The United States of Africa « Afronline

category: Africa, Culture, Politics

The United States of Africa 0

The rapper Awadi was a founder of a Senegalese’s brand of political hip hop. As ‘kola wrote on this blog, Awadi was at the forefront of a 1990s social movement that helped to galvanize a youthful constituency to help elect Abdoulaye Wade as the new president in 2000.

“Of course, after [Wade] got the presidency, he disregarded the scores of youths and rap artists that supported him and pandered instead to wealthy and influential members of the business community, which included prominent Mourid (religious brotherhood) leaders.”

Awadi continued his activism, calling out Wade over corruption, subsidizing North Korea, electricity shortages and the tragic cases of young Senegalese drowning on small boats to Europe trying to flee unemployment back home.

Wade was eventually voted out earlier this year. (The new president is Macky Sall, a former Wade prime minister.)

Awadi remains prominent in local politics, but has been casting his net wider for a more continental remit. His last album, Présidents d’Afrique, is an expression of his continental and diasporic politics. Which is where director Yannick Létourneau’s film “United States of Africa” comes in.

The film follows Awadi through Senegal, Burkina Faso, South Africa, France and the United States (including the inauguration of Barack Obama) as he records the album with musicians (Smockey, M1 of Dead Prez, Zulu Boy, among others) who share aspects of his political vision. After watching the documentary I asked the Canadian filmmaker about its genesis, politics and why so many political pop stars come from West Africa. But first the trailer.

Can you say something about the process of making the film and your and Didier Awadi’s respective visions? What you were trying to communicate?

My initial idea was to make a documentary on African hip hop. It was an idea that I carried since the end of the 1990s. The idea manifested itself more clearly when I was invited to screen my previous film, ‘Chroniques Urbaines’, in Burkina Faso in 2004. At the time that I was there, they also had the Waga Hip Hop Festival, an urban music festival with artists from Africa and Europe. That’s where I saw Awadi live in concert as a solo artist. He was there with a full band, 10+ people musicians and dancers on stage, which left a strong impression on me — in terms of the quality of the show, Awadi’s lyrics and the relevancy of everything he had to say. I went to see him after the show and told him about my project. I first heard about Awadi back when he was part of Positive Black Soul. Their first album — which was released early 90s — had equally left a strong impression on me. I had had the opportunity to see them live at several big festivals here in Montreal. So I was quite happy to meet him in person ten years later. And Awadi was open to a collaboration. That same time, I met [the Burkinabé rapper] Smockey who also features in the documentary (more about him later). That’s the early genesis of the project.

I quickly realized I could not just do a film on “African hip hop”. That was too broad and I wasn’t interested in doing a who’s who of African hip hop. That would rather be something for a book. I could not just make a film about ‘music’; because what these artists are doing is ‘bigger than hip hop’.

They are concerned with social justice, not only in their own countries but on the African continent as a whole. I needed to go deeper to understand better their commitment to political hip hop. The film took about four years of research, development and financing. It was very difficult to find anybody interested in Africa and/or anybody interested in (African) hip hop.

It took a long time but I finally managed to pre-sell it to four Canadian broadcasters, and then a fifth broadcaster (the South African public broadcaster SABC1). After that, it took me about two years to shoot (ninety days) and about a year of post-production. So overall it was a 7-year process. That’s the short version.

My interest in Africa goes deeper than just my interest in hip hop. My first encounter with the continent was when I travelled to Burkina Faso in 1993 to visit my mother who was working there for an NGO. She lived there for 9 years. I wasn’t particularly interested in Africa. I had all these stereotypes in my head as a young Canadian citizen. I didn’t know much about what I was going to see or what was going to happen once there.

But that first trip changed me and my perceptions: the people that I met, the stories that I learned, my hearing about the story of Thomas Sankara who had been killed five years earlier. From the youth of Burkina Faso who saw him as a fallen hero and by studying Sankara, I found out about the unhealthy relationship with France and their former African colonies; I learned about the issue of debt and its use by the IMF and the World Bank to justify privatization of health, education and other common goods.

I got more interested in the socio-political aspect of what was going on in Burkina Faso but also throughout the continent, as the same dynamics are at play in other African countries. This film for me is the result of 20 years of traveling back and forth, lots of reading, meeting people, engaging in conversations and finding out more about a history I didn’t know of.

I realized I didn’t know any of the African heroes and thinkers like Diop, Nkrumah, Lumumba, Nyerere, Biko, Cabral or Hani. It’s only with time that I got better acquainted with the concept of the United States of Africa, a concept initially put forth by Marcus Garvey (and which was pushed further through Nkrumah etcetera). That concept became the frame of this film.

This film has become for me a way to challenge the stereotypes and the negative representations I had of the African continent and the contribution by Africans to civilization and history — too often portrayed in a negative way as if Africa was somewhere outside of history. Sarkozy’s speech in Dakar in August 2007 (where Sarkozy said Africans had “not fully entered history”) sums up that colonialist point of view very well. This film is my way to talk about this other Africa we unfortunately don’t know much about.

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