Sana Na N’Hada’s Kadjike (Sacred Bush) was shot primarily on the Bijagós archipelago off the coast of Guinea-Bissau. Focusing on the clash between traditional Bijagó culture and the global drug trafficking network, the film is set in an atemporal place in harmony, according to Bijagó cosmogony, with God Nindo’s creation. The natural landscape and the environment play a key role in the defense of its symbiotic relationship with traditional society and culture as the destructive forces of modernity intruded upon this pristine corner of the planet. According to the Bijagó creation myth—which is presented in voice-over by the Kriol-speaking narrator (Sana himself)—Acapacama, the original female inhabitant, founded the first village of Nocau. Before it was time for her to leave the world, she charged her four daughters with the care of tradition, the ocean, the forest, and the wind. Acapacama’s heritage was to be protected by her descendants. The Bijagó society at the center of Kadjike not only lives in harmony with its natural ecosystem, but is also portrayed as an egalitarian society in terms of gender roles.
Two parallel coming-of-age narratives are recounted in Kadjike involving the young men Ankina and Toh. Ankina has been chosen to become a medicine man. He is struggling to live up to the task, while Omi, his girlfriend, is interested in marrying him despite a prohibition against marrying a would-be initiate. Toh is restless and rebellious. He is tired of living under the rule of the elders and is eager to explore the world. Both stories become entangled through the intrusion of a couple of outsiders from the capital city, who bribe the local state authorities in order to purchase a piece of land on a sacred island to run a cocaine transshipment operation. While Ankina must learn the secret power of the snake, Toh becomes involved with the drug trafficking pair who seduce him with promises of traveling the world while in reality they intend to use him as a mule. Meanwhile, as Ankina emerges as a new community leader after being initiated, he discovers the drug trafficking operation and becomes determined to mobilize his people to oust the intruders and to save Nocau.
Kadjike thus presents a dramatic confrontation between tradition and one of the most perverse manifestations of global modernity. During the mid-2000s the Bijagó archipelago became a nodal point between Latin America and Europe in the international drug trafficking network as Guinea-Bissau emerged as a transshipment depot along the West African coast. Given the island territory’s remote location and vulnerability in the context of a weak nation-state, with little control over its borders and a government that has been prone to corruption, Guinea-Bissau offered an ideal platform for drug trafficking, which exacerbated recurrent institutional crises and political violence related to the internal struggle for power. However, since the mid-2010 decade the drug trade appears to have become less conspicuous in Guinea-Bissau, with foreign traffickers being driven away.
Kadjike posits the Bijagó archipelago as a microcosm of what the nation should be: an ideal society living in harmony with nature and the environment while preserving its customs and traditions, including shared power between men and women. This binary of tradition and modernity has of course been explored elsewhere in African cinema—for example, in Ousmane Sembene’s Emitai (1971), in which traditional belief systems and customs are insufficient to overcome the cruelty and injustice of the French colonial authorities as agents of Western modernity. Despite these circumstances, collective mobilization among women in defiance of the colonial oppressor does become politically empowering.
Sana’s Kadjike, for its part, presents a diffuse globalized force that suddenly emerges in the remote Bijagó islands through urban middlemen who in turn entice and corrupt naive or gullible members of the island community. Sana offers Kadjike as an allegory of national unity through the mobilization of the Bijagó as a counterforce against the threat of malevolent forces. The film asserts the centrality of collective action as well as unity of purpose among the people themselves for the preservation of island culture, values, and livelihood and in order to vanquish, or at least deter, the intrusion and perversions of global modernity in the form of narcotrafficking. By the same token, the film’s title, “Sacred Bush,” offers a strong contemporary ecological message. In this title, and in the film’s profusion of extraordinary shots of the Bijagó’s stunning natural landscape, traditional spirituality and nature remain inextricably intertwined, thus complicating the binary between modernity and tradition.
