Independent Black filmmaker Haile Gerima and his wife Shirikina Aina just returned from a tour of Africa promoting the movie, which has been seen in 32 different cities in the United States. Details concerning the blaze are sketchy and the D.C. Fire Department is conducting an investigation.
While it is too early to know for sure, the fire has left Haile Gerima devastated. He has been too distraught to visit the site where so much of his work lie in ruins.
"We have done a lot of work to reclaim our own image, battling against one of the largest industries in the country. It's been a real downer to deal with the fire," Mr. Gerima told the Final Call. Figures are not clear yet on the amount of damages incurred.
"We understand the powers that be and we have faced bigger obstacles," he concluded. Even though numbers won't be available until the insurance company completes its investigation, some materials lost are priceless. Not only were 'Sankofa' videos destroyed, original video artwork, soundtracks, CD's, and other films including "Harvest 3000 Years," "Bush Momma," and "Child of Resistance" were also lost.
The Sankifa office warming and awards celebration held the day before the fire was supported by more than 300 people with special appearances by actress Oyafunmike Ogunlano, who played the role of Shola, Hasinatou Camara who was Jumma, and Jimmy Savage who portrayed the character Musa. Sankofa is an Akan word that means one must return to the past to move forward.
In the movie, Mona, a contemporary model, is possesed by spirits lingering in the Cape Coast Slave Castle in Ghana and travels to the past, where a house servant named Shola is abused by the slave master. Nunu, an African born field hand, and Shango, Shola's West Indian lover, continuously rebel against the slave system. Inspired by Nunu and Shango's determination to defy the system, Shola finally takes her fate into her own hands.
Unlike other films depicting slavery, "Sankofa" actually brings audiences through the social, political and religious changes needed to support a slave culture as well as destroy it. Because of its bold realities and firm depiction of slavery from the eyes of the oppressed, the film has constantly been under attack. The fight against slavery and a slave revolt are prominent parts of the film.
Shirikina Aina (Haile's wife) has remained optimistic throughout the ordeal. She is grateful that no one was injured or killed and thankful that a quick thinking family member preveneted the fire from causing a total loss. "This will not stop us. We are counting on the community to continue to back us and we will continue to move forward," she said.
During a recent video premier showing, hosted at Muhamad Mosque No.6 in Baltimore, a "Sankofa" video drive was initiated. People who witnessed the movie for the first time were astonished by the film and were eager to spread the word.
"I've learned about slavery before, but I really didn't know it was like that. What really inspired me was the way the white priest pitted them against each other. Everyone should see the movie, people don't really know how it was and what it still means today," said 23-year-old Lazette Jackson.
--Final Call, April 30, 1996
"The word 'Sankofa' comes from the Akan language. It means 'returning to your roots, recapturing what you've lost and moving forward.' Because of the film's subject matter, I felt Sankofa was the most appropriate title for the film."In Sankofa, 19th Century slavery is addressed and used as a landscape to shape and compose a story that deals actually with the contemporary reality of African slave descendants. Africans and African-Americans of the Diaspora have never really dealt with the issue of slavery. It has been this nation's most neglected agenda or subject. And so, I felt it was necessary to dramatize the subject and make a film that would in the end be very healing for all peoples. After seeing Sankofa, many people will come to grips with certain aspects of their own obsessions. They'll realize that they have no real outlet in this society because this society discourages those people who want to exorcise this historical incident. The dominant culture in this society wants to maintain the status quo at the expense of Africans everywhere. We are told to 'march in place,' while other non-black groups are allowed to heal, meditate, reflect and grow from their given experiences. By making trivial the whole slavery incident, they attempt to keep us ignorant of our past. And, if we don't know and learn from our past, what can we expect of the future?
"The recurring symbol of the bird is an important symbol in Sankofa. From nearly 20 years of research, I have found that the bird was important to both slaves and maroons. The duality of the bird, especially the vulture, represented both life and death. For those who escaped slavery, the vulture acted as a guide to the hills, away from the dogs, the horses and the overseers. For those who collapsed or died along the way, the vulture ate or devoured its prey. But then again, in death there was a certain sense of freedom to those Africans since it was believed that the vulture would carry your spirit back to your roots, back home to Mother Africa. Certain birth myths even tell of runaway slave who 'transformed' into birds and flew back to Africa. Whether a physical or spiritual metamorphosis, both ideas express a fundamental sense of freedom or returning to Africa.
"Sankofa addresses the continuing problem of those persons in the African Diaspora who neglect their own history. In dealing with this problem, we must ask ourselves two questions. How do we as Africans jar our 'collective memory?' And, is it possible to learn from our collective experiences and move forward as a people? It is my hope that this film will stimulate the necessary thought processes needed to engage in meaningful discussion and debate about the present-day 'slavery' in which we as Africans find ourselves."
The following is a summary from an article written for the Sacramento Bee newspaper by Bee Staff Writer Fahizah Alim, 31 March 95.
When Haile came to the U.S. in 1967, "He saw other people who looked like him. He wondered where they came from. He was 21 years old and had never heard of the African slave trade. It was not taught in Ethiopian schools. 'I only learned of American slavery when I got here to this country...I couldn't believe we had been denied the knowledge of the slave trade in Africa. Even in the U.S., it was very, very covered up, and you have to dig to go underneath to find what has taken place. Everybody has collaborated to cover up an African holocaust.'"In his film Sankofa, Gerima seeks to show slavery in a way that he says it has never been portrayed before."
"Gerima, a 48-year-old professor of filmaking at Howard University in Washington, wrote and directed 'Sankofa' and co-produced it with his wife, Shirikiana Aina. The film's purpose, he says, is to help Africans and African Americans understand why and how they came to be who they are.
" 'I made the film [a 9-year project] because I was enraged,' he says. 'I made it in tribute to that whole brutal event of Africans betrayed by their own people and by the world.'"
" 'History heals,' Gerima says. 'History is power. Which is why we named the film 'Sankofa.' Sankofa is a philosophical, mythological bird passed down from generation to generation from the Akan people of Ghana. The name means to move forward, you must reclaim the past. In the past, you find the future and understand the present.'
"...the past, in the form of the African slave trade, has been misunderstood and misrepresented.
"'I was very unhappy with 'Roots,' ' says Gerima, referring to Alex Haley's saga that traced a black family from its origins in Africa through slavery and finally to freedom in America.
" 'I felt it didn't embody the struggle and the resistance spirit of black people in the sense of fighting back. It only showed their tolerance - their capacity as victims to tolerate what was perpetrated on them. The spirit of resistance was very much absent.
" 'By the time of 'Roots,' I had done much research, and I was well aware of runaway Africans from Louisiana to Jamaica to Surinam. Slaves who had run to the hills and swamps and caves, and created their own society. Slaves who returned at night and freed more black people out of bondage. That knowledge was very important to me.'"
"Characteristically, the making of the film required much of that same spirit of struggle. Gerima began working on the script while studying at UCLA in the 1970s, but it wasn't until 1983 that he was ready to make the film.
" 'I began to look for money, and it took almost nine years to find money. I went all over Europe and Africa to find whatever money there was. Our first shooting was in early 1990. Then we had to stop and go raise more money (from Africa and European television rights) in order to film in Ghana and Jamaica. Our efforts to shoot the plantation scenes in Louisiana met with resistance." "Despite winning rave reviews at international film festivals, Gerima says he was snubbed by American film distributors who he said have described the movie as 'too black' or 'not commercially viable.'
" 'When we opened at the film festival in Berlin, it was the first time in the 40- year history of the festival that an in-depth film (on slavery) was included in the competition,' Gerima says.
" 'However, the next day after the film showed, the American press canceled their interview with us after seeing the movie. I realized that we were having a problem with the media power structure. We were desperate for a distribution deal, but the copy came back with a 'no' '
"The film was shown at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, but Gerima says it was turned down by U.S. film festivals. A shortage of prints - there are only 12 now - kept 'Sankofa' out of other international festivals.
"Help came in a fund-raiser screening in Washington, D.C. For $20,000, he rented a theater and showed the movie. 'Sankofa' ran for 11 weeks. With the money from the box office, Gerima's Mypheduh Films eventually booked theaters in 16 other cities, including New York (it's still playing after 33 weeks), Baltimore (14 weeks), London (11 weeks), Chicago (10 weeks), Atlanta (13 weeks), Houston (five weeks) and now Sacramento, where it will run through April 6. "One after another, African American community groups across the country have taken it upon themselves to raise money to sponsor the film and bring it to their cities. He calls those groups 'the children of 'Sankofa' without whose help I would have been silenced totally.'"
After seeing the film at the Black Arts Festival in Atlanta last summer, four African American women from Sacramento set out to raise more that $10,000 to bring "Sankofa" to Sacramento: local publicist Venita Jacoson; Darolyn Davis, press secretary to Assembly Speaker Willie Brown; Kimberly Tyler James, Event Planning; and Alice Scott, a Channel 3 (KCRA) reporter.
" 'Hollywood has disfigured the African race from Day One, from the day they started filmmaking.... From the silent era until now, Hollywood continues to disfigure blacks in motion pictures. And then the world has a disfigured impression of black people.'"About present day black filmmakers he writes:
" 'Most of them, I don't care for their movies. I don't think they are living up to the expectations of what is our there in relationship to what needs to be told of our history. They all just have shooting and killing and sexual exploitation of each other. In my book, it is another round of black exploitation movies." 'My characters are basically human, engaged in something universal. Something human. Wanting to be free. Wanting to be free is a human notion. They are not freed by somebody else, and they don't get the idea inserted into them by Lincoln or a Quaker saying, 'You are a slave and you need to be free.' They are all like any human being would be in that situation trying to be free.'"
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