From thoughts into words

Sudanese director Ibrahim Shaddad's experimental film, "Insan" is memorable (to say the least). With no spoken narrative to guide me as I watched it, I was disoriented for a while, but eventually, I was able to put two and two together. It's a short film- 27 minutes- but that is more than made up for by the powerful story line: a herdsman undergoes a series of crises that cause him to lose his wife, his livelihood, and eventually, his hand. Quite a sad conclusion to what started out looking like a simple film about a villager's adventures in the city. Particularly striking is the setting of the film. The film was released in 1987, a few years after the debilitating drought in Western Sudan. Was the film a reflection of that experience? Unfortunately, my grasp of Sudanese history is very weak, so that question will remain unanswered for now. Truthfully, my interest in the film had nothing to do with intellectual engagement. I watched the film for the same reaso...

The documentary film, "Darwin's Nightmare: A Celluloid Dream Release," sheds light on the extremes of globalization and the impact it has had on Mwanza, an East African urban center. Many of the villages around the Tanzanian lakeside town are stricken by HIV-AIDS, and regularly lose their breadwinners. Young women, many of them widowed by AIDS, are forced into prostitution to support themselves and their families. The fishermen who catch Nile Perch from the lake for their livelihoods are unable to eat the same fish: it is too expensive for them. All their catch is sold to the factories that process the fish for exportation to Western Europe. So what do the fishermen and their families eat? They eat the remains from the processing plants i.e. the rejected fish, and the parts that are unappetizing for the Western European consumers. As if that is not bad enough, it transpires that the Nile Perch are foreign to Lake Victoria, and that their introduction to the lake h...

I read columnist Wallace Kantai’s “Ties with North Africa Shallow” in the February 26th, 2006 edition of the Sunday Standard with great interest. In it, Mr. Kantai expounds on the idea belief that any ties connecting sub-Saharan African nations to North African nations are shallow. However, I ultimately disagree with his conclusions. In my opinion, Africa is first and foremost a geographical entity. Therefore Algeria,Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt are incontestably African. Another articulation of what it means to be African is racial. However, in reality, we can’t seem to agree on precisely what it means to be black. The moment that we try to determine whether it’s skin color, hair texture, the shape of one's lips, nose or physical frame that makes one ‘African’,we hit a roadblock. There’s also the idea that being African is political. A few decades ago, when we were united by anti-colonization movements, we readily accepted Ben Bella, Abdel Nasser and others ...