Reflecting on Migration: Man on Ground (2011)

- a Nigerian film on South Africa

Françoise UgochukwuDPP, Open University, 20/04/2016

Southern Nigeria, a heavily populated territory, has experienced emigration since the colonial period. These migrations first took people to Britain or the United States for historical reasons. The early Nollywood films, Nigeria-made in the 1990s, recorded this trend, exploring widespread belief that Europe and America were better placed to ensure the happiness and prosperity of Nigerians who could make it there.

The recession experienced by Nigeria in the early 1980s, and the gradual tightening of immigration by Western countries within the last forty years, changed the landscape, with more and more Nigerians exploring the rest of the African continent in search of a new elusive Eldorado. This paper considers the film Man on Ground (2011) produced and directed by the Nigeria-born South African Akin Omotoso, in the context of the problems encountered by Nigerian migrants in South Africa and the growing diplomatic malaise affecting bilateral relations between Nigeria and South Africa, to study its reading of Nigerian immigration to South Africa.

Picture: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-warren/south-africa-immigration-apartheid_b_8068132.html

THE FILM

Man on GroundSouth Africa 2011. Directors: Akin Omotoso Akin Omotoso, Kazeem Kae-Kazim, Rosie Motene & Fabian AdeoyeProducer: Akin OmotosoCast: Hakeem Kae-Kazim, Fabian Adeoye Lojede, Fana Mokoena, Buku Mazibuko, Thishiwe Ziqubu & Makhaola NdebeleLanguages: English, Zulu, Sotho & Yoruba

Colour, Blu-ray Disc, in English, Yoruba, Sotho and Zulu with English subtitles. 80 mins.

SOURCE

The film is directly inspired from events which took place in the evening of Sunday 11th May 2008, when a gang of youths from the black suburb of Alexandra in Johannesburg invaded a house on London street and attacked its foreign residents, murdering them in cold blood and taking their properties. Within days, the violence spread to the townships of Diepsloot and East Rand, where Ernesto Nhamuavhe, a Mozambican immigrant living in an informal settlement outside Johannesburg, was burned alive as onlookers laughed. Ernesto Nhamuavhe, a husband and father, who became known internationally as ‘the man in fire’, inspired the film Man on Ground.

SYNOPSISDirector Akin Omotoso structures this intensely personal narrative as a thriller. Ade (Hakeem Kae-Kazim), a Nigerian banker living in London, desperately searches for his missing brother to deliver a parcel sent by their Mum, amidst the xenophobic tensions of South Africa's townships.

FOCUSThe focus here will be on the film treatment of Nigerian and African migration in South Africa, on its interpretation of the current malaise between the two countries and on its audiovisual presentation of intercultural communication or the lack of it. The presentation ends with a consideration of the political and educational use of the film and its impact, in the line of traditional Nollywood films. It equally aims to show that in spite of its originality, this film closely follows the Nollywood ‘edutainment’ model, seeking, in this case, to warn would-be immigrants against dangers waiting for them abroad.

From Lagos to Johannesburg

With some 2,4 million African immigrants coming from Nigeria but equally from Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe, randomly accused of various evils, South Africa has been experiencing xenophobia, discrimination and violence.

After years of difficult relationships marred by Nigeria’s hostility to the South African apartheid regime, South Africa, considered as the “most modern, diversified and performing” nation on the continent (Veron 2006), has now become Nigeria’s valuable economic partner. Commercial exchanges between the two countries have grown exponentially since 2002, reaching some three million euros in 2012. This, unfortunately, neither improved relations between the two giants nor helped the more than 250 000 Nigerian migrants settled in South Africa – with some 400 of them currently incarcerated there.

In 2013, reports of endemic discrimination led the Nigerian minister for foreign affairs to deplore the negative attitude of the South African Government against Nigerian citizens in that country. According to him, the main problem was the average South African’s perception of Nigeria as a fraudsters’ haven and their xenophobic attitude towards Nigerians, which had to be remedied through dialogue between the two countries. Related subjects discussed included immigration procedures, police harassment and expulsion of Nigerians.

This situation seems to be growing worse by the day. On April 19, 2015, the then Nigerian Consul in South Africa, Ajulu Okeke, reported that his compatriots had lost more than 21 million rands through xenophobic attacks, while, on April 29, 2015, Reuters signalled the calling back of the Nigerian Ambassador in SA after a new spate of violence in Johannesburg. And in March 2016, for Damilola Oyedele, the visit by South African President Jacob Zuma to Nigeria may be indicative of the warming diplomatic ties between the two countries but not a reflection of the relations between citizens of both countries (http://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2016/03/13/nigeria-south-africa-relations-beyond-the-rhetoric/

From Life to Screen 

This is the difficult climate which inspired the Nigerian-born Akin Omotoso’s second film. His first film, God is African (2003), equally inspired by intra-African migrations, “a theme scarcely treated” (Crouillère 2010 : 190), “signals a shift to a new kind if cinema made by African immigrants in South Africa”(Dovey 2009 : 143). God is African takes us back to 1995, where a Nigerian student, Femi, sought to mobilise his university to uphold the Nigerian poet Saro-Wiwa’s human rights via the local radio. A few traditional Nigerian films (Coming to South Africa, 2005 ; Akpegi Boyz 2009) have since attempted to attract people’s attention to the ugly side of migration. South African films, on their part, “highlighted the filmmakers’ concern with the social realities of violence, and offer ways of conceptualising, visualising and criticising violence” (Dovey 2009 : 6).

Man on Ground (2011) tells the story of two brothers, Ade and Femi, who left Yorubaland. Ade is the perfect example of the successful migrant: he resettled in London where he works as a banker; As for Femi, a political opponent in his country, he chose to flee to South Africa where he survives taking small badly paid jobs in a black Johannesburg ghetto. Ade takes advantage of a short visit to South Africa to deliver a parcel from their Mum, discovers his brother has been missing for a week. He then starts looking for him, using the very few clues he gathers on the way, and slowly discovers what had been Femi’s daily life and difficulties. His search brings him to the ghetto and the factory where his brother worked, and where he meets Femi’s boss, Timothi; but neither Timothi nor his wife Lindiwe show any willingness to answer his questions. While Ade and Timothi are together, a xenophobic riot erupts among black South Africans and both men are forced to spend the night together in Timothi's office. The long hours spent drinking, silently facing each other, slowly lead Ade to understand how his brother tried to survive in South Africa and to realise what happened to him.

Man on Ground belongs to what Haynes defined as the ‘new wave’ of Nigerian cinema, “a movement which sets itself apart from the usual Nollywood productions” (Jedlowski 2013 : 37). These films, sometimes tagged “docu-fictions” (Jedlowski 2012 : 244) to highlight the way the treat their sources, are produced and shot in diaspora with big budgets for cinema house publics and reflect diasporic lifestyles.

Destruction is at the heart of the film built on symbolism, as evidenced by the match being struck, with fire spreading and engulfing metal shacks representing black workers’ insecurity, and cars seen as consumer goods out of the workers’ reach.

Man on Ground illustrates the tense relations between Nigerian immigrants and their South African hosts. This is a subject familiar to the film director, who experienced this first hand. His father Kole Omotoso, a well known Nigerian academic and writer, moved to South Africa in 1991 with his family.

Within the last ten years, Nollywood has gained in popularity across the whole Southern Africa (Becker : 180). Yet, at first glance, Man on Ground seems very different from those Nigerian films, both in its subject and its treatment of reality. First, the film appears rather austere. The decor is reduced to its barest minimum: a deserted street, a wasteland, a staircase, an empty room. There are no colours either, a striking departure from the traditional Nollywood and its brightly coloured costumes and lively crowds. This minimalist approach is enhanced by the timing of the story, more than half of which is set at dusk or at night, and by its choice of venues: lunar, foggy landscapes, rail junctions, open warehouses and machinery, long empty corridors – which all powerfully echo the characters’ feelings. The total absence of spatial markers facilitates viewers’ empathy with a story they could easily appropriate, and with the enforced message that what matters is the sharing of human experience.

A Different approach

The film is built on close-ups focusing on facial expressions which serve as clues to the characters’ unspoken feelings and reactions, a choice enhanced by the frequent use of slow motion, flash-backs and voice off to piece the story together.

Man on Ground is the story of isolated individuals : Ade, Femi’s fiancee, the factory’s boss. Timothi suffers from extreme loneliness and hated by his workers, is carrying heavy secrets and does not even know that one of them killed Femi ; his wife herself is totally silent. In this environment, migrants do not have any support, be it from family or friends – Femi and Ade’s mum, in her faraway Nigerian village, is only briefly mentioned once, and represented by the tiny parcel meant for Femi, which will only be opened by his young widow in the last scene.

These rootless migrants, in transit through alien surroundings, live under threat. Immersed in the wordless violence of a black community fighting for the betterment of its living standards, they remain strangers there, as they neither share the local language nor its culture, as proven by the struggle for communication between Ade and Femi’s boss, with both only able to share monosyllables.

In the absence of words to express their feelings, and of the trust necessary to share their thoughts, silence ends up defining relationships in the film, with facial expressions as the only clue to people’s emotions: fear, anguish, doubt, contempt and love. A moving illustration of this is the night Ade and Timothi spend facing each other, getting drunk from the same bottle without uttering a word – hoping perhaps to break that invisible barrier.

The scenario tries to unpack a tangle of fragmented information and retrieve the missing links on the way. Questions are being asked, which do not get any answer: where did Femi live? Where did he work? Why did he choose to stay in that country and settle in this dangerous area of town? What happened to him? Then, why was he killed? Is Ade now in danger as well? We hear the word ‘foreigner’ a few times – a reminder that Femi could never have managed to integrate the black community he had joined.

The post apartheid South Africa is presented here as an African country viscerally hostile to foreigners, accused of despising locals and stealing the little they are entitled to. The style and the staging of the film successfully communicate the depth of migrants’ isolation and their problematic situation. While Ade managed to carve a space for himself in Britain, Femi’s future in South Africa remains an aborted dream, and his life a failure, poorly compensated by his fiancée's unborn baby. This is a rather sombre reflection on South-South migration.

A Teaching ToolIn the first part of her published thesis, Dovey, herself a South African, considers the cinematographic production of her country and suggests that cinema remains the best means of reaching her illiterate compatriots – 75% of the population. She enumerates the producers’ difficulties, faced with past white violence and brutality, yet desirous to contribute to national reconciliation and unity, and turns her book, African Film and Literature: Adapting Violence to the Screen, into a denunciation of xenophobia while pleading for a positive multiculturalism. Omotoso’s reflection as expressed in Man on Ground is to be seen in that context: just like several other film directors, he “attempted to represent violence realistically for educational reasons” (Dovey 2009 : 32), and denounced “abuse, rejection, fear and intolerance, triggering his public’s reflection and generating an openness to a greater wisdom and humaneness” (Crouillère 2010 : 190).

Man on Ground is the fruit of three months of in-depth research by the production team under Omotoso’s direction, supported by the main cast - Fabian Lojede and Hakeem Kae-Kazim, joined by the female producer Rosie Motene in early 2011. The storyboard is inspired by an analysis of the riots and the reading of books, interviews and commentaries on the situation. For Omotoso,

It was important to get all sides of the story and the research was crucial. It gave us insight into what was happening on the ground, it provided us with our tagline "tell them we are from here". One of the victims was asked what he would tell his attackers if he could talk to them and he say, "tell them we are from here". Here, being planet earth.[…] The script took three years to write. We went through the research, investigating different narrative options till we settled on the version that became the shooting script.

http://www.spling.co.za/movie-news/interview-akin-omotoso-on-his-film-man-on-ground

Created in reaction against the 2008 South African xenophobic explosion, Man on Ground, a high quality film produced in partnership with the South African National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF) and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) after a funding campaign open to the entire population, is considered as “a timely exploration of the plight of refugees” (Dov. Kormits, 30/04/2012, (https://www.facebook.com/ManOnGround accessed 29/01/2016).

Its specificity is inscribed in its production history: from conception to release, it is

a political film, at the crossroad of its director’s personal experience and of the country’s recent history. It is unique in that, based on its history and qualities, it was chosen as a reconciliation tool. Each of its screenings can be seen as a step towards the progress of the campaign launched throughout the country and beyond to fight a xenophobia considered as an offshoot of poverty.

A Film for Reconciliation

Premiered at the Toronto Film festival in 2011, Man on Ground has been touring South Africa, with screenings in four of the country’s regions: in Musina, Malelane, Durban and Cape Town during the information campaign ‘Tell Them We Are From Here’. This campaign sought to inform the population on the difficulties faced by immigrants, facilitate the dialogue between migrants and local communities and support diversity, tolerance and peace. Sponsored by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), the Goethe Institut and the Open Society Initiative of Southern Africa (OSISA), and led by the film director, this campaign followed another one launched in 2012, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqe4E-0F1AQ, accessed 18/04/16), titled ’I Am a Migrant Too’ and equally organised by the IOM to promote peace through helping the various communities in the country to realise that the migration experience affects everybody and should be celebrated.

The support offered by the International Organisation for (IOM) is in line with the organisation’s strategy , which aims to inform on the migrants’ situation, facilitate an understanding of migration issues, promote the protection of migrant workers and their families, and promote, facilitate and support discussion and dialogue on migration. This support enshrines the official recognition of the match between the mission undertaken by Omotoso’s film and that of the IOM, and credibly demonstrates how much the cinematographic tool can contribute to popular education. The film screenings are followed by recorded interviews intended to offer audiences the opportunity to share their experience and to air their opinion on xenophobia, identity, integration, social cohesion ad exclusion.

In conclusionThe importance of Man on Ground, an icon of the contemporary Nigerian experience

on South-South migration and alterity, places it at the crossroad between two worlds. Blacks, Africans and yet foreigners in South Africa, Nigerians represent here an entire continent searching for stability, in a film offering a sober reflection on the difficulty of resettling outside one’s birthplace. The number of official nominations of Man on Ground, in Toronto, Lagos and Dubaï in 2011, in Berlin and Durban in 2012, and the awards received since then, amply prove the impact of its powerful message. Yet the director’s desire was to reach out to ordinary people and local communities. Omotoso explained:

I wanted to make a bold yet visceral film, that wasn’t afraid to give the viewer space to meditate. Secondly, I wanted a film that would stimulate dialogue within communities affected by xenophobic violence as well as the world at large. […] I hope that this film will begin to change the mindset of people who are obsessed with persecuting fellow human beings because either they don’t look like ‘us’, they don’t sound like ‘us’.

http://www.flavourmag.co.uk/review-man-on-ground/ accessed 18/04/16

 Man on Ground, directed by a Nigerian immigrant in South Africa, could be

considered as far removed from traditional Nollywood productions immersed in Nigerian settings, with their colourful crowds, verbal art and exuberance. Yet its sharp criticism of societal evils and its didactic nature prove that it really belongs there. On a continent still plagued by a dearth of public libraries and poor reading habits, Omotoso’s film is definitely part of those productions which “have become a means to communicate the diasporic experience, including the hardship, which may be part of it, to those who stay behind”(Krings & Okome 2013 : 7). A multilingual film at the crossroads of various cultures and offering a mix of English, Zulu, Sotho and Yoruba, Man on Ground joins other films carrying a message of peace in the context of current campaigns against violence in South Africa and beyond.

 

http://www.flavourmag.co.uk/review-man-on-ground/ accessed 18/04/16