Washington, DC — "I loved Eyes on the Prize when I saw it," says Onyekachi Wambu, producer, director and writer of a two-hour documentary, Hopes on the Horizon, broadcast on PBS stations this month. The program comes from the Blackside filmmaking shop in Boston that also produced Eyes on the Prize. Wambu says both projects put people at the center of the story. "Hopes is about ordinary people taking back their governments. Thats where the 'Hope is."
The film looks at the decade of the 1990s, when popular pressure to end military or autocratic rule forced rapid change across much of the continent. "Viewers will see a different kind of Africa than the one they have come to expect," Wambu says.
The documentary presents six stories over the two-hour period: Benins National Conference for sovereignty that ousted the seventeen-year dictatorship of Mathieu Kerekou and paved the way for free, multi-party elections in1991; Nigerias struggle against the rule of General Sani Abacha; the effort of a group of Rwandan historians to write a new history that contributes to reconciliation; the campaign of Moroccan women to reform the Moudawana Islamic laws that deny women full legal autonomy; the work of a farm cooperative organized by women to gain rights laws that make it easier for small farmers and workers to claim land; and the project of Aha Thuto school in South Africa, that explores the link between education and liberation.
The six stories are woven together by the music of a griot, a traditional African storyteller, and aim to present a collective portrait of a continent freeing itself from both colonialism and dictatorial rule. "This is not an Africa in distress but an Africa showing how change is accelerated when people get behind the idea of civil society," says Onyekachi Wambu.
Unlike most documentaries on Africa, the film relies on African analysts instead of Western academics, journalists or policy makers. "This is a rare opportunity for Americans to hear Africans speaking directly to them, says Executive Producer Terry Rockefeller: "This is Africa explained by Africans."
The show airs Friday, February 16 at 9 p.m. on many PBS stations. Check local listings.
