A Trip to the Country and the Ideology of Modernity

Halfway through A Trip to the Country, Teno’s westward itinerary takes him through the small town of Nachtigal, on the banks of the Sanaga River, where the local economy has been hit hard by long-delayed repairs to a ferryboat that once drew throngs of passengers and merchants to the area. As the camera pans over disused, rusted machinery and out over the empty Sanaga at twilight, Teno remarks in a voice-over that the sight of the river calls to mind an “unfinished” popular folktale from his childhood. In a far-off land divided by a river, a river monster demanded the sacrifice of a virgin during each year’s rainy season before he allowed boats to cross. People had grown so accustomed to this ritual that they no longer even challenged it, instead viewing the sacrifice as “a time of great festivities” until they thought to offer the fiancée of a famous warrior, Dinga, to the monster. Dinga bravely fought and defeated the monster, freeing the villagers from its demands. At this point the children’s story ends, comments Teno cryptically before revealing the rest of the tale: “Counseled by his advisors, Dinga became the richest man in the region since he threatened to release the monster if people didn’t pay his tax, which was worse than what the monster had demanded. It seems that this is the law of the market. And ever since, generosity and solidarity are just distant memories.”^{Footnote 1}

The film then shifts abruptly from this newly completed folktale to the residents of Nachtigal’s own memories of what life was like when the ferry was running, but it is worth lingering on Teno’s narrative intervention for what it reveals about the pervasive sense of anxiety in his documentary. We can certainly read this folktale as an allegorical narrative of Cameroon’s transition from colonialism to the neocolonial excesses of Paul Biya’s one-party state, and it would be tempting to consider the story’s last line as expressing nostalgia for an anticolonial solidarity that never actually existed.^{Footnote 2} However, in the broader context of the film it is Teno’s rather sardonic aside about the “law of the market” that stands out, since A Trip to the Country is primarily concerned with Cameroon’s uneven integration into the world economy and with the ways colonialism and globalization (and their attendant discourses of “modernization” and “development”) ideologically bleed into one another. As Teno explains, speaking about his 2004 film, Le malentendu colonial (The Colonial Misunderstanding), “The humanitarian aid workers have replaced the [colonial-era] missionaries. Colonization has changed to the costume of globalization and in Africa no change is in sight: always a little more charity and a little less justice” (quoted in Diawara Reference Diawara2010:315).

Thus Teno’s folktale condenses and evokes a set of cultural and political concerns that recur throughout the film. Often these are expressed with a particular sort of urgency reflecting the millennial context of the film’s production. We can take as an example a particularly telling comment from early in the film, as Teno takes us through the Yaounde neighborhoods of his youth, streets now littered with the carcasses of old cars, which he reminds us were once the chicest symbols of postcolonial aspirations for modernity. Amidst the proliferation of all this trash (to reference the cinematic category theorized so provocatively by Kenneth Harrow in his 2013 book of the same name), the camera focuses briefly on a decrepit water fountain, “where we had our first kisses.” As we see a young boy filling a bucket from a hose, Teno remarks wryly that “the slogan ‘running water for all in the year 2000’ will soon become ‘running water for all in the year 3000.’” This millennial sloganeering bespeaks an anxiety about a certain idea of the future, a sort of sanitary modernity that appears destined endlessly to recede. Teno maps his own, more personal, misgivings onto the broader anxieties of the nation when he reveals shortly thereafter the more personal impulse driving the documentary’s narrative impetus: in undertaking his journey westward, he seeks “to confront my youthful hopes and certitudes with today’s reality.” Like the fountain, rustic Cameroonian villages like Teno’s hometown were supposed to disappear with the advent of modernity; and like the slogan about public water, Teno’s personal objective in the film, couched as it is in confrontational rhetoric, evinces the disheartening (if inevitable) non-coincidence of the present and the future that characterizes the temporality of the film’s journey.

The sense of millennial urgency that runs through the film does not, for all that, preclude moments of levity, as Teno occasionally winks and nods to his viewers by highlighting the hilarity revealed by certain narratives of development espoused by the state. Passing through the town of Ebebda, not far from Nachtigal, Teno makes a seemingly impromptu stop at the local subprefecture in order to interview the government official overseeing the development of the town. Named after a German explorer who was also a special commissioner for Togo and Kamerun, Nachtigal stands in for the nation’s history under colonial rule. By contrast, Ebebda (“the city of the future,” according to local administrators) has seen significant growth following the construction of a bridge and a highway that attract traffic and commerce from all over the region, although the town still lacks drinking water. “Out of curiosity I went to meet this government official, an important and very busy man,” Teno remarks sarcastically as his camera zooms out from a close-up shot of a poster of Paul Biya and pans diagonally down to introduce the functionary in question who is lazily leafing through a newspaper. Teno keeps the poster’s legend, identifying its subject as Biya, in the corner of the frame as he asks the official to introduce himself. The latter obliges, smirking coyly as if he is in on the joke, and identifies himself as Jean-Jacques Biya the Second, closing the nepotistic circle that Teno’s camera has just opened up. During their conversation, the president’s relative expounds on the ways the state’s presence in Ebebda has changed the local culture for the better: before, there was “too much freedom, too much debauchery,” although Biya does not do Teno the favor of explaining what these assertions actually mean. The state’s goal, he goes on to explain, is to “change the mentality” of the villagers by providing them with a bona fide highway and electricity, yet he never manages to articulate explicitly the causal logic that links development/modernization with state-sponsored cultural change. Biya boasts of Ebebda’s new “geo-strategic” status as it evolves into a city, but when Teno asks him whether he has plans for the year 2000 he only smiles and scoffs, replying, “The year 2000, that’s in two years! How can I plan for two years ahead?”

Biya’s rhetorical question is the culminating point of an interview full of vacuous platitudes that end up weighing all the more heavily on Teno’s narrative precisely because of their humorous emptiness. The subtext of this sequence, which jumps back and forth between street scenes and clips from the interview in Biya’s office, is that the transition from village to city life has indeed provoked an ontological-cultural shift, but one for which the state is unable to account adequately. The humor here, I think, moves in two directions at once: it points simultaneously to the short-sightedness of official discourses about modernization and daily life and, in a much darker vein, to the everyday uncertainties that arise as narrative by-products of the stories the state tells about itself—hence, for instance, the shot of two women triumphantly hailing the arrival of electricity in Ebebda while, in the same breath, admitting that the town’s water remains polluted and undrinkable. Fredric Jameson, in The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992:200), refers to the co-presence of these directions as so many “layers” of social experience that are lived firsthand before being “reprocessed” by media and state actors who control the representations of everyday life. Teno’s use of humor in this sequence signals the uncertainties and anxieties that slip through the cracks of “official” forms of reprocessing, elements of social life that escape the state’s representative purview but which, for him, documentary cinema is able to grasp.

Teno’s arrival in his home village of Mbieng coincides with the local congrès de développement, a festival that sees the return of young people who have moved away to the cities (in search of education or jobs) and who reunite with their parents and elders to participate in community development projects and hold talks on the village’s future.^{Footnote 3} Throughout this final section of the film, Teno juxtaposes shots of village elders decrying the loss of a sense of cooperation among the younger generations with shots taken at parties and a road race that lay bare the extent to which the congrès is now beholden to “the goddess of modern times: advertising.” For the older members of the community, consumption has become the order of the day during the congress and pride of place is no longer given to the implementation of meaningful local projects that are designed to benefit the village and bring generations together. These lamentations signal a thematics of kinship that is strikingly different from the one that, as we will see, takes center stage in Sacred Places: in this earlier film, kinship becomes the metaphorical vehicle through which Teno captures and conveys millennial anxiety in its most stark expression. As such, it indexes both a very real sense of generational continuity that appears to be under threat as well as a sense of rupture brought about by the very ideology of development that once promised to renew local kinship ties but that now privileges consumption and sponsorship. As one middle-aged resident puts it, “Before, the congress was for the whole family; it was a way to improve the neighborhood for the benefit of all. But now, some elite members of the family have seen that it’s a way to earn a little money, and that’s what has changed the congress.”^{Footnote 4} A source of and metaphor for anxieties about the future, kinship reveals the constitutive paradoxes of development ideology and, at the same time, functions as the raw material upon which that ideology acts.

A Trip to the Country leaves us at this impasse, with Teno referencing feelings of helplessness as he describes “a long journey to arrive at a dead end.” It is purposefully unclear here whether he is referring to the film’s geographic trajectory or, on a broader level, to the nation’s ideological cul-de-sac. Cinematically, though, this move allows Teno to sidestep the totalizing perspective of the documentarian as “the almighty voice-giver,” in the words of Trinh Minh-ha (1993:96), “whose position of authority in the production of meaning continues to go unchallenged. . . .” Teno’s position is not, for all that, necessarily self-effacing; but it does strategically drown itself out by continually challenging a set of aspirations—held by Teno and his compatriots, alike—that persist problematically in the postmillennial moment. Documentary form for Teno, then, does not so much “give voice” as it gives the lie to certain ideological assumptions and installs itself in the cracks of prevailing political narratives that risk hitching (colonial) pasts to (globalized) futures all too seamlessly.

Sacred Places: Cinema, the Djembe, and Storytelling

Sacred Places tackles many of the same issues as A Trip to the Country (the powerful role of “tradition” in a globalized moment, the politics and poetics of consumption, and the creation of local narratives of modernity, to name but three), yet it lacks the tense affective urgency that pervades the earlier film. It does not seek to offer an easy way out of A Trip to the Country’s dead end, but rather it refracts the question of cinema’s relationship to modernity through a new optic—much like how one turns a kaleidoscope to see a new pattern and image made from a different configuration of the same tiny mirrors inside. The millennial anxiety that provocatively overdetermines our viewing experience of A Trip to the Country is channeled here into questions of aesthetic creativity and local spectatorship, since in this documentary one of Teno’s overarching interests concerns the future of African cinema’s relationship to African publics. I suggest that from this perspective, Sacred Places does not attempt to erase this anxiety or sublate it into a cinematic Aufhebung; such a reading would graft an all-too-perfect solution onto the thorny problems that haunt Teno’s work and would view the films too neatly as bookending each other. Instead of aiming for such a resolution, what drives this later film is an open-ended willingness to explore the creative possibilities opened up by the fraught emotional investments Teno reveals in the earlier one. In certain respects, Sacred Places has a tighter, more conventionally focused narrative structure, complete with developed characters (playing themselves), including Bouba, the owner and manager of the ciné club in Ouaga’s St. Léon neighborhood, and Jules César Bamouni, the djembe-maker and musician who sees the traditional drum as aesthetically inseparable, yet not indistinguishable, from cinema. The film sketches a portrait of everyday life in the neighborhood and of the everyday consumption of world cinema, yet it also asks a pointed and occasionally uncomfortable question of its own medium, namely: how and why does African cinema “unsee,” to borrow an expression from novelist China Miéville, the very African publics it represents on screen as filmic subjects in the stories it tells?^{Footnote 5}

Sacred Places documents the informal consumption of (pirated) Western and non-Western films in Bouba’s ciné club, but Teno is intent at the same time on telling the story of local desires for African films, of people’s willingness to constitute themselves as a market for films they feel tell stories about their lives.^{Footnote 6} At stake here is not so much what Mbembe (2010:227) calls the “circulation of worlds,” but rather an “Afropolitan” circulation of logics of consumption. As Bouba explains, however, this process of self-constitution is stymied by the economies of distribution of many African films.

Bouba’s comments mobilize a vocabulary of possession (“their films,” “their own actors,” “our stories”) that, paradoxically, is also implicitly tied to a vocabulary of cinematic expropriation and alienation. The everyday lives and cultural practices of African publics make their way to the big screen but seem destined primarily for spectators elsewhere; meanwhile, films from various elsewheres are the only ones that are truly economically viable in a “ghetto” cinema like Bouba’s, but they are left to resonate on a much less personal level for local audiences. The circulation of illicit copies of African films (such as Idrissa Ouédraogo’s Yaaba [1989]) in the ciné club represents one creative workaround to respond to local demands for local films, but even this solution highlights the short-circuiting of a presumed organic link between these films and African audiences. Ouédraogo himself, in a brief interview scene from the end of the film, references this creative piracy approvingly yet admits that his international funding sources prevent him from taking ciné club spectators seriously as consumers.^{Footnote 7} Further, Bouba’s remarks echo Teno’s own concern for organicism which, he informs us early on, motivated the documentary in the first place: “Twenty-five years after my first visit to Ouaga, what is left of the dream of the pioneers who saw film not only as entertainment, but also as a means to educate the masses?”^{Footnote 8}

As viewers, we are given to understand that this early question and the organically didactic role of cinema it expresses will act as narrative scaffolding for Teno’s documentary as a whole. While this is true to a certain extent, the question obscures as much as it reveals since it says nothing about the ways in which the presence of the djembe drum will inflect the documentary’s approach to film. Nor does it foreshadow how the presence of Jules-César—at once drummer, artisan, and amateur philosopher—will become aesthetically necessary for Sacred Places to be able to engage meaningfully with cinema at all. In short, the question artfully elides the constitutive detours the film will need to take in order to be “about” African film, and it does not indicate how cinema and the “traditional” djembe will vie for pride of place in what follows, like siblings jockeying for position before a family portrait is snapped. The thematics of kinship untangles itself here from anxious questions of development, as was the case in A Trip to the Country, and congeals instead around questions of spectatorship, consumption, and aesthetic pleasure.

Throughout the film, scenes featuring Jules-César and his djembe punctuate Teno’s investigation of Bouba’s ciné club and its impact on the reception and perception of films, African and non-African alike, in the neighborhood. The relentlessly joyful beats produced by Jules-César function almost as acoustic dissolves, transitioning between sequences dealing with the club and those open-air conversations between the djembe artisan and the documentarian in which the latter strives to capture the aesthetic specificity of the traditional drum in the midst of “modern” desires for world cinema and for access to the global markets for African films. Close-up shots of Jules-César’s disembodied hands on his djembe testify to the stubborn presence of an artistic form whose local importance is undeniable (and always seemingly within earshot) yet whose relationship to cinematic modernity is never explicitly theorized by Teno in any authoritative voice-over. Instead, he leaves it to his protagonist to account for the persistent relevance of the djembe and traditional artisanship; he does so not in defensive or overly formulaic justificatory terms, but rather by expansively naturalizing their contingent cultural and aesthetic proximity in the cramped social space of the working-class St. Léon neighborhood. “Cinema can’t ignore my djembe and my djembe can’t ignore cinema. They go hand-in-hand,” declares the charismatic Jules-César reflecting out loud on the role cinema plays in the neighborhood. Teno responds to this comment with a bit of provocation, asking whether cinema has replaced the djembe. His protagonist, smiling, responds with a proverb before concluding that “the djembe and the cinema are like brothers. The djembe is the koro, the cinema is the dogo. The koro is the older brother, he tells the story. For me, the djembe is like a koro, it tells stories, and its stories can also be made into films. So, cinema is the dogo, which means the little brother.” Teno objects playfully and reverses the terms of the analogy; notwithstanding this reversal, though, he adopts Jules-César’s metaphor of kinship as an aesthetic grammar through which to understand the djembe’s relationship to African film. Since, from this point of view, the drum and the film make and remake each other’s stories, it follows for Teno that to tell the story of cinema and its modern publics in St. Léon is also perforce to tell the story of its traditional brother. “So cinema had a brother!” exclaims Teno. “A big brother at that. To find out how cinema was doing in the neighborhood, I went looking for Djembe, the brother so long ignored by the Lumière brothers, the Dardenne brothers, the Coen brothers . . . and by me, too.”^{Footnote 9}

That this detour is necessary helps to explain the alternation between sequences featuring Bouba and the ciné club and those where Jules-César’s personality seems to overspill the camera’s frame. We can consider, for instance, a scene that nearly immediately follows Bouba commenting on the desirability of local markets for African films: this lengthy scene, one of the film’s most absorbing, sees Jules-César tightening and stretching the skin on a djembe he is making for a client, sweat dripping off his face as he lovingly tests the skin’s tautness. Teno’s camera slowly zooms in and out as we see the artisan’s muscles strain, and we have no choice but to let the almost melodic squeaking of the tightened ropes holding the drum’s skin in place wash over us. With very minimal prompting from Teno (indeed, this sequence has few words at all), Jules-César explains that he’s “giving a sound” to the djembe before he ties the final knot around the skin and launches into a catchy, fast-paced solo. Given Bouba’s comments on the production and distribution of African cinema in the preceding sequence, it is difficult not to view this artisanal interpolation as fundamentally prescriptive: what we witness in this scene is a sort of open access to the highly local production of the djembe for local consumers, a productive process that, we can infer, is not accessible in the same way for lovers of African films. Tellingly, Teno offers no commentary on this sequence and cuts away abruptly to another scene featuring Bouba deciding on which DVDs to put on the club’s program that night, but the lack of voice-over only intensifies the prescriptive nature of the sequence. The djembe here tells a story for its “little brother,” the cinema, a story of its own relations of production, of local production for a local market. This “story,” told only visually and accompanied by the sounds of the djembe, stands in stark contrast to the story of production and distribution communicated earlier by Bouba, and Teno seems to wonder here just how this story might one day be told by cinema in Africa.

In A Trip to the Country, then, modernity appears either as a sclerotic, top-down ideology with colonial residue or as an everyday form of false consciousness. By contrast, in Sacred Places cinema’s modernity in this small Ouaga neighborhood is championed by resourceful piracy (thereby forcing open the market to local actors that mainstream African cinema often “unsees”) and by an intensely productive confrontation with a local art form it can no longer ignore. As I have stressed, though, this confrontation between cinema and the djembe is not agonistic but appears as a series of exchanges between siblings, and the productivity of this familial proximity allows us to observe how Teno funnels the pervasive anxiety from his earlier film into an exploration of cinematic kinship. This formulation takes seriously Lévi-Strauss’s (Reference Lévi-Strauss, Bell and von Sturmer1969) classic observation that complex exchanges are at the heart of all kinship relations, and it provokes Teno to highlight how local negotiations of cinema’s modernity are predicated on the fundamental, if unexpected, permeability of the aesthetic frontiers separating cinema from other (traditional) art forms. Crucially, Teno both thematizes and enacts this experience of kinship. First, thematically, by making Sacred Places as much about the djembe as about the video club, Teno evinces a keen understanding of the fact that his film must tell the story of the djembe if it is to engage in any sort of commentary on cinema at all. Second, he incorporates this consciousness of kinship into the very form of his documentary, forcing his own narrative to pass through the stories the djembe tells about itself and, by extension, about film as well.

Although the experience of cinematic kinship thoroughly mediates Teno’s narrative about local negotiations of cinematic modernity, the word modernity is spoken only once in the film, near the end—but in such a way that it indelibly colors all that precedes it. Teno informs us that his time in St. Léon represented a step toward the rediscovery of “the heritage of our ancestor, the griot, condemned to the wilderness by technological progress, but whose modernity has returned to haunt sites and places, even the most sacred.” These are the closing words of the film, as Teno ends with shots of Jules-César pensively smoking a cigarette. However, such concluding remarks go beyond establishing any facile, one-to-one equivalence between the djembe artisan and the figure of the traditional griot storyteller who was “modern” all along and who returns, ghostlike, to exact aesthetic revenge on the technology that sidelined him. Instead, the comments (and the exchanges inherent within cinematic kinship generally) point more deeply to the radical diffusion of traditions of storytelling in the contemporary moment, such that the feedback loop between the tales the two metaphorical brothers tell each other becomes more pressing than ferreting out what belongs to “tradition” and what to “modernity.” Teno’s foregrounding of cinematic kinship thus prompts him to substitute a filmic vocabulary of creativity and exchange for one of anxiety without thereby nudging his priorities away from the tradition‒modernity conversation.