CONFERENCE ON AFRICA
This year’s Tribute to Africa as seen through the eyes of African filmmakers held by the 11th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival featured a Conference on Africa held on Thursday, March 19, 2009. Speakers were: Irini Tsolaki (representative of Amnesty International), Rebecca Papadopoulou (director of Doctors Without Borders), Mandisa Zitha (Director of the Encounters Festival of South Africa), Kal Toure (director of the film Victims of Our Riches), Gilbert Ndahayo (director of the film Behind this Convent). Yorgos Avgeropoulos, journalist and documentary maker moderated the conference. AIDS, wars, genocides, the attitude of the West towards Africa and the social role of the documentary on events in Africa provided rich ground for discussion and riveted the audience, which bombarded the speakers with questions.
The Artistic Director of the Festival, Dimitri Eipides, welcomed the audience and the speakers saying: “The Conference on Africa completes in the best possible way this year’s Tribute to Africa; the Africa that is ignored, or in the best case is covered from our own Western point of view. At the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival we had the rare opportunity to see how African directors authentically present life in this continent”.
Moderator Yorgos Avgeropoulos called Africa the most interesting area on the planet. “There you see joy, colors and music, but also corruption, despotism, a new form of colonialism practiced by the multinationals, wars, genocides, humanitarian crises. This is where we whites wash out our guilt. Once an African had told me that in order to understand Africa one first has to realize that the people there first belong to tribes and then to nations. In any case, the borders were not marked out by them”, Avgeropoulos commented.
Gilbert Ndahayo’s story was shattering. He was the first survivor of the Rwandan genocide to present his experience in a documentary. “The most difficult thing was not how to make the film, but how I would go on living after the genocide. At the time people believed that if they ran to churches and monasteries they would be safe. But the murders were waiting for them. They waited for three days until all the people gathered and then they went in, they slaughtered 200 people, threw them in a hole in the ground and lit a fire. Among the murderers were the priests themselves! My parents and my sister were killed by our neighbor”. According to Gilbert Ndahayo the first stage of genocide is to say: “People are not people but cockroaches, as the media who was financed by the government said. They had prepared 262 questions for the murderer during the trial. I asked only seven. He told me no one had sent them to kill, they were enraged, they had lost their senses. They had been brain washed. They killed 20 people every day”.
Mandisa Zitha, director of South Africa’s Encounters Festival referred to another frightening reality that is taking place in South Africa: “The country is receiving many refugees from Zimbabwe, Somalia, the Congo, who live in refugee camps. South Africans see their means being restricted and blame the refugees. Last March there were dozens of xenophobic attacks. The refugees were beaten, their camps were burned down”.
“Poverty is a major problem in Africa, this is what causes all the extreme situations”, added the director Kal Toure. In his film Victims of our Riches, he focuses on Africans trying to enter north Morocco as immigrants and then try and find a better life in Europe. “If they manage to reach the Red Cross they are safe, otherwise they are deported. Let us not stigmatize Africans. Let’s imagine what things would be like if there were people who lived with cholera in Cologne, if people didn’t have access to food and clean water in Paris”, Kal Toure commented.
“No one dies anymore in Europe from malaria or cholera. In the last year we had 4.000 dead from cholera in Zimbabwe and another 60.000 sick. In Liberia, with 3 million people, there are only five doctors! The better educated are forced to leave in order to find better living conditions. Europe itself is draining Africa of nursing staff, which is then imported into its own hospitals”, Rebecca Papadopoulou, director of “Doctors Without Borders” in Greece said. She gave a series of alarming facts: “We have 3 to 6 million deaths per year in Africa – according to different sources. This means that we have 8.000 - 16.000 deaths every day, that is, twice or four times the number of victims of the attack on the twin towers. In Zimbabwe 15% of children are born with AIDS. In Europe, this percentage is zero comma zero… zero… When doctors without borders began antiretroviral treatments in 1999, the head of finance of the USA at the UN said that something like that was utopian, if not dangerous. With the first treatments, the cost was 13.000 dollars a year per patient. Which African health system could stand such a cost? Following the struggle of many NGOs and the actions of thousands of citizens, this cost fell to 100 dollars. But the number of people receiving treatment didn’t grow. Why? After a while, the patient’s body develops resistance and the medicines are no longer effective. New medicines cost 30.000 Euros a year. It is a vicious cycle”.
“Sixty years after the declaration of human rights, human rights violations are endless. The lack of political will on human rights is unacceptable. There will come a time when leaders will have to answer for the fact that they were more interested in preserving their power than in human rights”, the representative of Amnesty International, Irini Tsolaki stressed. She continued: “Africa is the third largest continent, with 30.000 kilometers of coastline. This is the only thing about Africa we learn in school. The media either select the meaningless, faceless dramatization of refugees searching for the Promised Land – an image that is now scarce – or show the annoying presence of immigrants – an image that is designed to stay”.
The representative of Amnesty International as well as the director of Doctors Without Borders referred to the blackmail of the Sudanese government, which, after the issuing of a warrant by the International Court against the president of Sudan Omar al Bashir, decided to deport 13 NGOs from the country. “This means that 2,2 million people are sentenced to death. Their survival depends on the presence of humanitarian organizations. This is blackmail against international law”, the two speakers stressed.
As Mandisa Zitha, director of South Africa’s Encounters Festival noted: “many African directors’ documentaries focus on Africa’s unknown history, because the official history that is taught begins in 1652, when the first colonist set foot in Africa. They speak of the unknown contribution made by African soldiers during World War II, when at its end they received a pair of boots and a bicycle, while the whites got land and money. They even speak of the AIDS virus, which has grown into an epidemic, and of course of the tribal differences and the memories that live on even after the end of apartheid”.
Two years ago, the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival incorporated the Human Rights section into its program, and the award sponsor Amnesty International. This year there are 19 nominated documentaries (among which are the films of the two directors participating in the Conference, Gilbert Ndahayo’s Behind this Convent and Kal Toure’s Victims of Our Riches). “They are amazing documentaries and choosing will be very difficult”, noted Irini Tsolaki, representative of Amnesty International.
Sirago Tsiara, one of the curators of PRAXIS, the 2nd Biennale of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki at the Center for Modern Art of Thessaloniki, spoke at the end of the conference. She congratulated the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival on the Tribute to Africa. She said that the 2nd Biennale of Thessaloniki, which begins on May 24, 2009 will be focusing on two areas of the world unfamiliar to most people, Africa and Latin America.
