 'Gee, isn't this interesting, we're writing in a place where people rely upon radio or possibly in the future would rely on film or television for stories.' I thought I didn't want to just dabble or be a dilatante and so I then decided to return to the states to study film with the idea of someday being able to share some of those stories with a larger public.
Well that gets me from Tanzania to you Jennifer Lawson the filmmaker. Now will you get me from you as a filmmaker to this series that is airing now?
And that story can be summed up in the immortal words of Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer: I just got 'sick and tired of being sick and tired' of people saying, 'Africa, what a country!' or, 'Boy, it sure is primative over there I bet; where did you stay, in the middle of the jungle?' Or any number of other extremely negative things. I just thought that it was quite remarkable how in this day and age, with all of modern telecommunications there is still this sort of shroud of misconception hanging over Africa. I thought that now was the time to try to do something to counter that. So then that's what five years ago inspired me to want to do something that offered a broader, more balanced perspective.
So five years ago, an idea that actually started to germinate between 1970 and 1972 begins to sprout?
Right.
How does it sprout? What five years ago are you thinking? You want to do what?
I was thinking I want to present the Africa that I feel I have seen. And I want to present the Africa that is not overwhelmingly disease, famine, warfare, brutality, mutilations - oddities, but is real people going about their lives and doing so in a way that despite incredible poverty I somehow feel inspired and enriched by their presence. So I wanted to try and capture that and share that with viewers. So my notion was, how can I tell stories about Africa where it would be as if I could take people, put them on a plane and just put them down right there.
Who do you go to with that idea?
I then went to channel 13 in New York, WNET. And the reason that I went to channel 13 was that they then were producing the Nature series and had done considerable work in Africa although that was focused almost exclusively on wildlife. But the other reason that I went there was that in doing my own research leading up to this I had decided that the real sort of underpinnings of the series, of the concept, should be the land and the continent; that I needed to go back to the beginning in a sense to explain what I thought was sort of the coherence of Africa.
Is this a tough sell? You know the litany of complaints whether it's about Africa or Black people in general: If it's not about crisis, if it's not about poverty, if it's not about pathology, media isn't interested. Was this a tough sell?
This was unbelievably easy in some ways. I had done a lot of the groundwork before I even showed it to anybody. I had done the budget and had a business plan. And I thought from the beginning that it should have a companion book and a website so I just sort of put my dream on paper and when I went to channel 13 they received me with open arms. I had it as six episodes then. They thought that I should go ahead and be more expansive. It took me about a half hour to move it up to eight episodes.
Outline for me and for our users what they will be seeing in the series.
The series really focuses on people. We like to think of it as Africa through African eyes. What we've done is divide the continent into eight regions. In each region we then indentify a person or a group of people who then become our guides and lead us through that region. The first program, for example, is called 'Savannah Homecoming.' And that's filmed in the Rift Valley so it's primarily Tanzania and Kenya. It's a story of two women. The first woman, Alice Wangui is a Kikuyu businesswoman who has a hair salon in Nairobi. She's expecting her second child and has decided, against her doctor's wishes, to go back to her village to give birth because she believes that people born in cities don't have a true culture. And she really wants her children - even though they will live in Nairobi - to know Kikuyu ways and understand Kikuyu culture. So she goes back to the village.
The second story is the story of a woman - Flora Salonik. She was born in Arusha, grew up in Arusha, went to school there, a well educated woman who fell in love with and married a Dorobo man who lives in a very remote area, a little place called Kinjungo which is just a very, very small settlement. It's an incredibly beautiful place but she has to walk 40 minutes to get water. There's no electricity, no hospital, no schools. She has been living there for twelve years, has three kids and now is trying to decide whether they should continue to live there or whether she'd like to raise her children in Arusha. We follow her when she makes her first trip back to Arusha in twelve years. We see her meet her family, greet her mother. Her sisters make fun of how she lives. She ultimately decides that she really wants to go back and to continue to raise her children there on the farm. That story to me is emblematic of where Africa is in some respects. What we wanted to show viewers is that there are big cities; Africa has some of the fastest growing cities on earth. On the other hand there is a traditional life that people treasure and value and individuals make that decision as to how they will juxtapose those and they will move between those worlds and how they will incorporate those worlds in their lives. But it is very dynamic not necessarily either-or.
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
The programs are structured where most of the information comes through via personal stories. We tie that together with narration, and Joe Morton the actor is the narrator. We attempted to keep the narration rather sparse. But what we try to do through narration is provide some historical context. So for example in the program about the Rift Valley we talk about how all of humanity, no matter what race, skin color, or whatever, may have indeed come from Africa. That we may all be Africans. And how there is even greater genetic diversity on the continent than there is between, say a Japanese person and a French person, because the small group of Africans that left over a hundred thousand years ago was much smaller than the people who stayed.
In doing these stories did anything surprise you?
We were constantly surprised by the incredible diversity and sometimes frustrated by the fact that you just couldn't capture it all. We would have loved to have had something on the Yoruba, for example, or some of the other cultures in Nigeria. You needed almost a ninth, tenth and eleventh program to get some of that material. When we were filming in South Africa, we were filming in a gold mine outside of Johannesburg and just by happenstance one of the miners we were filming picked up a magazine and said 'Oh, there is that woman.' A crew member asked. 'What woman?' It turned out she was the first black woman working in the gold mines. And of course she became another person who we focus on - in program eight.
