AT THE INTERSECTION OF ANCESTRAL AND IMPORTED WAYS: A CRITICAL REVIEW OF MAANGAMIZI: THE ANCIENT

Cinema is one of the newest forms of creative expression in Africa, aside from writing. The first generation of African filmmakers began producing films as a political act of representation. Customarily in Western cinema, Africans served as background props for movies such as Tarzan and safari-type films; they were hardly represented at all. Sembène Ousmane, the late pioneer Senegalese director, explained that “[b]efore [Africans] started to make films, Europeans had shot films about the African continent. [But] the African we saw in those films were unable to set one foot in front of another. . . . African landscapes were used as settings. Those films were based on European stories” (Plaff 3). His generation of filmmakers knew that for things to change, they had to tell their own stories themselves. In addition to the goal of correcting erroneous images of Africa, they also had a higher and nobler objective to address problems that plagued people on a daily basis. Since the political and economic problems African faced were tied to both their inner beings and the external forces that governed people's lives, it was imperative that their films addressed how people felt about themselves, their inner struggles, their feelings; in short their états d’âme.¹

Some filmmakers began shooting movies and forms of documentaries that dealt with traditions, cultures, and the conflicts between local and imposed cultures. One can count on one hand the number of successful cinematic productions that addressed the issue. It is even rarer to find movies with well scripted storyline that deals with the psycho-social dilemma of tradition and modernity as does the film, Maangamizi.

Co-produced by Tanzanian cineaste and U.S. citizen Ron Mulhivihill, Maangamizi the Ancient One is a movie that features BarbaraO as Asira, Amandina Lihamba as Samehe, Mwanajuma Ali Hassan as Maangamizi, Thecla Mjatta as Chief Medical officer Dr. Moshi, and Waigwa Wachira as Dr. Odhiambo. The movie interweaves African traditional beliefs and mysticism with Western processes of healing–hypnosis and with psychotherapy– and feminism. It stands as one of the best mixes that is not often seen in African works of art and literature.

As a matter of fact, the movie is the story of Samehe, a mentally ill patient in the women’s ward of a psychiatrist hospital, and Asira, an African American psychiatrist who traveled to Tanzania at the invitation of her former school friend, Dr. Odhiambo, to facilitate the treatment of Samehe. As the movie progresses, it becomes clear that Samehe had had a very rough and tough childhood. She was bullied by the boys and girls her in school, but her trauma had far deeper causes than was initially presented. In fact, her mother had been burnt alive by her father, who was so “intoxicated” by the teaching of the Bible that he had disowned his own African beliefs. He called the latter the devil’s way and instructed his family to follow his lead. Samehe's mother was burned alive because she disregarded his demands and continued to pass down her African religion to her daughter who was in contact with the ancestors and whose voice she constantly heard. The choice of fire as punishment evoked the ecclesiastical punishment by hellfire, a feature of monotheistic religions such as Christianity and Islam. Samehe's mother was killed after she gave Samehe a scarab amulet as a token of the covenant between her and the ancestors. At the end of the film, through the helping hand of a follower of the ancestors, Samehe recovered consciousness and the faculties that her traumatic experience had taken away from her.

Maangamizi is a piece that, first and foremost, inscribes itself in the broader struggle of the female gender around the world and, in particular, on the African continent where the plight of mothers, daughters and sisters are far from pleasant. In fact, the work stands as a denunciation of sexist attitude and behavior that certain males display.

Incidentally, the major characters of the movie are female. Asira—the medical doctor who rescues Samehe is a woman. She assists her African sister to recover from the trauma that was caused by her father’s brutality towards her mother. Trying to be holier than thou, Samehe's father had preached the message of a peaceful and loving Jesus Christ while burning alive disbelievers. He urged the abandonment of African values and beliefs systems for imported and imposed ones such as Islam and Christianity. His character exemplifies male brutality and heartlessness toward women. The other main male character, Dr. Moshi, the director of the hospital, is a sexist who roundly bullies his patients. He attends to Samehe's seizures with force and tranquilizing injection, so that the poor patient owes her getting back her health to the African American psychiatrist.

Asira goes through a great deal of pain during her mission at the hospital where the mentally disabled Samehe and others reside. She faces the pettiness of Dr. Moshi, the director of the hospital and a philanderer, who flirts with the nurses and tries to gather information on her relationship with Dr. Odhiambo. The brutish behavior of Moshi reflects the arrogance and sexism of African males. He tells Asira that “This is Africa!” effectively informing her that she is in Africa, where males look at the independence and emancipation of woman with disdain and anger. He intends his statement to remind her to keep her mouth shut and to follow orders. Moshi's behavior contrasts sharply with his high level of education. More than any other category of people in Africa, the elite class to which he belongs is supposed to set the pace for progress in Africa. In other words, they ought to show that the gender roles of the past have substantially been transformed such that men’s orders no longer carried so much weight for women.

Interestingly, the director’s reaction to Asira is reminiscent of the attitude of Okonkwo in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart who “calls to order” Nwoye’s mother when the latter wants to know if Ikemefuna –a lad put in her husband custody in atonement for the killing of a daughter of Umuofia – will stay with them. He thunders telling her: “Do what you are told, woman!”² Luckily enough, the head of the psychiatric hospital realizes that things have changed, and that he has to adapt. As the film progresses, Asira’s professional journey becomes a journey of self-discovery and exorcism as she comes to grip with her own past that is as tumultuous and painful as her patient's life.

Another important point is that the representation of women in the film does not follow familiar paths. It may appear that Samehe's predicament—loosing her power of speech after witnessing the terrifying misdeeds of her father—accords with the standard portrayal of the African woman as a beast of burden; this is not the role that women play in the film. The fact of bestowing on a woman the responsibility of protecting the African ways says a great deal about the positive value the filmmakers place on the female gender. This assigned responsibility is crucial in the rehabilitation and development of the continent. When Samehe takes a trip to see her mother in the dilapidated town of the Hereafter, described in the movie as the “land of destruction,” the mother reminds her of the hard tasks that awaits her: “this is what has become of our inheritance, our Africa thanks to people like your father who have turned their back on everything for the sake of change – even rejecting our traditions and the will of our ancestors.”

It is also significant that Samehe is aided in her journey of rehabilitation and healing by her grandmother, Maangamizi. The grand mother has many attributes as the Ancient One, the Destroyer, the ashes and the Bringer of life. She acts as the guardian angel for Samehe and Asira, as well. We learn from her towards the end of the movie that Asira's mother is the younger sister of Samehe’s deceased mother. The roles assigned to the females in the movie speak to the need to reverse the complement of laws and social norms that are fundamentally made and enforced by men. The Ancient One is a female, which is somewhat unusual, given that she exercises power of life and death over every body, male and female. Conversely, male protagonists, with the exception of Dr. Odhiambo, are depicted as villains with brutish attitudes. For instance, Samehe's misguided father acts out the role of God Almighty, arrogating to himself the right to beat the devil out of African idolaters and to burn alive protectors of the old religion. Unfortunately for him, he winds up blind and suffers in hellfire where he is forced to beg for forgiveness, redemption and assistance.

The Hell scene in the movie is an indictment of Christianity, which facilitated the destruction of African traditional ways. As a matter of fact, the religion was the channel through which European imperialists and colonialists used to reach into the heart of Africa; to subjugate African people and exploit the resources of the continent. As some scholars and critics of African descent caustically put it, when they came with the Bible, Africans had the land. After they asked the Africans to close their eyes for prayers, they opened them only to find that they had the Bible and the Europeans had the land. In robbing and forcibly dispossessing Africans of their wealth, these false ambassadors of faith, propagators of the words of Christ, rationalized the theses of black inferiority. In sum, this imported religion wreaked havoc on Africans, after implantation in their hearts. The father of Samehe epitomizes this state of affairs.

While the male gender is shown as villainous, some of the women in the film appear in need of empowerment. This empowerment of women takes place at a much important level in the movie. A significant fact is that a woman suffers the trauma resulting from the violent clash of cultures, though the patient recovers her health through the healing hands of another female. Most significant of all is that the rites of sacrifice and exorcism intertwined with a hypnosis that is supervised by a female. As a matter of fact, the producers of the film put into play a process that has different names for Africans and people of the West. For Africans a mentally ill person is a possessed person who then goes through therapeutic rites of exorcism, whereby healers implore the gods with sacrifices to deliver the sick person from the hands of evil-doers. In the Western therapeutic tradition, by contrast, a possessed person is described as mentally deranged and undergoes a healing process that is called hypnosis.

In this movie, African mysticism is coupled with Western hypnosis to force the patient to come to grips with the root causes of his/her troubles. The film, which is couched in African traditional practices, features the necessary blending of olden ways with Western ways in order to achieve social stability and advancement. In fact, Dr. Asira in the mental hospital utilizes hypnosis on Samehe who became mute after the traumatic events of her childhood. Completely cut off from the “real” world. Asira’s procedure interweaves with African traditional religion and helps Samehe unleash the painful, repressed childhood memories. The treatment also overlaps with Asira’s own condition since both the patient and the healer share a common trauma: horrible memories of a painful childhood.

More importantly, the hypnosis process set into motion by Dr. Asira facilitates the encounter of the patient with her protector and Destroyer, Maangamizi. The latter unleashes the lost magical power encased in the scarab amulet that Asira's twin sister snatched away from her when she was young. Hypnosis becomes a favorite game for Samehe which she repeats again and again by herself, and which mirrors the rituals that traditional healers use to cure patients possessed by evil spirits. Apparently, these two processes create an epistemological crisis in the mind of Western educated Africans and Westerners. Dr. Asira promptly calls Samehe’s visions day-dreaming whereas the latter finds it true and real. Samehe’s stance will ultimately be validated by the psychiatrist when they both embark on the same wagon of self-discovery and self-knowledge.

The journey of self-discovery initiated by Asira helps Samehe apprehend her dead father and mother in the underworld or the Hereafter. Asira’s hypnosis enables Samehe to contact her grandmother whom she would see before without knowing how to relate to her. Under hypnosis, Samehe delved into her past, rummaged through it, and learned how to communicate with people in the other world, chief of whom is Maangamizi. The Ancient One enjoined Samehe to discover for herself the predicament of his parents: “go back! See with your eyes and you will be healed.” She finds her father in indescribable pain, blind and moaning for help! After the visit, she regains use of her tongue and acknowledges that “strength lies in the blood of our ancestors, and in your blood and in the water that flows from the holy mountain.”

The film ends with the final exorcism and reconnection of the lost soul and self around fire in the holy hills. The ritual is conducted by an old male priest, which eloquently speaks to the fact that African women in their process of empowerment do not necessarily throw aside their brothers. They are inclusive, suggesting that unity makes the community strong. The women's battle of self-regeneration, and to a larger scale the struggle for Africa's rebirth, are not fought alone, but in togetherness.

In a certain sense, Maangamizi runs parallel to Sankofa,³ a movie written, directed and produced by Ethiopian born filmmaker Haile Gerima. The film chronicles the often silenced African holocaust that resulted from European raids in Africa in search of people to enslave as laborers in the plantations across the Atlantic in the America. Sankofa presents the African and African American perspective on slavery and its ravages in Africa and the Americas over the distorted representations of Africans and people of African descent by the Western film and academic industry.

Through the vision of Mona, an African American top model who visits her ancestors on a cane plantation somewhere across the Atlantic Ocean, Gerima shows that Africans of the Diaspora and those on the continent can confront their problems and their past through the healing balm of local cultures. He depicts the struggles and spirited resistances that men and women of the Diaspora went through in their stride towards freedom. The director of Sankofa also showed the willingness of African Americans to reach out to the motherland, from which they had been cut off by slavers.

Unlike Asira, Mona is back to Africa for an exotic tour. What makes the cases of both women similar is their personal journeys into the deep recesses of their being. In fact, Asira through her benevolent service to the women patients of the psychiatric hospital discovers who she really is. She reconnects with her other self, Samehe, and by the same token with Africa. Mona, likewise, sees her tour turn into an odyssey in the experience of her forefathers who were brought from freedom to the Americas in chains. Like Maangamizi, Sankofa makes the case that a re-visitation of the past, however harsh and brutal the latter may have been, provides psychological healing for people in Africa as well as for their brothers and sisters in the Diaspora.

Maangamizi does, and rightly so, postulate that no matter how deeply one is into modern ways, one has a duty to reconnect with one’s own past, one’s traditions and cultures. This duty uncovers the dilemma in which Africans in Africa and those in the Diaspora find themselves. In fact, we need to be careful when we advocate for traditions and culture, because such advocacies tend to erroneously assume that cultures are static, and lie waiting for the uprooted to return and link up with their base. Cultures are very dynamic, and so are the traditions that are part of it.

Our social, political and economic practices that are now looked at as traditions are the sedimentation of disparate practices that are, for the most part, borrowings from cultures and peoples around us. After consolidation, these practices fuse with others, and the cycle of evolution and change is once again set in motion. Hence, any claim of going back to the olden ways as is recommended by the Ancient One should be understood in terms of recourse to the sources. A naïve understanding of such injunction is unfeasible.

Also, it should be noted that the portrayal of Samehe’s father as a zealot, with maniacal tendencies, is a critical comment on Christianity's role in Africa’s loss of religious and spiritual integrity. Not only did the religion serve as a pretext for Western imperialist powers to carve up the African continent, but also it fundamentally altered African people’s relationship with the Supreme Being. Monotheism is substituted for polytheism; the plurality of divinities gives room to the concept of one of God with its Trinity of beings. Perhaps, the film puts the fact of Christian responsibility in Africa’s developmental stagnation and disorganization in a way that shocks. But, all in all, that religion was closely intertwined with the colonial project in Africa. It is ironic that the same religion served as a refuge for those who enslaved the African in the New World plantations.

Conversely, a perceptive or astute viewer would note that the film begins with a fair amount of allocation to the Muslim call to prayer, which runs at the beginning and end of the film as if Islam is inherently an African religion, and exempt from critique. Perhaps, one of the main shortcoming of Mhando and Ron Mulhivihill’s chef d’oeuvre is their one-sided critique of Christianity in the subjugation of Africa. Like Christianity, Islam originated in Arabia and made inroads into Africa through trade and conquest. Both religions considered African traditional beliefs as idolatrous, backward and obscurantist. Notwithstanding the embrace of Islam by Africans prior to European colonization or Islam's seeming accommodation of some of Africa's values and practices, it no less damaging to Africans in severing them from their religious beliefs.

Ultimately, the movie leaves us thirsting for more given the equivocal meaning of the name of Samehe's and Asira's “guardian angel.” The name's double-edged meaning defeats the sanctity and supernatural character of the grandmother, who is presented as a unifier, a moralist and therefore a model of character to follow. And yet, at the same time, Maangamizi means the Destroyer and the Ancient One. The Destroyer, yes, might recall the power of African deities to wreak vengeance upon the unruly and norm-breakers, which is a way to ensure earthly and spiritual order. But at the same time, the destructive potential of the god obscures the all-gracious image attached to them. Perhaps, such hidden malevolent side of the gods is what the main character attempts to rebel against when she rejects the remonstrations of her heavy-hearted mother, in the Land of Destruction who cannot comprehend Samehe’s willingness to help her wailing and ailing father. Likewise, the seeming contradiction in the characterization of Maangamizi might be speaking to the “natural” two-sideness in the perception that Africans hold about nature. In the Western world, that conception of duality can be seen in the oppositional binary, or binarism.

Perhaps, Mhando and Mulvihill do not intend to entangle themselves in the already tangled knots of historical confusion that imported faiths created in Africa. Unlike some filmmakers, who decide to address the issue by prescribing a solemn way out, the Tanzanian and American directors prefer to be descriptive in their approach. They simply put the fact in front of the viewer , and leave the latter to make the ultimate decision. A Mandinka proverb asserts that when one has a bucketful of proverbs, one usually knows or senses which one is one’s own.

Overall, this movie is really worth watching for Africans and people of African descent who need of to reconnect with their past in a world that is going global, which means that local identities are receding in the face of a new global identity. Global identity is a threat to individualities and/or specific identities; if the world is sufficiently globalized we will be confronted with an undifferentiated and homogeneous whole, a monster in other terms.

Works and Video Cited

Plaff, Françoise. The Cinema of Sembène Ousmane, A Pioneer of African Film. Westport: Greenwood, 1984.

Notes and References

1 French phrase for our inner unexplainable and at times conflicting feelings.

2 Achebe, Things Fall Apart, p.14.

3 Sankofa is based on an Akan proverb that states, a bird never gets angry at a tree, because it will always come back to perch on the branches. Applied to humans, the idea is that one can try to strip oneself off one’s own culture or identity. But that cannot work because one will need it, and want to don it back. Thus, our identity sticks on us as the skin on our flesh.

Siendou A. Konaté. “At the Intersection of Ancestral and Imported Ways: A Critical Review of Maangamizi: The Ancient One” JENDA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies: Issue 9, 2006.