Cue Daft Punk: one more time

Hi everyone -

It has been waay too long since I wrote.  At this point it's almost too late, for Burundi purposes, since we leave here on Sunday.  (Yay!)  But I might as well tie this one off with a last letter.

I don't think I've written since January - yikes! - before I went to Mali.  Um, what to say about that?  Three things to say about that.  First, another great concert.  Last year I went to this pretty famous concert in TImbuktu.  It had a weird vibe because its exoticism attracts lots of foreigners like me, and that sets up this unpleasant segregated situation between ticketpayers and non-ticketpayers (euphemism for rich and poor, euphemism for white and black).  This year the concert was in Segou, a nice but unremarkable city in central Mali which attracted all of the same great musicians, fewer travelers, and many more Malians.  It is where Malians go to hear Malian music, and it was a great party.  My favorite find was Toumani Diabate.  I think he's pretty well known by people that are into African pop, which is to say that I'm not revealing any hidden gem here, but still it's nice music.

Second thing from Mali: there's just no end to the shit I don't know.  Last year I had interviewed this village herder, a dynamic and articulate guy in a village who had been organizing other herders in the area to oppose commercial agriculture.  This year I wanted to follow up so I called him, tracked him down, and it turns out he has an office, long story short he's the Regional Director of the Ministry of Agriculture.  Here is him last year, we're in his one-room hut in a village in the middle of nowhere, in the corner is the gourd that he used to serve me yoghurt from his goats.

  

This year he was wearing a dark suit sitting in an office with leather sofas, and no I didn't take a picture of him.  It was a surprise.  Also, I stayed again with a friend of a friend in Bamako, a young family that has a stifling gender dynamic.  The wife basically never leaves the house, and she's unhappy about it.  I have ended up getting along better with the wife than the husband.  At the end of the trip -- my having lived in their house for three weeks over the course of a year -- she confides in me that she is only one of two wives.  The guy has a whole second family that I had no clue about.  How do I not know this shit?

The third thing from Mali is professional, it's about land law, and it's kind of boring.

While I was in Mali Clara met her friend Aude in Tanzania for a week.  They took a 5-day trek through a park.  "Trek" might sound kind of dramatic, but they did set out with a guard a cook and a porter and lost themselves in 6-ft. elephant grass before they realized nobody knew where they were going and turned back to hire a guide.  It turns out that through the elephant grass was the right direction.  On the 36-hour bus ride back (which was her fourth trip like that, since it was the same bus we'd taken to Zanzibar in December) she watched all four Rambos.  The guy next to her said that Rambo "can't be a white guy, he's too tough."

In March, for both of us I think it's fair to say, we sort of struggled to keep our work going.  Clara had finished her training workshop and wanted to find partners to make more films with.  There were a few people that she wanted to work with and who wanted to work with her, but it proved hard to get things going.  Some of that was due to the fact that people had other stuff going on -- one of the participants in her workshop, and a good friend who Clara wanted to work with, took his film to Cameroon and then Burkina Faso, where he won a prestigious award.  Some of it was due to social politics beyond her control and, frankly, beyond our ken.  People are affiliated with group X or person Y, and they get suspicious of other partnerships develop, etc.  Things were going, but falteringly.  For my part, some of the boring things I learned in Mali made me abandon, more or less, the thesis I had been working on.  It proposed some other ideas that I was following up on back here, but none took off.  (Which is to say that I didn't take off with them, but let's not make it personal.)  What we were doing in the meantime:

In April things had picked up for both of us.  Clara has been working on two really interesting films, one on a fascinating corruption crusader here and another on a fascinating gay rights activist.  Both fascinating!  It has been cool to get a better view on how local activists work on local political issues.  She's also been helping some of her friends here polish up some of their projects.  I have brought together a couple people that are interested in land research, one a statistician and the other a policy wonk, and we have been developing a program for a long-term land rights survey.  I was hoping that it would be funded before I left; it isn't, but it has plenty of momentum now and I'm sure it will go ahead.

These are, for both of us, perfectly respectable outcomes from the year here.  Still, we've both spent a lot of time rationalizing why it is substantially less than we had anticipated.  Part of it is because integrating yourself in a community is hard -- as Eve Lyn diplomatically pointed out before we left (you were right!).  There have also been interesting ways in which ingratiating ourselves here has seemed particularly hard.  For me, it was the first time that I had tried to work outside of a big institution.  It was interesting to see how things work once I'd taken off the rose-tinted glasses of having a budget to spend, jobs to offer, a logo to flash around, etc.  In other words, to deal with people on their own terms.  For Clara, it was the first time she'd lived in a place with a history and a political culture that was so unwelcoming.  Because of the colonial history, presumably, the social and political role of a white foreigner is to a large extent predetermined here, in ways that it wasn't for her in Latin America.  For me the challenge was seeing, for her the challenged was being seen.  Funny.

An anecdote from yesterday captures this pretty well.  The annual film festival is going on now.  (All of her workshop films were submitted, and one will probably win an award.)  Clara was invited to a panel discussion.  She was invited to speak first.  She said something about how it's hard to make opportunities to learn when people only get three days to shoot a film.  The guy across from her is an established filmmaker from South Africa.  He said "What I'm going to say is harsh, but I'm shocked to hear that people are being trained to make a film in 3 days.  It's impossible.  It takes 3-5 years to learn to be a filmmaker.  Africans deserve real film training.  But you [Clara] come her and do a 3-day training because you get paid to do it."  (It wasn't three days of training, it was three days of shooting, but whatever.)  He was angry.  Another guy seconded.  Another guy elaborated, saying something about how it's "dangerous" to give young people cameras without full training.  This 3-day theme then drove much of the discussion.  Clara was less offended that she had right to be, and responded with more poise than I would have.  At the end one of the workshop participants spoke up and said that the workshop was great, that other opportunities had come out of it, and "anyway, what have the old generation of African filmmakers done to train us? People come from Canada and America to work with us and I'm happy for it."

We talked a lot about that afterwords, you can imagine.  Basically, I think, what was going on was run-of-the-mill elitism: an old guard that had worked hard to establish themselves was resentful of the upstarts working in a somewhat easier social and technological environment (in the case of Clara, much easier).  But then that wrong-but-benign point gets racialized because the politics is racialized.  And with good reason.  It's hard to imagine how difficult it must have been for the South African guy to establish himself as a young black filmmaker in apartheid South Africa, and how often he must have been told that he wasn't properly trained, that just picking up a camera doesn't make one a filmmaker.  He was not really talking to or about Clara or her work, he was addressing a long-standing situation in which Clara has just a cameo role.  And it isn't just him.  Even the workshop participant who spoke up for Clara's workshop couldn't just say that the workshop was good, she had to racialize it by challenging the African guy to be as helpful as the North American visitors.  People have dense political relationships that personal characteristics can't always cut through, and sometimes it's hard to blame them for that.  After all, they live here and we don't.  Clara put it really well: "The thing that makes it so unpleasant -- that I'm not being seen for who I am -- is also the thing that makes it understandable."  Basically, this has been a very interesting year for both of us to think about what it means to be adjacent to a community but never really part of it.

In other news, two months ago we were having dinner with our neighbors when we heard tiny squeaks from the nearby shrub, squeaks that were coming from a 3-week old kitten.  We've adopted him and made ourselves into a ridiculous caricature of a young couple acting out a nesting instinct.  He's really cute, though.  Almost all the time.

We also took a trip to Congo.  Bukavu is a nice town and I got to see some friends in Goma.  I also went up to Uganda to see some colleagues from when I worked there, which was really nice.  We've taken a couple trips to Rwanda, which is sort of surreal because it's a really pleasant country that has spent the past 20 years starting wars all over the region.  Here in Burundi the prognostications of insurrection have lost their novelty, the latest being that a recent 10% hike in the price of beer will be the tipping point.  Stranger things have happened.  Other very big news is that Charlie and Jane, Clara's parents, came for a visit.  It was completely awesome, and it deserves a whole letter all by itself, except that most of the people reading this letter were either here at the time or have heard it from them directly, and because this letter has gone on too long already.

Lots of love to everyone, and we look forward to seeing you at home!

Bradford and Clara